Acquired Humanity
By Jacob Taylor
On November 10, 2020, James, a twenty-year-old boy with COVID-19 antibodies swimming through his blood walked into a plasma donation center hoping to help someone–anyone. After receiving a Powerade to increase blood flow and signing a clipboard of paperwork, James received a binder of information to read from the man at the front desk. As he flipped through wrinkled page protectors that had touched many fingers before, he found his eyes burning with tears he blinked away. He could not share his antibodies because he had had sex with another man. He should have stopped reading right then, but he kept flipping through. He debated whether or not to tell the man at the front desk. James had prepared himself for the possibility that his medications would disqualify him. But his sexuality–he had not considered that.
The donation center did not care that James had tested negative for HIV, and other common diseases. It did not care that he had used protection and only felt the need to get tested to save his new lover from the 2% failure rate of condoms and the slight chance that his former lover did not know of a disease that may have been lurking in his blood. Regardless, Nucleic Acid Testing, which has been used to screen donated blood and plasma since 1999, can detect HIV even before an infected donor develops antibodies or symptoms. Despite all this, the donation center did not want James’s blood or its COVID-19 antibodies because James had loved another boy, and those two boys did what lovers do.
James followed the man at the front desk into a private consultation room, and there James told him the problem. The man said, “They’re trying to change it so you can donate as long as you haven’t had sex with a man within the past twelve months. So maybe in the future, you can come back.” He smiled, as if that solved all James’s problems.
What James wanted to say but did not: “That doesn’t change anything if I marry a man.” He thought of the women who had left him voicemails asking him to donate his COVID-19 antibodies. He felt that he had let them down and began to regret each time he had made love to another man, just as he had regretted loving men in the first place, not quite a year before.
Abbott Laboratories developed the first test capable of detecting blood infected with HIV in 1985, four years after the AIDS crisis began. Just before this test lowered the risk of contracting HIV through blood transfusions in the United States to one in two million, a woman named Diane lost her baby, and a life-threatening amount of blood spilled from her womb. Doctors flooded her veins with foreign blood–which saved Diane’s life–but this stranger’s blood could have killed her just as easily had the donor shared more than just their blood.
Diane worried that she might have contracted HIV from the transfusion, but she said, “It saved my life. I can’t think about that.” Her brother related the experience to gambling in Las Vegas. Diane got lucky. Others did not.
A boy with hemophilia named Ryan White developed AIDS after receiving an infected blood transfusion in 1984 at age thirteen. Because of widespread myths that HIV could spread by casual contact, White “had been forced to get his seventh-grade class lessons through a telephone hook-up at home” until winning the right to attend public school at court. Even then, his classmates bullied him, and neighbors slashed car tires and broke windows. When White’s mother went shopping, “cashiers would throw down her change to avoid touching her hands.” After two years of abuse in Kokomo, Indiana, White’s family moved to Cicero, a town just 20 miles away, where classmates and teachers treated him “as just another student.” Just twenty miles separated understanding from bigotry.
On May 11, 1982, The New York Times released an article titled “New Homosexual Disorder Worries Health Officials” in which it labeled the disease GRID, for gay-related immunodeficiency. HIV became a problem strictly for gay men, and any straight person who contracted HIV simply fell victim to the homosexuals. The article even stated, “the general public need not fear an epidemic.” With a few words in an article that took up one-eighth of an inside page, The New York Times effectively made gay men the “them” that threatened to destroy the general public’s peaceful world.
And the general public did not fear an epidemic. A woman named Amanda, who reached her late twenties during the AIDS crisis, recalled that she did not think about HIV often when the crisis began. She lived in conservative Utah Valley where “it was kept quiet.” Amanda had a stable marriage, and she did not know of anyone nearby who had gotten the virus. “I would have been more nervous had I lived in a big city,” she said. “Just going around where we lived, to the store or visiting people, I didn’t even think twice about it.”
Although Amanda felt safe where she lived, she said that HIV scared her to death–like every other illness did–and that she would not have knowingly entered the same room as someone infected with the virus to this day. Amanda remembered reading the story of the playwright Carol Lynn Pearson, who cared for her gay ex-husband while he died of AIDS. Amanda respected Carol for her kindness, but she also remembered thinking, “How would she dare do that? I couldn’t do that.”
