E-Mail This Article to a Friend O brave new world (continued)

HOW COULD I — or anyone — communicate the horror, the confusion, the depression, the devastation, the sorrow, the insanity, the sheer-madness-producing unreality of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and the early 1990s to people who had not been there? Who were just coming into the world at the very moment when my world was being torn apart by fear and death, terrorized by the most extreme forms of queer-hating our culture has ever seen? It is, of course, impossible. Just as it is impossible to convey the intricate web of immediacy that swirls about the maelstrom of any political or social disaster.

But in the great tradition of Freudian therapy, once I had identified my fear — quite simply, the fear of being overwhelmed by everything I had experienced through AIDS — I found ways to overcome it. This was a class, I told myself. We would stick to facts, figures, and time lines. We would meet for a brief 10 weeks — just enough time, really, to touch on the most important aspects of the epidemic. This was an academic subject, not a therapy session; students would be required to comprehend the material intellectually, not emotionally. Steadied by this roster of perspectives, I neatly managed to leave my entire personal life at home and began work on the course. I created a syllabus, put together a book list, and compiled a course reader. I was, for the most part, ready to go.

And then we had our first class, where I learned that my students — all smart, all engaged in the world around them — had no historical understanding of the AIDS epidemic in the US. None. But, of course, where would they have learned this? In their high-school history classes? Unlikely. AIDS is too controversial to be included in history books, and there is no such thing as "gay history" in high school. On television or in movies? Hardly. What they did know about AIDS came from health classes, where it was usually taught as one more STD — granted, a deadly one, but not a real worry if you practiced protected sex. To them AIDS was, for the most part, a problem in Africa or the "inner city." It was a mostly treatable disease from which not many people in the US died. They had never heard about the political pressure to quarantine people who were HIV-positive or the incendiary debates about closing gay bathhouses and even gay bars. Many of them did know that Magic Johnson is HIV-positive, but almost no one knew that Rock Hudson died of AIDS; many did not even know who Rock Hudson was.

This lack of rudimentary knowledge was, in a word, shocking. But I wasn’t the only one who was shocked. As the class got under way, my students were astonished to learn how "gay" the American AIDS epidemic was. Once we got into the material, they were — as most of my classes have been — voracious in their appetite for learning, taking in huge amounts of political, theoretical, and scientific material. It was gratifying to see them grapple with the same questions that have faced AIDS activists over the past two decades: what are the acceptable legal limits for HIV testing? How much authority should the government have to control people’s behavior? What role do homophobia, racism, and sexism play in constructing social policy on HIV/AIDS? What is the political role of art in the midst of an epidemic? Indeed, they seemed to grasp the complexities of AIDS in its early years with great dispatch.

Still, I was left wondering, what does it mean that only three out of 34 of the nation’s brightest college students had any idea that the AIDS epidemic began as a so-called gay disease? Can this be put down to a huge failure of the American education system and the media? Perhaps: many students know almost nothing about the war in Vietnam thanks to national shame and amnesia, and no one in his or her right mind would trust the media’s historical accuracy. But even given the flaws of our schools and our "communications industry," I am still dismayed by the fact that the hard truths of the early AIDS epidemic, which is still with us — albeit in its third wave of an international pandemic — would be so quickly forgotten, so utterly vanquished by the American psyche.

Was what I was seeing in class the ultimate "de-gaying" of AIDS — the very thing we fought so hard for early on? Or was it simply another form of pervasive, societal homophobia in which queer lives and large spans of queer history are completely erased, banished to the dustbin of history? I am not sure, although I suspect that both apply. What I do know is that throughout the 10 weeks of teaching "Plagues and Politics," I learned more about myself, about teaching, about self-reflection than ever before in such a short period of time. Every class was a challenge — not only to convey complex information and ideas in an accessible fashion, but to ascertain where I was intellectually and emotionally.

I managed not to mention my personal life in the classroom — although I did tell some students that I worked as a cashier and towel boy in Boston’s Club Baths in the late 1970s — and it was only with great judiciousness that I brought up my own history of AIDS activism. I was still worried that if my own political positions became too evident, it would impede the openness of class discussion.

But what was most difficult for me in the classroom was grappling with the knowledge that the AIDS nightmare I have lived through since 1981 — and which continues today as friends, despite the new, improved drug treatments, are still dying, although far less frequently than before — was not even history for these students, let alone a tangible reality. Part of me, at times, wanted somehow to immerse the class in the daily horrors of the epidemic that I and so many others lived with in the 1980s and the 1990s. Not just the men being refused care in hospitals, long-time partners being refused admission to hospital rooms because they were not "family," but the physical destruction of the body: sheets soaked with blood when an IV slipped out; massive chest infections caused by malfunctioning Hickman catheters; inflamed shingles infections that can cause a face to look like a piece of lacerated beef; violent, wild convulsions caused by brain inflammation. This, for me, was the AIDS epidemic; discussions of epidemiology and discrimination law, although important, seemed on some level beside the point. But this was an academic course, not a ride through a House of Horrors. Often I found myself in the odd position of leading highly intellectual class discussions while memory flooded my brain with ghastly, monstrous images of sick friends — physically damaged, wasting away, ravaged with illness — who had died decades before.

Keeping such experiences to myself was, I think, the right decision, for when we did look at graphic portrayals of people with AIDS — the documentaries Silverlake Life and Life and Death on the A-List, photographs by Nicholas Nixon or Mark I. Chester — the anxiety level in the classroom rose palpably. That wasn’t, by any means, a bad thing — it became a necessary part of the pedagogy — but clearly there were limits to what the students could take. In the end, I believe the class was a great success — discussions were intense and terrific, the midterms and final projects were overwhelmingly successful — and the students grew tremendously in their knowledge of both the epidemic and society’s response to it.

STILL, THE SPECTER of my own personal history haunts my reflections on teaching the class. Will that history — mine and so many other people’s — simply be lost in the future? Consigned to a few gay-male memoirs and novels, and some obscure oral-history archives? How much will be lost, and at what cost? And now, weeks after the course is over, the papers graded, my lecture notes filed away, I feel an increasing sense of rage. How many people have to die of AIDS for the epidemic to become part of official US history? How much does suppressing what happened to the gay community (and other groups) in the epidemic simply help perpetuate homophobia today? I fume when I think of students who have been denied the history of the queer community’s sheer bravery in the face of AIDS. It is not just my own history they don’t know, it is the vital history of a momentous social movement that, in many ways, changed the face of political and medical policy in America.

But this rage and fear of loss is tempered by another realization. I also know that these students, of all kinds of backgrounds and sexual orientations, will not have to live through the horrible nightmare of the last two decades. At least as far as the American AIDS epidemic is concerned, things are different for them, and I am grateful they will be spared the pain of that seemingly unending tragedy. Ten years ago I could never have predicted that students in the year 2003 would — for better or worse — have so little knowledge of the AIDS epidemic. Something as extraordinary as history’s encounter with AIDS, then as now, recalls the emotionally weighted words of Miranda in The Tempest: "O, wonder!/ How many goodly creatures are there here!/ How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,/ That has such people in’t!"

Michael Bronski can be reached at mabronski@aol.com