(no subject)

[katallison]

So, 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.

Comments

[debg.livejournal.com]

>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 can't tell you how much this resonates. I also had HPV (courtesy, in my case, of a gyne tech who didn't change his gloves between patients, dear little fellow). I also got the cervical cancer, but mine was just that. Also live in SF and was there, with a three-year break in Europe, from 1970 on.

My head has been many of the same places yours has been.

[katallison.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, you were in my mind when I was writing this, Deb; though I don't know you well, the little I know about your life suggested to me that you might have some of the same sort of ambivalent nostalgia for those bygone days of oblivious and reckless innocence.

I also had HPV (courtesy, in my case, of a gyne tech who didn't change his gloves between patients, dear little fellow).

Sweet freakin' jesus. I'm really sorry to hear about that, and the sequelae. Though I know you have other things you're dealing with now, I hope that at least is resolved.

[debg.livejournal.com]

The cancer's been in remission, no sign of recurrence, since the surgery in October 1997. I'm hoping it stays that way.

Ambivalent nostalgia - yes, indeed. Despite the rock and roll connection, I never did the promiscuous thing (typical Cancerian, all about the long-term relationships), so the tech with the infected gloves - they traced about a dozen cases back to him - came as a sort of ironic sucks-boo. I mean, the least I could have had was some wild mad group sex to justify it, or something.

But I look at my daughter, 24 years old, and it floors me - she hasn't been alive long enough to predate AIDS. I remember moving back here in 1981, with a 2-year-old under one arm. My sister lived in the Castro, and I found an apartment on 24th and Diamond; I remember the posters in the windows of the Castro shops, of an arm infected with Kaposi's sarcoma, standing there shuddering and wondering what in sweet hell was going on.

But you, me, we remember when indiscriminate sex might equal the clap, and a trip to the clinic. I accompanied a few friends and relatives on those little forways.

Gods. What on earth did this species do to itself?

Just to let you know

[(Anonymous)]

You put words to my thoughts and you say it so much better than I can. I've read your stuff for years -- just thought it was time I let you know.
msterlingcolson@yahoo.com

[katallison.livejournal.com]

Wow, thank you so much! Really, the greatest moments of joy I have in life come when I hear from someone I don't know personally, but who finds some kind of meaning or connection in the stuff I type out, sitting here at my messy little desk. It's just such an amazing enlargement of my world. Thanks again!

[eliade.livejournal.com]

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.

Yes. I think it's interesting, too, how often we as writers gravitate to fandoms, characters, or character readings that let us bypass the realities of gay sex (or with het sex, bypassing the issue of pregnancy). Vampires, for instance--the blood is the contagion metaphor, but the need for condoms is nil. And you *never* see vampires posited as disease carriers; though it seems like in theory they might carry a contagion and just not contract it, their bodies are these neutral and sanitary things, blank slates.

Similarly with aliens, elves, immortals, young wizarding folk safely cut off from the nasty, STD-ridden muggle world. And I suspect this is in part what lies behind fanonical tendencies to structure romance as long periods of unrequited love followed by monogamy, and to posit some characters as celibates or virgins prior to a relationship. E.g., Fraser. (Though, truly, near celibacy is canon in his case. Heh.) I mean, condoms often do get worked into stories--especially more these days. But there's a huge mass of stories that not only don't display use of them, but are premised on situations where it's unnecessary.

[katallison.livejournal.com]

Yup. ::nodding:: I find myself thinking too that the sort of traditional romance-novel true-love approach that slash often takes works in concert with the public-health message of monogamy, saving yourself for your One True Love, etc. etc. I'm not saying this well, but -- that whole linking of sex with romance with permanence, settling-down, domesticity, etc. Or to put it another way, the behavioral imperatives dictated by living in the time of AIDS meshes rather better with the "traditional" (or sociobiological, if one goes that route) female patterns (find the one guy, snare him, get him to stay with you) than with the male (spread your seed widely).

And, um. I don't think I'm making a lot of sense here, but I trust you to either disentangle the shred of meaning that might be implicit, or to like me even though I'm babbling. *g*

[halimede.livejournal.com]

Or to put it another way, the behavioral imperatives dictated by living in the time of AIDS meshes rather better with the "traditional" (or sociobiological, if one goes that route) female patterns (find the one guy, snare him, get him to stay with you) than with the male (spread your seed widely).

Aside from the fact that I have serious doubts about how descriptive these tropes are of what people actually *do* (or ever did), they supposedly go together and that kind of nullifies the protective effect. Just another layer of wishful thinking added to a romantic ideal of questionable realism. Can I make my case for the sane and rational again, here? *g*

[bethbethbeth.livejournal.com]

Odd. I was *just* talking about this "world before AIDS" with some of my students after class tonight.

Because...yes, AIDS hadn't hit the newspapers yet, and I was living in San Francisco (just over the Castro), and colored hankerchiefs hanging out of the back pockets of jeans were as good a way as any for my friends to pick someone up, and Harvey Milk and George Moscone hadn't been killed, and the clubs were fun and open all night and people were happy (if not altogether sane), and when an actor friend wrote to me about the cute little masks and gloves people had to wear when they went to visit him in the hospital (because it looked like he had hepatitis) and how I would have loved it, well...I just giggled and didn't worry at all.

And thank god, it *was* just hepatitus, because twelve months later, a letter like that would have scared me to death.

But my students, Kat...most of them don't know - not really - that they're not in that Garden. I don't know whether it's innocence or willful ignorance or just an acceptance born of never knowing a different world, but whatever it is, they're *far* less conscious of AIDS than anyone I know who was old enough to have watched as it appeared in the world.

And these days, *that's* what frightens me the most.

