AIDS in the eghties

Not long  after I was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, a gay  colleague of mine invited me to have lunch in Boston’s Italian North nd. During our lunch, I asked him if he ever lost someone to aid to AIDS. My colleague was frank. He told me that he had been involved with an older man who died soon quite soon after  the affair. My aim was to compare Alzheimer’s to AIDS. But the comparison struck as  too facile.

This topic almost fell into my lap. I was walking close to where I live, and someone was giving away books. The one I took home turned out to be a gem. Personal Dispatches: Writers’ Confront AIDS. My favorite by far was The Fear. And why not? 1987 was the year, but know one knew when a breakthrough, if ever. The challenge  was compared to curbing the Great Influenza in the second decade of the early twentieth century. But there had been litle or none stigma to the flu. AIDS did. Here is how Holleran described the scene in 1987: “The Fear among homosexuals is personal, physical and real. It is easy enough to dismiss the idea that the CIA set out to exterminate homosexuals; it is not easy to dismiss the fact—having lived in New York, before during the seventies as a gay man—one can reasonably expect to be infected.

This was the zeitgeist when this book was published. Pat Buchanen, a longtime right-wing pundit, called for a quarantine in one particular community in Florida, presumably with a high density of gay residents. But as Holleran wrote at the time, “Even with the homeosexual community, however, there was despicable behavior: men who would not go to restaurants, hospital rooms, wakes” or other such venues. The Fear among homosexuals is personal, physical, and real. It is easy enough to dismiss the idea that the idea that the CIA set out to exterminate homosexuals; it is not easy to dismiss that—having lived. In one of Holeran’s most vivid

War. At one point in this brilliant essay, Holleran states, “The Fear is a god to which offerings must be made before sex can commence. Sometimes it refused it…Even safe sex leads to the question…Sex and terror are twins. Death is a hunk…and loathing…This remarkable essay ends from an invocation from Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenCentury preacher who wrote the sermon, under the title “Sinners in the Hands of an angry God.”

And I was glad to learn that Andrew Holleran had survived the plague of AIDS. What a fine writer he is.