Content area
Full Text
Vox Femina: Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Lesbian
For 15 years throughout the 1980s and into the mid-1990s I wrote continually of death and dying. When I wasn't reporting on AIDS for the queer and mainstream press I was reviewing books and art by people with AIDS or writing obituaries of people with AIDS. Then came protease inhibitors and Andrew Sullivan declared the AIDS epidemic "over" in a New York Times magazine article. The tone of AIDS writing began to shift from guerilla warfare to a kind of Sharper Image survivalism.
I started writing a health column for POZ, the happy, shiny AIDS magazine putting a pretty spin on a killer disease. I did that for two years. Then I left the AIDS business for good.
It wasn't that I thought AIDS was over. I had spent too many years investigating drug therapies, charting the rise of unsafe sex among Gen-Xers and chronicling the shocking pandemic of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa to have any such delusions. Protease cocktails might staunch the bleed for a time in the privileged West, but millions were still becoming infected each year worldwide with no hope of seeing even antibiotics, let alone anti-virals. AIDS had decimated an entire generation -- my generation -- of gay men in America and had killed nearly everyone between the ages of 25 and 45 in certain African nations. AIDS was far from over. Rather it was like a medical Vietnam War -- it could and would, I believed, go on forever.
And life on the front lines of an endless war takes its toll in pain and loss and the effect of the ever-simmering rage just below the surface of professional calm. It was tough to maintain equilibrium after a rime; one becomes a little schizophrenic as the distinctions between journalistic remove and activist urgency blur. For over 15 years all I could think was that people were dying; my job was to account for and to the casualities.
The grim irony was that while I wrote about AIDS my own cellular time bomb was ticking, silent but...