Memory Loss

Lately I've taken a break between volumes of Proust and have turned to the writings of David Wojnarowicz, the queer artist who came of age, lived, raged, made his art, and died within the first wave of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Quite a contrast to the monocles and brushed moustaches of Proust's cocktail parties, non? It's almost as if, in the midst of a sitfling and utterly banal concerto of snide remarks and society histrionics, this lanky little fag with big glasses and unkempt hair and ripped leather and denim has burst in, upsetting the card tables and cakes. I seriously wonder how Proust and Co. will be able to right things.

I can see Wojnarowicz now, pissing on shoes, ranting at their hypocrisy--our hypocrisies today. Sections of Close to the Knives were obviously originally printed as journalistic essays, for in parts he defends against those who attacked him in the press for being hysterical and ranting. It's only in hindsight that we realize how right he is. How these government officials and Bishops and moralizers were complicit, sometimes gleefully so, in the painful deaths of thousands of innocent people. Their policies = murder. The truth of America's cruelty to its suffering minorities is a shame that can't be lived down or dealt with in any sort of reparative way yet.

Wojnarowicz talks about a particular friend of his named Peter, and how when Peter was weakened from opportunistic infections, he and a friend took Peter out to Long Island to some quack doctor who was injecting AIDS patients with typhoid. Rumours that the suspect remedy actually worked gave people hope. After bloodying their knuckles against the silence of their government, they were desperate to try anything. A story would surface about a vaccine concocted out of human shit, and soon people were going downtown to get injected with the latest fecal treatment. They became so knowledgeable about their conditions they could pose as researchers and gain access to the formulas of AIDS drugs priced out of their reach, which they'd then cook up in their kitchens for their friends. And they died by the tens and tens of thousands, decimating whole neighborhoods and robbing me of my fathers, grandfathers, artists, myths, and collected knowledge.

His friend Peter died in early November, 1987. In early November of 1987, I had just turned 9 years old. I was living in Two Harbors, Minnesota, and pretty oblivious to the world outside of the third grade. In a few months my appendix would burst and I would find myself close to death, but in those autumn months I was still a kid and probably just played with Legos a lot. I lived out in the woods with two sheltering parents and no cable. What did I know about AIDS as Wojnarowicz drove his sick and bitter friend Peter out to Long Island to get injected with Typhoid?

This was before the Ryan White documentary which made mothers around the country cry and come to feel sorry for the little kids who were unfairly impacted by this virus (finally we have victims worth saving!). I can remember being in sixth grade, which would be 1990 or 1991, and being told that you couldn't catch AIDS from a toilet seat or a kiss.

But in 1987? I can only remember two instances at the moment (and trust me, I've been thinking hard on this one) in which AIDS figures. Maybe I'm 9 or 10 years old. I'm playing outside at a friend's house. Their dog comes up and I notice a giant horse fly on the dog's head. I grab the fly, and it pops in my hand, filling my palm with bright red dog's blood. I remember looking at my hand and kinda freaking out--could dogs get AIDS? Could horse flies carry AIDS? I think I probably asked an adult about this one. Of course, I was a hypochondriac as a little kid, after the near-death appendix-bursting thing. It wouldn't surprise me if I freaked out about getting AIDS from a dog at that age, just like I freaked out about having breast cancer at the age of eleven, or of being diabetic at fourteen.

Another memory I have comes from much earlier. Maybe I'm seven or eight. Probably seven. I'm walking with my mom and an aunt in Duluth's Rose Garden. I'm holding my mom's hand. We're walking past the rose bushes when I look down and see a tube of lipstick lying on a leaf. It's partly unrolled and it has left a smudge of bright red on part of a leaf. I bend down to pick it up, my mom sees me, and yanks me away--Don't touch that! You don't know where it's been! My aunt concurs--It might have AIDS on it! Now I must forgive my aunt, she was old then and I can't blame her for not being able to dispense sound advice. But I remember the words had a mesmerizing affect on me. What does it mean to be told as a little kid that a mysterious invisible disease could be lurking on mundane toiletries? In my young brain, the mere possibility of the lipstick being contaminated was turned into a meditation on the poor sick owner of that lipstick, who was obviously dying. Perhaps she had been running through the rose garden late at night, chased by whatever disease this was! In her haste, she dropped her lipstick in the bushes. I had to be careful. Life was dangerous. I often become depressed with my generation, and in my hubris I lament coming to the party late. If only I had turned 20 in 1978...but if that had happened, I tell myself, I would have been dead a long time ago...

How we have forgotten that particular past. We Americans have such short and selective memories. We've forgotten the conflagration and ignore the steady burn today. The younger echelons of the gay community here never give a thought to what their lives might be lacking, how it could have been different had these thinkers and writers and artists stayed alive and kept their communities intact. I read the ending to Robin Hardy's The Crisis of Desire in which he writes, "My future is in ruins..." and I think--that's my present he's talking about. I have friends who went to a funeral a month for years, who lost every single close friend they had, who still lose friends. I think of the quiet man I met in Los Angeles in 1999, who was staying at a friend's house in a hospital bed set up in the dining room. As the rest of the party gushed over a stupid fucking fountain in the backyard, we nipped out front for a cigarette. I had no idea what to say to him. We just smiled at each other, made small talk. Later, someone told me he had been given only a few months more to live. How did we all forget about this?

AIDS Quilt by guest blogger Glen

"David Wojnarowicz" by Felix Guattari

Art by Wojnarowicz