A gay man named RJ, who finished his “college wild days” just years before the initial outbreak in 1981, saw his friends in West Hollywood treated like lepers throughout the epidemic. It did not matter whether or not these gay men actually had HIV; if they looked gay, people scooted away from them on public transportation, as if breathing the same air could infect them. RJ himself never contracted the virus. Still, friends who had accepted his sexuality before the epidemic abandoned him. Perhaps they assumed he would inevitably die and did not want to deal with the drama, or maybe they began to see homosexuals as the sinners many religious leaders insisted they were and saw AIDS as God’s punishment. Even some of RJ’s friends who did not know his sexuality but suspected it started to keep their distance. Although RJ never expressed that he felt like a leper too, these former friends treated him like one, and many likely wondered when RJ would finally start showing symptoms. He wondered the same thing. He scanned newspapers for the most recent casualties of the epidemic. Most often, these men were strangers. But sometimes, RJ had known them, made love to them.
Because there were no treatments available in 1985 when the first HIV test was developed, many activists discouraged gay men from taking it. One gay man who lived through the crisis said, “The only thing that could happen would be getting fired from your job or kicked out by your roommate or disowned by your family.” Another said, “there was nothing you could do, and the stress would just kill you faster.”
Perhaps the most daunting aspect of the disease is that it can remain asymptomatic for decades. During the first stage of HIV, which occurs two to four weeks after infection, “about two-thirds of people will have a flu-like illness,” which quickly resolves. In the second stage, an infected person usually has no symptoms. This stage can pass within a year, or it can last as long as twenty. The virus copies itself, preparing to fully compromise the immune system, and it populates its host’s blood, semen, vaginal fluid, rectal fluid, and even breast milk. The third and final stage, known as acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, occurs when an infected person’s immune system becomes severely compromised, and the patient develops life-threatening “opportunistic infections” that a healthy immune system can easily fight off. Before the first HIV test, gay men had no way of knowing whether they had HIV until the disease progressed to AIDS. Each day became a guessing game as they searched newspapers for late lovers, trying to determine who had gotten it from whom and when, whether they had done it long enough or hard enough to transmit anything. When testing became available, these men had to choose between the stress of not knowing and the possibility of receiving a death sentence.
In March 1983, the CDC released a statement explaining that no documented cases of AIDS existed “among health care or laboratory personnel caring for AIDS patients or processing laboratory specimens,” and that the only person-to-person transmission identified had either been through intimate contact or blood transfusion. In September 1983, the CDC elaborated: “AIDS is not known to be transmitted through food, water, air, or environmental surfaces.” The statement also expressed concerns that some had “misconstrued” the CDC’s classification of at-risk populations to mean that those people could transmit the virus through non-intimate contact. “This view is not justified by available data. Nonetheless, it has been used unfairly as a basis for social and economic discrimination.”
The CDC and other organizations put the information out there as soon as it became available. Gay activist groups published and dispersed pamphlets on safer sex and how to avoid contracting the virus as soon as June 1982. Still, homosexuals, heroin addicts, Haitians, and hemophiliacs, the four populations most at risk–termed “the 4H club”–experienced terrible discrimination. After the CDC set the spotlight on the 4H club, items manufactured in Haiti could not be sold in the United States, and tourism dropped by eighty percent. Haitians in the United States could not find work or sell their houses. Ryan White, a hemophiliac, attended school through a telephone after getting diagnosed in 1984–a year after the CDC released these statements–and his mother had to pick her change up off the floor. Citizens of West Hollywood treated HIV-negative gay men like lepers. Mere association led to discrimination.
Because HIV is spread through bodily fluids, a certain kind of intimacy comes with contracting it: making love, sharing needles, licking a lover’s wound. Sharing blood is a sign of familial connection; it means that one is there for another through the pain of pregnancy, or even just the pain of a paper cut. Two heroin addicts may meet each other for the first time as they share the same needle, but they both know the pain of addiction, the pain of a bad high, the pain of the dullness that follows. Those who share blood, also share pain.
Similarly, to make love to someone is to be vulnerable. Sex is a giving of oneself to another: a giving of one’s time, space, skin, organs, orgasms, and especially a giving of one’s fluids. But more importantly, to have sex is to accept another’s fluids, another’s disease.
When doctors declared in 1982 that “the general public need not fear,” they really meant that “their pain is not ours.” The general public–the vast majority of heterosexuals–had held this belief for centuries. It manifested in the declaration of homosexual desire as a mental disorder. In the constant and continuing efforts of organizations–religious and not–to convert homosexuals into proud heterosexuals despite continual failure. But this declaration that “their pain is not ours” changed things. It sparked a new age of homophobic propaganda: “AIDS: the Wrath of God,” “gay plague,” “GRID” and on and on. Finally, the heterosexuals had gotten it right; men having sex with men was literally killing people. The general public seemed to revel in its success. The only cure they needed was the disappearance of homosexuality. At least until the virus spread to them.
