sdyer@bbncc5.UUCP (Steve Dyer) (01/03/86)
I had a really out-of-the-ordinary experience this past New Year's Eve that shook me out my everyday torpor and placidity. I was completely surpised by my reactions, and I thought I'd share it with other readers. A few weeks ago, a close friend called to invite my lover and I to a dinner party on New Year's Eve being given by a couple who were friends of his. We had met one of them once before at a party a few years ago, and he asked our friend to call us and invite us for their New Year celebration. The night before the dinner, we called our friend to get directions and details, and before hanging up, he said non-chalantly that they also have a third person living with them who has AIDS. We finished getting the particulars and hung up, not missing a beat. What was most remarkable was my reaction (which also turned out to be my lover's reaction, although we didn't talk about it until after the dinner.) First, though it may surprise some of you, not every gay person has AIDS or knows someone with it or knew someone who died of it. I think that for the great majority of gay men, and that included myself, AIDS is an enormous abstraction, always on the verge of becoming a physical threat, but mostly elusive and immaterial, like an enemy whom you haven't seen and who hasn't yet attacked. I had never met anyone I knew to have AIDS, though friends had. Nevertheless, most of us are schooled in the "proper" reactions to have, and it's rather frightening when our experience doesn't bear them out. I was appalled at myself. I had three reactions. First, anger and disappointment at having to spend a supposedly festive holiday with someone whose condition was anything but, and not knowing how to share social smalltalk with eventual death looking you in the face, and second, REAL anger at my friend who waited to tell us about this third person's condition the night before dinner, making impossible any superficially honorable excuse from the obligation. Finally, and just as surprising, a real irrational aversion to being in the company of someone with the disease, knowing intellectually that it can't be caught by sitting across the dinner table, but even that offering little solace. Luckily, I could see how bankrupt all these were, and we went ahead, just a little fearful of how the evening would turn out. As expected, confronting these fears makes them disappear, for we had a enjoyable time, but rather sad and poignant too, for the person with AIDS was obviously tired and weak, and seemed almost to shrink away in the face of social company and chitchat. Life looks almost normal until you see the oxygen tank in the john, and he was cold all the time, wearing a down vest indoors and a quilt on his legs. But he kept up his own before and during dinner, too, before he excused himself to go to bed before the new year came in. And you begin to see that, for any people with terminal debilitating diseases, life consists of trying to keep as much of the daily routine as one can accomodate. But, I think we made three new friends that night, and that we'll see them again pretty soon. -- /Steve Dyer dyer@harvard.harvard.edu harvard!dyer