David Davis

The more I read about gay life during the early years of the AIDS epidemic1, the less lonely I feel.

Perhaps I haven’t earned that loneliness, being privileged to have friends that I trust will care for me when I need them to. But COVID has made my world smaller, less spontaneous, more exhausting. I rarely go out anymore, because masking at most clubs and parties is cumbersome and of course not 100% effective. Two bouts with the virus have damaged my already compromised immune system, making one of my favorite hobbies, promiscuity, more onerous than the adventures it promises. Even if COVID were eradicated tomorrow, I’m painfully aware of every potential apocalyptic pony waiting to flee the barn. I hoard medication, obsess over mucus membranes, and agonize over pricy prophylactics, all the while resisting a growing revulsion at the thought of other microbiomes, human and animal alike.

But then I think of the gay people living during and immediately prior to my childhood who also feared contact with other living beings, dreaded the doctor (if they could find one to treat them), and raged against the CDC and FDA and the US government and all the other governments, besides. At each epidemiological encounter with loss, deprivation, or injustice—whether personal or witnessed through social media—I think, There is a precedent for this. It’s cope, but it’s also true. When I can’t fuck, party, breathe, seek healthcare, or move through the world as I would like to, I think of writers of a certain era who wrote about life with or surrounded by HIV/AIDS: Andrew Holleran, Essex Hemphill, Guillame Dustan, Hervé Guibert2, David Wojnarowicz, Reinaldo Arenas, Gary Indiana, Bob Glück. If they could live with it, so can I, I think, choosing to forget, for the moment, how many of them didn’t survive.

Comparing HIV and COVID-19 as social phenomena, public health failures, or symptoms of white supremacy’s colossal destructive force is a tricky business, not least of all because HIV hasn’t gone anywhere. We ought never forget that the differences between them are stark—I personally do not attend a friend’s funeral every week—but then, so are the similarities. Like all illnesses in a world in which healthcare is not a human right, they gravitate toward populations made vulnerable by their relative distance from capital. Immune-trashing viral diseases that could be mitigated, contained, or even eliminated if those in power cared to make the effort, HIV and COVID are, as we say about mismatched eyebrows, sisters rather than twins.

Share

The image at the top of this post is from Nicholas Ray’s breathtaking In a Lonely Place, a film noir starring Humphrey Bogart as a Dixon “Dix” Steele, a down-on-his-luck screenwriter cynically seeking his next payday among the barflies and mercenaries of 1950s Hollywood3. His desire to write is stymied by the very industry that gave him his earlier success, and his resulting misanthropy—which manifests as an indiscriminately violent temper—prevents him not only from being satisfied in his work, but from finding happiness in the people around him. Why write at all?

Old Hollywood is good for movies about frustrated writers doomed to much worse than professional failure: Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)4. Lining them up now, I can’t help but notice their chronological placement between the second World War and the arrival of New Hollywood in the late 1960s. Their shared themes signal a post-war existential crisis, perhaps, for working artists in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the rise of McCarthyist repression. Despite our differences, I see myself in these fictional writers, as I see myself in the all-too-real writers of the first AIDS generation: artists whose personal circumstances force them to doubt the future. Why write at all?

I have written three books, two of which—the earthquake room and X—are published. Inside me are many more, and it is my greatest wish to make and share them. But if you want to know the truth, I don’t think I’ll have the chance. With current and incipient pandemics, climate collapse, rising fascism, and the foreign horrors in which my country is implicated, I fear the window for that kind of writing life, let alone career, is closing. I’ll get out one or two more, I suspect. After that, the writing, if and when it happens, will stay with me.

As sorry for myself as it makes me feel, failing to obtain a certain kind of career in a certain kind of consumerist economy would be no tragedy. But if there is a world after the fall of the American empire—and I hope very desperately that this happens sooner rather than later—there is little reason to think I’ll make it there, which leaves me at something of a personal impasse. I will keep writing until I can’t anymore, but how? To what end? For whom? The work of solidarity and survival is cut out for me, but as for my vocation…well…there are more questions than answers.

The more I read about gay life during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, the more I understand that I cannot only look to those writers for the lives they lived. I must also look to them for the deaths they died, all of them characterized by fear, suffering, and, yes, loneliness. In my better moments, this reassures me.

Subscribe now

If you have a few dollars to spare, please help Lina and her family evacuate Gaza. Every life is priceless.

Thank you for reading and sharing. Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Buy my book. Learn the history of this newsletter.

1

By which I mean the 1980s through the mid-1990s, although evidence suggests a decades-long emergence, including an illness referred to as “junkie flu” or “junkie pneumonia” that was killing homeless IV drug users in New York in the 1970s.

2

And through him, his lover, Michel Foucault.

3

Bogey is so fucking good. Peel back his snideness to find a yearning lover, not unlike Casablanca’s Rick Blaine, at your own risk. Beneath him lurks yet another man: a shark-eyed killer with a rage so terrifying you forget it’s trapped in the body of a middle-aged chain-smoking welterweight.

4

If you’re looking for a worthwhile homage, the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink (1991), starring sweet baby angel John Turturro, is excellent.