A television advertisement released in 1987–the same year that the CDC approved the first HIV treatment–begins with White men, women and children being lowered from the ceiling like bowling pins as a voiceover says, “At first, only gays and IV drug users were being killed by AIDS, but now we know every one of us could be devastated by it.” The camera zooms in on a little girl with pigtails who winces as a grim reaper rolls a bowling ball at the lot of them.
Aiden, a gay man born in the early 1990s, said, “HIV was always a gay story.” Every portrayal of the disease he had seen in movies, TV shows or books always included gay people, and for much of his life, Aiden only knew one gay man: his older brother who contracted HIV at nineteen. While Aiden developed a mental picture of how a gay man behaved, he drew all of his ideas from television and his brother because no other references existed in his life. The Gay Man pierced his body, burned color into his hair with chemicals and infused his skin with droplets of multi-colored ink; he danced at clubs, got drunk, got high, got addicted and got AIDS. The Gay Man–well, he was just “too gay.”
And the sex the Gay Man had! Perhaps House Representative Bill Dannemeyer described his sex life best as he gave a speech, “What Homosexuals Do,” on the House floor on June 29, 1989 while Representatives debated what to do about the AIDS crisis. According to Danneymeyer, “the average homosexual has 1,000 or more sexual partners in his lifetime” and his “favorite sexual activities include: Receiving oral sodomy, that is putting one man’s penis in another man’s mouth” and “performing anal penetration.” His other “peculiar” sexual activities include “Rimming, or one man using his tongue to lick the rectum of another man; golden showers, having one man or men urinate on another man or men; fisting or handballing, which has one man insert his hand and/or part of his arm into another man’s rectum” and “inserting dildoes, certain vegetables or lightbulbs up another man’s rectum.”
Aiden decided to become a new kind of gay. “I’ll be different. I’ll be better.”
“I didn’t pierce my ears for a long time because it felt too gay,” he said. “I didn’t wear the clothes I wanted to wear. I didn’t go dancing or go to a club or drink alcohol for a long time.” Perhaps Aiden felt that looking and acting gay meant everyone thinking he enjoyed showering in his lover’s urine and shoving lightbulbs up his ass. Perhaps he even believed everyone who looked gay actually did.
The problem, however, is that the average gay man Dannemeyer described, that Aiden saw, does not exist. For example, “Can We Talk?” the pamphlet Dannemeyer cites for the peculiar sexual practices of gay men he describes makes no mention of any vegetables or lightbulbs used as sex toys, nor does it use the terms “golden shower” and “handballing.” Dannemeyer describes these sexual acts in much more detail than the pamphlet, in which the writers make vague allusions that require experience or prior knowledge to understand, using terms like “active partner,” “receptive partner,” and “watersports.” The Harvey Milk Lesbian & Gay Democratic Club produced this pamphlet to educate gay men on how to have safe sex during the AIDS crisis–not to explain “What Homosexuals Do,” as Dannemeyer put it. The image of a man inserting a vegetable, say a zucchini, into another man’s rectum likely made a number of Representatives cringe as they listened to Dannemeyer’s speech, but where did all those vegetables come from? Perhaps he slipped in these rumors to scare the House from helping the tens of thousands of people–gay and straight–who had contracted HIV in the United States by that time.
Rumors and distortions of the truth like this ruled the Gay Man’s image. Amanda never met a single gay man throughout the AIDS crisis. The only things she ever heard about gay men came through the television, the newspaper or her church–never from men who loved men. She once told her grandson, James, who would later realize he loved men, that “a boy marrying another boy is never OK. Never.” James nodded as he learned what the word gay meant for the first time, sitting in his grandmother’s sun room while she condemned what he would soon become. James would think back on that moment for decades.
There is something ironic about the name human immunodeficiency virus because politicians and religious leaders at the time seemed intent on dehumanizing gay men, the staple victim, and the general public began to see members of the 4H club as less than human. It took six years for doctors to release the first treatment for HIV, and Ronald Reagan, the president at the time, did not publicly mention AIDS until September 1985, four years after the crisis began.
In the United States on December 14, 2020, not even a year after COVID-19 entered the nation, needles broke skin and vaccines rushed into the bloodstreams of American nurses, filmed and applauded.
Nearly four decades after its discovery, there is no vaccine for HIV. There is no cure.
