Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone by David B. Feinberg Read Free Book Online

pornographic-movie theaters, art galleries, cocktail lounges, and other disreputable venues: My sole remaining one is the pink fag number. The bus shouldn’t leave until 5:30; there’s no point in being early. I decide to forgo the cab and take the subway for that proletariat feel.
    I’m not the only one subcomatose on the subway at 5:10 A.M. The feds have cordoned off my car and declared it a fashion emergency. A woman in her forties, clad in a pant suit resembling a bad Basquiat done on heroin, snores caustically. One man sleeps on his back, reeking of urine. The rest have their heads buried at the chest, against the window.
    Cheery ubiquitous Brian from the Bronx is there, a bright beam in the haze of radical somnambulists. No one should be allowed to smile before 4:00 P.M. I put on my sunglasses and pretend he doesn’t exist. Coffee is quaffed; donuts are devoured. People mill about aimlessly. I find a kindred spirit. The bus shows up an hour late. We file listlessly onto the bus, preparing to catch up on the missing hours of sleep. All is quiet, save for the lesbian in drag who converses with the certified hair-emergency about the eternal verities: relationships, therapy, and life after high school. I feel old, wizened, decrepit, fossilized. The driver decides to make us chill out by turning the AC on high. He yells at someone for opening the hatch. Why do we collect a tip for him at the end of the journey? The reflex of the two-dollar-per-person rent levied every Monday? Because we are incapable of cognitive action at this point.
    Dentists are rumored to be in Washington this weekend, along with the Ukrainians. I wonder if some AIDS activists will organize a terrorist action to steal dental dams en masse.

Bamboozled into the Conference
     
    The bus drops us off in front of a junior-high school. I’ll be sleeping with radicals tonight. I’ve signed up for group housing in a seminary, instead of staying at a hotel, in order to undergo as many hardships as possible: living the gritty, sweaty, low-budget activist lifestyle. I want to take a shower and lie down for a nap. Unfortunately, group housing is unavailable until the evening. I have no other recourse than to attend the AIDS-activist teach-in.
    I stagger to the registration desk, to find out there’s a sliding-scale fee of ten to twenty dollars for the conference. No one from New York City was apprised of this. Raggedy Maria, surrounded by her ever-streaming hair, sits on the steps outside and says, “Don’t pay it.” Washington organizers grumble that if ACT UP/ New York had given them more financial support, the fee wouldn’t have been necessary.
    As we file into the auditorium (I’ve paid ten dollars, because I have no intention of going to the Sunday ACT NOW conference, which sounds as if it will be like an eight-hour meeting of ACT UP dominated by the radical fringe), two men hand us stickers that say “TOUCHED BY A PWA.” Both side walls are decorated with large paintings announcing the “Why I Will Vote Essay Contest ‘88.” Harried Heidi from New York, who was asked to speak a scant fifteen minutes earlier to preserve gender parity (because no women had been scheduled to deliver opening remarks), informs us of this fact irritatedly, and since she has nothing prepared, she bitches about the conference registration fee instead. This is the perfect opening for the two-day event. Contingents are battling in internecine warfare and the conference hasn’t even begun!
    A man from PISD (the latest acronym, standing for People with Immune System Disorders, created at the San Francisco ACT NOW conference a few months ago in the name of inclusiveness [the more the merrier!], a new subgroup of disaffiliated and debilitated, which includes PWAs, PWARCs (Persons With AIDS-Related Complex), People with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and People with Existential Ennui, among others) gives a rousing speech of unification and sexual liberation. He thrills us with