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

his vibrant testosterone. I wonder why he doesn’t give out his phone number. The stage is flanked by “SILENCE = DEATH” and “ACTION = LIFE” banners; the latter is ACT UP/L.A.’s flip version, pink on white, as opposed to New York’s pink on black. Keep your sunny side up!
    The afternoon is divided into four time slots; at each time, there are four sessions running. I go to a session on AIDS education. A California activist talks about the latest quarantine proposition on the November ballot. While we are stuck with demons and the figurative Lyndon LaRouches and William Dannemeyers, these poor souls have to devote all their time to fighting the literal ones. An educator from Eugene, Oregon, states that her hometown is the amphetamine capital of the world. Hmm, wonder how much a roundtrip ticket to Eugene is. She is trying to educate gay men in her town about safe sex, but an estimated thirty percent have unprotected anal intercourse in Eugene. Cancel my reservation. After twenty minutes of general discussion, the meeting is broken into three submeetings by the facilitators, who have had only two hours of sleep the previous night, because several participants are complaining that it isn’t possible to get to her or his particular issue in such a large setting. At that point, I decide to constitute my own group and disappear. I fear I would be too conspicuous in my silence. A few months earlier, at the San Francisco ACT NOW conference, groups decomposed into smaller and smaller groups, eventually disintegrating into elementary particles: quarks generally of the strange flavor.
    I return to the auditorium, where a woman of color is speaking. After fifteen minutes she interjects that she didn’t know she was going to speak and apologizes for not having a proper presentation planned. I listen to the litany of outrages: Although 14,000 AIDS cases have been reported in Africa to date, a more realistic estimate is 140,000; on the average, women die six months after diagnosis, while gay white men last two years; currently AIDS is spreading primarily through intravenous-drug users via contaminated needles and their sexual partners, drug-abuse treatment programs have not expanded to help stem the epidemic, and there are no comprehensive needle-exchange programs in the United States. She accuses the government of conducting genocide with AIDS, as smallpox was deliberately spread to the Indians in infected blankets: This killed half of the American Indian population. At the end of her session, the room opens up for questions, and it’s an ACT UP/N.Y meeting in microcosm, with commies, pinkos, members of the Workers’ World Party, socialists, and other socialites; the solution is reached through petitions, revolutions, and cocktail parties.
    Some members from the ACT UP/N.Y Issues Committee conduct a one-hour version of the FDA teach-in. A cute blond named Mark with a necklace of worry beads is surprisingly articulate as he wends his way through several decades of government regulations and historical precedents. During a break, United Fruit Company, a political-comedy group, does a few skits: A preacher and four singers perform homilies to sodomy; a vampire is killed with a wastebasket filled with used condoms; a drag queen, mistakenly arrested at a demonstration, comes up with a complete change of clothing from her clutch purse.
    I scramble downstairs to catch the tail end of a session with John James, who publishes AIDS Treatment News. A few radical faeries sit interspersed with the rest in the cafeteria. You know the type: beards and skirts. I’m falling asleep, barely conscious at this point. John James praises Larry Kramer and Project Inform for bringing the drug problem to the attention of the news. Someone asks about the syphilis-is-AIDS theory, and the typhoid quack on Long Island. Penicillin doesn’t seem to work, but the killed polio virus looks promising; unfortunately, the supply has been cut off. The hottest