However, one must inevitably ask if gay men really want to be saved. In the early 2000s, Gregory Freeman wrote an article, “Bug Chasers,” for the Rolling Stone claiming that 25% of all new HIV infections among gay men were caused by actively attempting to contract the virus. These HIV-negative men, or “bug chasers,” would connect with HIV-positive men, or “gift givers,” in online chat rooms intending to participate in unprotected sex. Freeman quoted a gay man, Carlos, describing the moment of transmission as “the most erotic thing I can imagine.”
When the article first hit the shelves, members of the anti-gay right like Sean Hannity, a talk-show host, ate it up. Freeman, however, did not back up his statistic with any studies or data; he claims it came from a psychiatrist, Bob Cabaj, who, after the fact said, “That’s totally false. I never said that.” Either Cabaj could not get his thoughts straight, or more likely, Freeman could not get his quotes straight. Or anyone else’s for that matter. Later in his article, Freeman paraphrased Dr. Marshall Forstein saying that “bug chasers are seen regularly in the Fenway health system, and the phenomenon is growing,” when Forstien actually said, “We have seen a few cases, but we have no idea how common this is.”
Freeman ends his article with the quoted words of a pseudonymous bug chaser: “If I know that he’s negative and I’m fucking him, it sort of gets me off. I’m murdering him in a sense, killing him slowly, and that’s sort of, as sick as it sounds, exciting to me.” This bug chaser, as far as he knows, does not have HIV, yet he talks as if he has given the virus to dozens of men. This does not add up, just like the numbers Freeman litters his article with, which literally do not add up. After shoving statements down the throats of two doctors, one must wonder if Freeman actually heard those words leave a person’s mouth, or if he had even found a bug chaser to interview at all. Regardless, Sean Hannity flaunted those closing lines as he publicly condemned gay men as the monsters Freeman made them out to be.
However, the subculture of bug chasing Freeman seems so fascinated with is much broader than his article acknowledges. One gay man, when his partner developed AIDS while he remained negative, tore an IV from his partner’s arm and stabbed it into his own, becoming a bug chaser; he contracted HIV to be with his lover in death. Another gay man decided that he would rather know that he had HIV than spend the rest of his life worrying he might catch it, feeling he would inevitably catch it, and so he became a bug chaser and got it over with. “It’s just not worth getting yourself all worked up over,” he said. He ranted about condoms the same way people ranted about face masks during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Ironically, the Rolling Stone released an article in May 2020 which refuted claims that college students were throwing “coronavirus parties” with the intention of getting infected. Coronavirus parties have happened. Brigham Young University experienced problems at both its Idaho and Utah campuses during the fall of 2020. Administrators believed that students intended to make bank selling their antibody-filled plasma after they recovered. At the Utah campus, cases rose from 40 to 79 within two days due to underground parties hosting over one hundred unmasked, crowded people. But for some reason, the Rolling Stone felt the need to defend these college students as simply throwing careless parties for the sake of throwing parties–not as a means to contracting the virus–when it humiliated and demonized the gay community for a publicity stunt while many gay men still grieved lost friends and lovers.
Freeman’s story fell apart immediately after its publication. The inconsistencies and absurd claims glare on the page. Such inadequate quality control might make one wonder what the Rolling Stone’s staff was smoking the day they approved Freeman’s article. Or, perhaps, they really believed that masses of gay men became completely consumed by eroticism derived from a disease that had taken so many of their kind. It appears that this was easier for the Rolling Stone to believe than the possibility of college students throwing coronavirus parties to make some extra cash off their excess plasma.
Gay men have become secretive out of necessity. When they force their way into the light, the general public meets them with controversy. The American Psychiatric Association labeled their sexuality a mental disorder until 1987, listing it first as “homosexuality” and later as “sexual orientation disturbance” in the DSM-II, and politicians denied them legal marriage in some states until 2015. When activists published pamphlets meant to educate gay men on how to have safer sex, Bill Dannemeyer twisted one’s words to villanize the gay community in front of Congress. The secrecy bigotry has forced gay men to adopt spreads rumors like wildfire. The Rolling Stone’s staff may have believed anything Freeman could have dreamed up about the sex lives of gay men.
At a press conference in 1982, Lester Kinsolving, a journalist, asked Larry Speakes, the Deputy Press Secretary for the White House at the time, if the president had any reaction to the CDC’s declaration that AIDS had become an epidemic. Once Kinsolving clarified that “It’s know as the ‘gay plague,’” the room full of reporters and politicians busted out laughing, and they continued to laugh throughout the conversation.
“I don’t have it,” Speakes said. “Do you?”
