Anatomy Lessons: The Face, the Fist, the Head, the Heart

The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

Scars are tattoos with better stories.
—from an advertisement


Faces: What does an AIDS activist look like?

Is s/he old or young? HIV positive or negative? Black or white? Gay or Straight? Tall, short, skinny or fat? The answer is: Yes. AIDS activists are all those things. What does an AIDS activist look like? Like you. Like me.

In the early ’80s, I was young and queer. I erupted on the gay scene at the same time as AIDS. I rallied, protested and joined things.



Fists: What AIDS activists do

If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.
—Betty Reese

I organized a chapter of ACT-UP in Salt Lake City, Utah. We did street theater—dying dramatically on the crowded city sidewalk (while our less thespian colleagues pressed fliers and pamphlets on to passersby.) Our most avid fan base was the local police who watched every performance carefully for us to do something arrest-worthy. Such as impeding foot traffic or “not moving,” which moved us from free speech to loitering, trespass, or some interpretation of a vague local statute. (Hence it was necessary if you fell down dead to continue twitching.)

Some of what we did seemed silly (or counterproductive) to me. We walked around Temple Square with a small squad of Drag Queens wearing aluminum foil badges that said: “Fashion Police,” and handed out tickets for “Fashion Violations.” Beside the checked fashion crime were pithy insults such as “The higher the hair, the closer to heaven.”

I joined the Utah AIDS consortium—an ad hoc group of health organizations, LGBT leaders and concerned citizens. Under the banner of a variety of organizations we marched, wrote speeches, lobbied hard for anonymous testing clinics, passed out condoms to street hustlers, and fought against the closing of bathhouses which the local Government saw as a health hazard, and we saw as an invaluable place to distribute condoms and information to an often invisible community at risk.

There was a real fear of quarantine, of AIDS camps, forced testing/reporting. It was legal to fire HIV+ educators or food service workers. Talk radio was filled with medical professionals warning that mosquitoes couldn’t be ruled out as carriers. My grandmother wept when she found out my babysitter was HIV+. How could I let my child eat food he cooked? I wheat-pasted every telephone pole with fliers. I spray-painted slogans on sidewalks. I was on an FBI watch-list. I had my phone tapped.


Heads (and Tails): What Were We Thinking?

In those early days we were tireless and inventive, but we had an energy that sprang from naiveté. I remember when the AIDS Quilt fit in a single room.

Doubt me? Rent the movie Longtime Companion (1990). In retrospect, its optimism is painful. We believed a cure was inevitable and coming soon. We thought the work we were doing would be a footnote, not a foundation. Three decades later, so much and so little has changed.


Hearts: Why to (not) be an AIDS activist

The heart is not simply suspended in a body but in a culture, a place, a time.
—Mimi Guarneri

I lost the active in my AIDS activism in the late ’90s. I woke up one morning and realized I no longer had any friends who weren’t dying. It was too often now or never. A missed phone call or postponed dinner could be a life or death matter. I rescheduled Tuesday’s dinner and shopping with Stephen (Courtney) but three days later when I was free, he was dead.

My friend/activist David Sharpton (whose babysitting made my grandmother cry) was the longest living PWA in the country at the time. He came to Utah from Dallas less than two years after his diagnosis. We were close friends for a decade. I sneaked birthday cake into his hospital room long after visiting hours, and sat on the bed as he told me he was moving to stay with relatives since his doctor didn’t think he could survive another Utah winter and its accompanying cycle of pneumonia. (He also confessed that he wanted to leave his young lover before his care became too irksome. He felt his relatives deserved some irking. I scolded him for the vanity that would deprive him of the affection and his lover of the remaining time. But I had to wryly acknowledge that it was me and not that pretty young man sitting at his bedside. The lover was at home drinking, dancing and entertaining mutual friends at the birthday party that had gone on as scheduled in spite of David’s hospitalization.)

Maybe David was right that it was time to give his family a chance to mend fences and to heal wounds. I didn’t share his faith in his God or his family. I selfishly wanted him to stay for my own reasons. That was David’s last birthday. He was 32. He died just a few months after leaving Utah for warmer climes. I left Utah the same year.

I licked my wounds (some self-inflicted like a bad relationship; others just the stigmata of our daily mugging by a homophobic society and an indifferent—bordering on genocidal—government). I stopped writing nonfiction. I had grown too used to interviewing victims of hate crimes, etc. I was inured to death and violence. I was cold inside and went away (wrapped unfairly in a blanket of privilege that my whiteness, lesbianism and neg status afforded me) to write poetry until I grew warm again.

Footnote: This, my darling readers, is the reason why victims of any -ism are often reluctant to embrace their non-similarly disenfranchised allies. Can any gay person completely trust a straight one to fight alongside them (or any woman trust a man, or any nonwhite person trust a white one) when at any time that ally could put down their sword and walk away because it's not their fight?

I have written enough poetry and grown warm-hearted enough to hope that these 30 years have taught us: this is our fight. Every battle on every border; we must stand together. What follows are portraits of activists’ courage, struggle and triumph.