We Heart HAART

The development of Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Treatment (HAART) therapies to manage HIV infection has changed our understanding of the meanings and metaphors of HIV infection. As we have studied, the sudden emergence of HIV infection in the gay community in the late 1970s and early 1980s was like a sudden disaster, the end of a social and cultural world with little precedent in contemporary American life. The fact that gay men and lesbians rose to the occasion to care for their own and force the government and the medical industry to respond to the crisis was a watershed event in the development of LGBT communities, insofar as faced with a deadly health crisis, divisive discursive debates fell before the community’s desire to save itself from self-immolation. And the effects of that period can arguably still be felt today, as a welding of communal identities around a solid if simultaneously ephemeral notion of LGBT identity, one still open to debate but that exists nonetheless.

As Sullivan notes in his piece, the louche moral position of gay men (and by extension lesbians) was enabled by disinterest on the part of heterosexual America, a sort of open secret in which heterosexual America didn’t acknowledge the gay and lesbian communities rapidly developing since the 1950s, a sort of moral stasis that refused to either assimilate or completely reject LGBT people, a position Sullivan associates as akin to the role of Jewish communities in gentile societies before the Holocaust.

One of the themes of Sullivan and many others who write about HIV infection and gayness is the notion of “the recall to nature,” the grounding of gay men to the body through disease, and its effect of maturation on the community. I feel uncomfortable with this reading for several reasons, not the least of which is some sort of implicit (or explicit, as the case may be) critique of rising above embodiment. While on the face of it, the argument of the recall to nature through disease/epidemic impact is of course true (we all exist in physical bodies that are vulnerable to infection and mortality), the tone of the observation seems trite, especially in the face of the thousands of HIV-related deaths in the LGBT community since 1980. A way of colloquially summarizing this recall to nature argument could look like this— “Before AIDS, gay men were disco-dancing, drug-taking, sex-hungry pod people who had no care for the world. Now, they’ve risen up to the challenge of humanity by demonstrating that humanity through care and tragedy.”

Again, in some ways, this reading may be true. It certainly is sentimental. But to argue that gay communities before AIDS were so facile is a misreading, I think, or at the very least ungenerous. In other words, it is a particular analysis with social and political implications, which are apparent in Sullivan but also in some of the other writers we’ve looked at, in particular Larry Kramer. As we’ve studied, in fact gay and lesbian communities before HIV were engaged in rigorous and vociferous debates around identity, parthenogenic culture, and the relationship of LGBT people to dominant heterosexual society. Gay sexual hedonism of the 1970s did represent, on some level, an absconding of some of this work, but the sexual hedonistic culture was fueled and supported by themes in mainstream culture (capitalism and consumerism being two of the most prominent). Also, that hedonistic culture did not exist in a vacuum, but was actually documented, examined, and critiqued by gay men and lesbians alike at the time and subsequently.

Another bone of contention I would have is what is so wrong with resisting embodiment? Why was it/is it wrong for gay men to want to transcend the body (here body means the literally physical as well as metaphorically social, cultural, political, what have you) into fantasy, projection, illusion, image, and potential? Some of this is obviously problematic, for instance in the ways in which some gay men can become, like Narcissus, enamored by image alone. But doesn’t the desire to transcend embodiment also represent, on some important level, the desire to achieve something beyond what the world has given you, especially a hatefully homophobic world? I think the “recall to nature” argument has, within it, some dangerous potentials, not only for LGBT people but for everyone who has dreamed of being something and someone different.

Reading the 1970s from the perspective of the HIV crisis is, in some ways, the worst sort of presentism. The trends and themes of gay male subcultural (or satellite culture, to invoke Newton) streams remain today in a critical tension with dominant culture, centered around the complicated nexus of masculinity, identity, sexuality, and self-conception. HAART therapies provide, in the maw of these irresolvable and continual debates, a pause in mortality, and perhaps a shift in perspective, although as Sullivan remarks, whether this is farce, tragedy, or something altogether different remains to be seen.

One thing is for sure, and that is the relative success of HAART therapies in managing the spiraling death rates that decimated the community in the late 1980s and early 1990s. HIV remains, I would argue, both a challenging public health problem for gay communities, as well as continuing to provide unwanted and continual messages of disease, pathology, and death associated with gayness. The thousands of gay men whose lives have been ameliorated or extended through HAART therapies are testimony enough to the positive effects of anti-retroviral drugs on the stability and “normalization” of the community after a period of intense crisis. Whether the challenges and traumas of the HIV crisis have been absorbed and resolved successfully within the community remains, for good and bad, an open question. But I would rather live in a gay world troubled by the questions and conundrums HAART (ironically) produces than one without it. We've seen that world, and it is not for the feint of heart.