Kinsolving kept prying for answers until Speakes said, “I thought I heard you in the State department over there. Why didn’t you stay over there?”
“Because I love you, Larry.”
“Let’s don’t put it in those terms, Lester.”
At another press conference in 1984, after Speakes said that Reagan had not expressed any opinion on the AIDS epidemic, Kinsolving said, “Will you ask him, Larry?”
Speakes replied by asking, “Have you been checked?”
Kinsolving said, “What? Pardon? I didn’t hear your answer.”
Speakes ignored Kinsolving. “I don’t get paid enough. Is there anything else we need to do here?”
AIDS became a joke while gay men suddenly collapsed on streets and their skin blackened with spots and wrinkled with artificial age.
But, if gay men never wanted to be saved in the first place, none of those jokes mattered, and Larry Speakes was right to get a good laugh out of it all. If people, when they thought of AIDS, only saw a bunch of perverted sex addicts, then they had done nothing wrong in ignoring the epidemic. If doctors developed a cure or a vaccine, it would take all the gays’ fun away. Forget the way their skin yawned between their ribs. Forget the parents who saw their children die, and the parents who refused to watch their children die. Forget the tears, the final fluid many of these men shared.
Currently, the most effective treatment for HIV is antiretroviral therapy (ART), also known as the “AIDS cocktail,” which uses a variety of medications to disable proteins the virus needs to replicate, and to restore immune function. ART can decrease a patient’s viral load enough that it becomes undetectable. This means that the illness will not progress to AIDS, and the patient cannot transmit the virus through sex. Despite this, the stigma remains. Aiden had seen and heard of many gay men rejected by other gay men because of their HIV status. Aiden said, “People wouldn’t even go on dates with them because of this disease.” One HIV-positive man Aiden messaged on a dating app even seemed surprised that his status did not bother Aiden. “And you know that I’m positive, right?” he asked, and Aiden said that he did. “And you’re still OK with meeting up with me?” Aiden was.
Aiden struggled to feel wanted. He said, “If I caused any sort of contention, people would leave.” Family, friends, lovers. Aiden did not understand why they left, just that they did, and he considered it his own fault. He developed many unsafe sexual practices. “I wanted that connection more than I cared what happened to me physically.” Aiden let his sexual partners choose whether they wanted to use protection or not, and he only asked after their status when they asked first, “probably to make it seem like I cared.”
“I had a lot of one-night stands,” Aiden said, “because it felt good to be wanted, and I wanted to be wanted.” Aiden did not feel loved, and so he made love with strangers to compensate. A few hours being held, however, couldn’t replace a good self-care class and a genuine romance, and so he began to pursue something long term once again. But by then, unbeknownst to him, HIV had begun to amass within his blood.
When it came time to tell his new long-term partner his HIV status, shortly after receiving a positive test result, Aiden could not banish the fear that his lover might reject him because of it. Aiden knew that HIV would not change their relationship, but he still dreaded the moment. His partner “was beautiful and wonderful” about it; “entirely supportive, and not at all judgemental.” That moment in Aiden’s life would have gone so much differently had his partner not taken the time to learn about the disease.
Amanda’s church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints–although it still saw homosexual behavior as sinful–began to make its views on homosexuality more understanding as James grew up. However, the church’s homophobic past remained. When James turned sixteen, his father gave him a pamphlet called “To Young Men Only,” written in 1976 by Boyd K. Packer, an apostle of this church. While studying it, James learned that gay men preyed upon young boys. Packer said that God forbade “physical mischief with another man.” He then shared an experience: A young man, feeling guilty, confessed that he had “floored” another young man who had made a sexual advance on him. Packer said, “Well, thanks. Somebody had to do it.”
James, while browsing search results for “homosexual” on the church’s website, came across a talk by Packer titled “Covenants” in which the apostle said that the “perverted conduct” of homosexuals led “without exception to disappointment, suffering, to tragedy.” He labeled the average gay man a sexual predator and a pervert. After reading this, James began to think that he would rather die than remain gay, a mentality that landed him in the hospital for nearly a week at nineteen years old. Similarly, religious leaders of that same church taught Aiden that “nobody is gay in heaven,” so he figured that if he died, “things would be better.” Both Aiden and James began to see homosexuality as something they needed to escape. For a short time, they considered death a reasonable cost.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints delivered “Covenants” to church members across the world in 1990, one year after Bill Dannemeyer gave his speech about gay sex on the House floor. Perhaps Packer heard Dannemeyer explain these homemade sex toys and “golden showers” and cringed right along with the rest of the world, never bothering to check where Dannemeyer actually heard about them in the first place, just like the editors of the Rolling Stone never fact checked “Bug Chasers.”
