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Dec. 1st, 2003 09:40 pmSo, December 1st, and it's World AIDS Day once again.
See, here's the weird thing; I'm one of the minority of people on LJ, people in my on-line acquaintance, who's old enough to vividly remember The World Before AIDS. The '70s' ... oh yeah, baby. That brief little glimmer of time, post-birth control, pre-AIDS, when it seemed like sex--as much as you want, wherever, however, whenever, with whomever--was natural, healthy, wholly good, as simple as air and water. And we revelled in it, god, we did, in a way that I'll likely never see again in my life.
I didn't come out of it wholly unscathed; I picked up a case of HPV, which back in those days the doctors pooh-poohed, didn't even bother treating, and which led years later to my very entertaining bout of "It looks like you have cervical cancer, oh I guess you don't after all, oopsie." But I lived through it, in other words, though I might well not have. There are many, many others who did no more than I did, who didn't live through it. I lived in San Francisco, back in the early days of the plague, and I'm certain that there are people I knew back then who are dead now, who've been dead these many years. Not that I've ever gone back to find out; it's one of those things I don't really want to know for sure.
I don't really know what it'd be like to be someone younger, who's never lived in a world without that equation of sex=possible death. To live in a wholly post-lapsarian reality is different, simpler in some fundamental ways, than being someone who had a spell of time in the Garden, and then got punted out. I think sometimes that it's left me with a permanent unease about the serpents in the garden, the dangerousness of innocent and passionate connection. The lessons you learn in adulthood, against your inclinations and wishes and beliefs, hit harder than the ones you merely grow up with as baseline reality.
Sometimes I think that what we do as slash writers is a way of working against that reality, a way of trying to imagine ourselves past that sex=death equation. And for all that I'm usually a hard-core realist, I don't mind that; if anything, it makes me nostalgic for a time when sex was a simple good, a way of connecting whose costs were only emotional and could therefore be dealt with, overcome, transcended.
And of course AIDS is about far more than sex, I know that, but that's the way it's been construed in popular awareness, here in the US. It's the way I construe it, since that's how it came into my own awareness; it was like the price tag on the ticket for that incredible ride we took.
Gah. I don't know where I'm going with this. Well, I will say that a good story to read at this time of year (by which I mean winter solstice, as much as anything, the darkest time of year) is torch's In Heavenly Peace, a beautiful and heartbreaking story that I reread every year in midwinter.
Take care of yourselves, everyone. Be well.
See, here's the weird thing; I'm one of the minority of people on LJ, people in my on-line acquaintance, who's old enough to vividly remember The World Before AIDS. The '70s' ... oh yeah, baby. That brief little glimmer of time, post-birth control, pre-AIDS, when it seemed like sex--as much as you want, wherever, however, whenever, with whomever--was natural, healthy, wholly good, as simple as air and water. And we revelled in it, god, we did, in a way that I'll likely never see again in my life.
I didn't come out of it wholly unscathed; I picked up a case of HPV, which back in those days the doctors pooh-poohed, didn't even bother treating, and which led years later to my very entertaining bout of "It looks like you have cervical cancer, oh I guess you don't after all, oopsie." But I lived through it, in other words, though I might well not have. There are many, many others who did no more than I did, who didn't live through it. I lived in San Francisco, back in the early days of the plague, and I'm certain that there are people I knew back then who are dead now, who've been dead these many years. Not that I've ever gone back to find out; it's one of those things I don't really want to know for sure.
I don't really know what it'd be like to be someone younger, who's never lived in a world without that equation of sex=possible death. To live in a wholly post-lapsarian reality is different, simpler in some fundamental ways, than being someone who had a spell of time in the Garden, and then got punted out. I think sometimes that it's left me with a permanent unease about the serpents in the garden, the dangerousness of innocent and passionate connection. The lessons you learn in adulthood, against your inclinations and wishes and beliefs, hit harder than the ones you merely grow up with as baseline reality.
Sometimes I think that what we do as slash writers is a way of working against that reality, a way of trying to imagine ourselves past that sex=death equation. And for all that I'm usually a hard-core realist, I don't mind that; if anything, it makes me nostalgic for a time when sex was a simple good, a way of connecting whose costs were only emotional and could therefore be dealt with, overcome, transcended.
And of course AIDS is about far more than sex, I know that, but that's the way it's been construed in popular awareness, here in the US. It's the way I construe it, since that's how it came into my own awareness; it was like the price tag on the ticket for that incredible ride we took.
Gah. I don't know where I'm going with this. Well, I will say that a good story to read at this time of year (by which I mean winter solstice, as much as anything, the darkest time of year) is torch's In Heavenly Peace, a beautiful and heartbreaking story that I reread every year in midwinter.
Take care of yourselves, everyone. Be well.