Amanda grew up ingesting the sayings of men like Boyd K. Packer, as if believing God sent doctrine through every off-handed word they breathed. Perhaps God meant for Packer to say every word he did about the perversion of men who could not help falling in love with other men. Perhaps God meant for James to cringe at Packer’s words, and for Aiden to feel so alone that the only place he felt loved for years was in the arms of a man he met hours before online. The only sure thing here is the pain. The pain of Aiden’s search for love and acceptance. The pain that devoured James as he lay in a hospital bed, while a social worker told him just how much it frightened her to see a healthy nineteen-year-old boy experiencing so much anxiety that he could not stand on his own.
After gay men began contracting HIV, the word faggot began meaning something closer to maggot; gay people reached a new level of dirty in the general public’s eyes that seemed to manifest in the spots that developed on the skin of those who caught it. HIV cannot spread through everyday physical touch, eating off the same dishes, using the same bathroom, or even through a dry kiss. In fact, the only documented case of HIV being transferred through an open-mouth kiss occurred when both people had actively bleeding mouth sores; the blood they shared spread the virus–not the saliva. But still, frightened people threw dishes gay men used away, rejected hugs and kisses on the forehead, and scooted away on public transportation. Even some gay men still refuse to touch or associate with people who have HIV, even if their status is undetectable.
At the 1992 Republican National Convention, an HIV activist named Mary Fisher said, “HIV asks only one thing of those it attacks: Are you human?” HIV does not ask its victims if they have enrolled in the 4H club before it attacks. It did not care that Fisher was White or never had a drug problem. HIV simply found its way into her body and replicated. HIV did this because Mary Fisher was human.
Although humanity may seem the most obvious risk factor, perhaps the CDC should have included it as the fifth H. Human immunodeficiency virus is a human struggle, but the people forgot that when they treated gay men like lepers and kicked Ryan White out of school, when they joked at press conferences instead of finding solutions.
Not quite a year before James, with COVID-19 antibodies swimming through his blood, walked into a plasma donation center hoping to help someone–anyone–he confessed to his father that he would not stop himself from falling in love with another man. He did not care what Boyd K. Packer or any prophet of God said on the matter.
James’s father said, immediately, “Maybe if you don’t have sex until you’re married. And maybe if he gets tested first . . .”
James realized then that his father saw gay men as little more than carriers of death.
When Asian Hate crimes “reached an alarming level across the United States [following] the outbreak of COVID-19,” many Americans saw Asian-Americans as little more than carriers of death. Verbal abuse ranged from referring to coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” or “Kung Flu” to racist slurs including “yellow n***r” and “die Chink die.” Asian-Americans were refused services, pushed off bicycles, stabbed, and killed, all because coronavirus originated in China.
In reality, White people in the United States are least likely to wear a mask while in close contact with someone they do not live with. Over sixty percent of people of any other race will wear a mask in this situation while only 46% of White people do. Furthermore, on January 6, 2021, thousands of White people gathered, mainly maskless, outside the capitol to protest Trump’s loss of the presidential election. These people stormed through the capitol’s halls, spraying spit as they shouted. These people had gathered from across the nation, creating the perfect breeding ground for coronavirus. Then, these people sat, unmasked, in hotel lobbies and later returned to where they had come from, bringing with them any particles of the virus that had been lurking in their fellow protesters’ spit, breath and rage.
On October 11, 1992, after research on AIDS had stalled, protesters marching to the White House met police officers on horses twenty feet in front of the gate. These protesters had loved people who had died from AIDS, and the U.S. government had done virtually nothing to stop it. Children and lovers and parents and friends carried urns and boxes and bags full of their loved ones’ ashes as they used a triangular formation to wedge their way past the line of mounted officers. Then, these people poured the ashes onto the White House lawn, chanting, “We’re bringing our dead to your door. We won’t take it anymore.”
Though condoms have become masks and homosexuals have become Asain-Americans, not much has changed. Like the U.S. government and the general public had not acknowledged the AIDS epidemic, the Capitol Rioters, Anti-Maskers, and even President Donald Trump refused to acknowledge the severity of the Coronavirus pandemic.
While AIDS activists handed out condoms–and decades later while store clerks handed out face masks–the immune systems of dying people in hospital beds succumbed to viruses the world knew so little about. And the people who stayed up at night hoping those loved ones would live, just a few days longer, wondered why we did not try harder.
Jacob Taylor is currently completing a master’s degree at Utah State University. Their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry is published and forthcoming in Sink Hollow, Sugar House Review, and the Southern Quill.
Artwork Source: “Brush Stroke,” Kelly DuMar
Artist Statement: Wetlands are my happy place. I live on the rural Charles River in the woods. The surface of water, whether it’s a river, a lake, a brook or a puddle, is an amazing canvas––where nature produces the art. Water reflects the energy of life. It’s constantly changing, eternally new. I gaze into water––river, brook, swamp––in all seasons to see images that allow me to understand myself and the world. “Brush Strokes” is an image I took one morning under a gray sky. Standing in the middle of the trestle bridge that crosses the Charles River, I looked down the soft current under soft light and saw an image that reminded me of a Chinese painting in black ink on pearl colored silk. It was an image as if made from the stroke of an artist’s brush. It felt to me as if an artist created it from a quiet and reverent intention. Immediately, I could breathe more deeply. I took the image with my I-phone. Now, my creative spirit was fed. I had made something from nature: a picture that calmed me, elevated my thoughts, nourished my aesthetic appetite. In less than a split second, the image vanished from the river. But it changed me, and I was glad.
Kelly DuMar is a poet, playwright and workshop facilitator from Boston. She’s author of four poetry collections, including jinx and heavenly calling, published by Lily Poetry Review Books in March 2023. Her poems and images are published in Bellevue Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Thrush, Glassworks, Flock and more, and her images have been featured on the cover of About Place, Synkroniciti, Cool Beans, Etymology, Confetti and Young Ravens Literary Review. Kelly teaches a variety of creative writing workshops, in person and online, and she teaches Play Labs for the International Women’s Writing Guild and the Transformative Language Arts Network. Kelly produces the Featured Open Mic for the Journal of Expressive Writing. Her home is the rural Charles River where she walks and captures images of the wetlands in all weather. Reach her at kellydumar.com
Notes:
Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of interviewees.
1 Nucleic Acid Testing . . . since 1999: “Infectious Disease Testing.” The American National Red Cross. Accessed 11 April 2021.
1 can detect HIV . . . antibodies or symptoms: “Testing and Processing Plasma.” CSL Plasma. Accessed 11 April 2021.
2 Abbott Laboratories . . . one in two million: Thornton, Keneth M. “25th anniversary of first HIV antibody test.” Medical Laboratory Observer. 1 December 2010. Note: the antibody test released in 1985 was developed to test donated blood and was not initially approved for diagnostic purposes; however, many people still used the test in this way.
2 a woman named Diane lost . . . Diane got lucky: Personal interview. 17 March 2021.
2 A boy with . . . at age thirteen: “Who Was Ryan White?” Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program. Accessed 11 April 2021.
2 Because of widespread . . . “as just another student”: Johnson, Dirk. “Ryan White Dies of AIDS at 18; His Struggle Helped Pierce Myths.” The New York Times. 9 April 1990.
3 On May 11, 1982 . . . fear an epidemic”: Altman, Lawrence K. “NEW HOMOSEXUAL DISORDER WORRIES HEALTH OFFICIALS.” The New York Times. 11 May 1982.
3 recalled that she did not think . . . I couldn’t do that”: Personal interview. 17 March 2021.
3 Carol Lynn Pearson . . . died of AIDS: “Carol Lynn Wright Pearson.” Brigham Young Academy. Accessed 22 March 2021.
4 finished his “college wild days” . . . made love to them: Personal interview. 19 March 2021.
4 “The only thing . . . kill you faster”: Brammer, John P. “Three decades later, men who survived the ‘gay plague’ speak out.” NBC Universal. 1 December 2017.
4 During the first stage . . . easily fight off: “Symptoms of HIV.” Minority HIV/AIDS Fund. Accessed 29 March 2021.
5 pass within a year . . . long as twenty: Osmond, Dennis H. “Epidemiology of Disease Progression in HIV.” University of California, San Francisco. May 1998.
5 In March 1983 . . . or blood transfusion: “Current Trends Prevention of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS): Report of Inter-Agency Recommendations.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 4 March 1983.
5 In September 1983 . . . economic discrimination”: “Current Trends Update: Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) — United States.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 9 September 1983.
6 as soon as June 1982: “A Timeline of HIV and AIDS.” Minority HIV/AIDS Fund. Accessed 12 April 2021.
6 homosexuals, heroin addicts . . . sell their houses: “The High Price of Stigma.” Public Broadcasting Service. 30 May 2006.
6 In the constant . . . continual failure: Venn-Brown, Anthony. Sexual orientation change efforts within religious contexts: A personal account of the battle to heal homosexuals. Sydney, Australia, Ambassadors & Bridge Builders International, 2000.
7 A television advertisement . . . lot of them: “AIDS ‘Grim Reaper’ Ad Campaign (1987).” YouTube, uploaded by Double Denim Days, 15 July 2016.
7 “HIV was always a gay story.” . . . just “too gay”: Personal interview. 21 February 2021.
7 House Representative Bill . . . another man’s rectum”: U.S. House of Representatives. “Congressional Record–House.” United States, Congress, House, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. 29 June 1989. 13950.
8 “I’ll be different . . . alcohol for a long time”: Personal interview. 21 February 2021.
8 “active partner” . . . “watersports”: “Can We Talk?” Harvey Milk Gay & Lesbian Democratic Club. 1984.
9 It took six . . . the crisis began: “A Timeline of HIV and AIDS.” Minority HIV/AIDS Fund. Accessed 12 April 2021.
9 In the early 2000s . . . given the virus to dozens of men: Freeman, Gregory A. “Bug Chasers.” Rolling Stone. 23 January 2003.
10 When the article first . . . literally do not add up: Sullivan, Andrew. “Sex- and death-crazed gays play viral Russian Roulette!” Salon. 25 January 2003.
10 One gay man, when . . . worked up over”: Hogarth, Louise. “The Gift – HIV Documentary.” YouTube, uploaded by DOL Films on 3 May 2016.
11 the Rolling Stone released . . . intention of getting infected: Dickson, EJ. “Are People Really Having ‘Coronavirus Parties’?” Rolling Stone. 7 May 2020.
11 Brigham Young University . . . after they recovered: Tanner, Courtney. “BYU-Idaho says students may be trying to get COVID-19 so they can sell their plasma.” The Salt Lake Tribune. 13 October 2020.
11 At the Utah campus . . . unmasked, crowded people: Dean, Tania. “Large parties held in Provo as COVID-19 on the rise at BYU.” KSL Broadcasting Salt Lake City UT. 7 September 2020.
11 The American Psychiatric Association . . . in the DSM-II: Burton, Neel. “When Homosexuaality Stopped Being a Mental Disorder.” Psychology Today. 18 September 2015.
12 At a press conference . . . need to do here?”: March, Eric. “This audio of Reagan’s press secretary and reporters laughing about AIDS should not be forgotten.” Upworthy. 1 December 2015.
13 the most effective treatment . . . the virus through sex: “Understanding ART for HIV.” Healthline. Accessed 12 April 2021.
13 “People wouldn’t even go . . . not at all judgemental”: Personal Interview. 21 February 2021.
14 although it still saw . . . more understanding: In October 2010, Boyd K. Packer made a statement that homosexuality was not inborn in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’s General Conference. Before the online publication of his talk, the apostle revised it to align his words with the church, which does not take a position on the cause of homosexuality. (Stack, Peggy F. “Packer talk jibes with LDS stance after tweak.” The Salt Lake Tribune. 25 October 2010.)
14 James learned that gay men . . . Somebody had to do it”: Packer, Boyd K. “To Young Men Only.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 1976.
15 the “perverted conduct” . . . predator and a pervert: Packer, Boyd K. “Covenants.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. October 1990.
16 the only documented case . . . bleeding mouth sores: “Transmission of HIV Possibly Associated with Exposure of Mucous Membrane to Contaminated Blood.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 11 July 1997.
16 “HIV asks only one thing of those it attacks: Are you human?”: Fisher, Mary. “A Whisper of AIDS.” American Rhetoric. 19 August 1992.
17 When Asian Hate crimes . . . bicycles, stabbed, and killed: Achiume, E. Tendayi, et al. “Mandates of the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance; the Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants; and the Working Group on discrimination against women and girls.” 12 August 2020. 1-3.
17 White people in the . . . 46% of White people do: Key, Jim, and Janesse Miller. “Half of U.S. adults, 3 out of 10 Angelenos don’t wear masks when in close contact with non-household members.” Press Room. 21 January 2021.
17 thousands of White people . . . they had come from: Wetsman, Nicole. “COVID-19 cases in the Capitol are only the tip of the iceberg.” The Verge. 19 January 2021.
18 On October 11, 1992 . . . We won’t take it anymore”: Hunte, Tracie. “The Ashes on the Lawn.” Radiolab. 18 December 2020.
The Turning Leaf Journal 