[katallison.livejournal.com]

Yup. I guess the analogy might be me and my smoking--I've pretty much always lived in a world where we knew that the cigs would kill you, but the more that knowledge is hammered home to me, the more resistant I seem to be to acting as if I were really *aware* of that fact. Resistance, she is a strange and a powerful thing.

And it *is* scary, because again, from my own experience, I know how ineffectual and often counterproductive the rational public-health hectoring can be. Wish I knew what to do about all that.

[halimede.livejournal.com]

There's an in between generation too: Those of us who grew up with the sex-is-natural-and-beautiful sensibility, but who hit puberty as AIDS hit the news. Me, I educated myself and I don't equate sex with possible death, as if it's a form of drunk driving, or something. I equate *certain kinds* of sex with the risk of (various) infection(s).

I worry about the whole 'sex equals possible death' tagline, because I wonder what it does to the human psyche. One effect seems to be that there is *more* guilt associated with sex, that it's *harder* to talk about, and thus harder for people to make sensible decisions.

[katallison.livejournal.com]

You make excellent points here; to me, what you say in your first paragraph is a great example of post-lapsarian adaptive response -- recasting one's attitude toward sex to "fine when conducted in certain ways, under certain guidelines." It's wonderfully sane and rational, and it totally makes sense, and yet it also leaves me a bit wistful, because the whole thing with sex back in the pre-AIDS days was that it was OK to be totally irrational, to throw aside all the guidelines and constraints. I mean, that's *necessary*, but it doesn't mean I like it.

And yes, the point you make about guilt and secrecy is very acute. Again (as in my response to Beth above) I find myself making an analogy to my smoking; I really have a hard time talking with doctors openly about the fact that I smoke, or how much, because it's like anyone with a *brain* would know exactly how stupid this is, and wouldn't be doing it in the first place, and so I tend not to seek out help with cutting back or quitting, because it's hard to even bring up the subject.

[halimede.livejournal.com]

what you say in your first paragraph is a great example of post-lapsarian adaptive response

If it is, I think it's pretty rare. When I was a teenager my girlfriends got on the pill even though they knew the health risks and even though they weren't even doing it yet or even had a boyfriend. They wanted to because if they *did* meet a guy they would sort of want to use condoms, but fully expected to be too chicken to be the one to bring it up, so if *he* didn't...
Me, being trivia!girl, I memorized the incidence of death per method of birth control. Allow me to say, 'Yay, barrier methods!' The only other one with a big fat zero attached to it is a vasectomy for guys.

and yet it also leaves me a bit wistful, because the whole thing with sex back in the pre-AIDS days was that it was OK to be totally irrational, to throw aside all the guidelines and constraints.

I understand the wistfulness, and even though I never lived that time, I get it too. Then I remind myself that there were guidelines and constraints in your day too: Be religious about birth control, get checked for asymptomatic STDs regularly. Hell, getting checked for *symptomatic* STDs often takes a lot of sanity and resolve, and a lot of people don't. The guidelines and constraints have changed, but the biggest real change is that they can't be taken care of by one person on their own, 'privately' anymore. It's imperative that one talks openly to one's partner. This seems to be the huge obstacle for many people. It makes me sad that it's easier to abstain or take risks (with all the anguish associated with both) than it is to learn to talk about sex.

and so I tend not to seek out help with cutting back or quitting, because it's hard to even bring up the subject.

To take the analogy a little further, isn't there something in a plain brown wrapper you can mail-order, or something? If you can't immediately break out of the logical conundrum, at least you can bypass it, maybe. :)

Also, from another comment you made in response to someone else:
I know how ineffectual and often counterproductive the rational public-health hectoring can be. Wish I knew what to do about all that.

If you have some spare change earmarked for a good cause, these gals seem to do a better job then most.

[jackiekjono.livejournal.com]

I am starting to see San Francisco circa 79/80 as a kind of a Woodstock for the younger end of the Boomers. Everyone I know between the ages of 40 and 55 claims to have lived there at the time.

I don't think that any specific one of them is making it up, but we are now entering the realm of statistical unlikelyhood.

skewed statistics

[kormantic.livejournal.com]

statistical unlikelyhood, perhaps, but keep in mind who you know. If you're the kind of person who is gay or gay-friendly, if you read slash and so do many of your friends... then you're consorting with a pretty specific population that will tend to have more things in common than not. Such as living in San Francisco at some point in their lives.

Regarding World AIDS day (late, I know), it's this massive problem, it's eating at populations (numbers are on the rise everywhere), but it's a bad combo of scary and boring. Nobody wants to hear the bad news, the mounting numbers, and most people tend to ignore anything they don't want to think about.

Me, I am every AfterSchool Special's Target Audience. I was especially wigged by Teen!Pregnancy and AIDS. Suffice it to say, I went a bit above and beyond when it came to sex.

Hmm.

Re: skewed statistics

[jackiekjono.livejournal.com]

Strangely, none of the people I know who lived in San Francisco at that time are gay. For the most part, they are gay-friendly, but not all of them. I'm guessing that as a Mecca for generalized hedonism, it was quite the draw for college kids and those who had just graduated from college.

My rule of thumb is to believe people who tell me they lived in San Francisco back then - but anyone who tells me they were at Woodstock is clearly making it up because - if they actually were there and did it correctly - they wouldn't remember it at all.

I was in high school back in the '80s. I was just starting to wrap my head around the idea that sex wasn't icky when all of a sudden sex was ickier than I could have possibly imagined.

I remember the paranoia most of all. I remember Catholic nuns scared to death that it would mutate into something you could get from a mosquito bite and gay men who were convinced it was a government plot. As recently as 1996, I have met gay men with HIV who honestly believed that they were being murdered by the CIA.

[katallison.livejournal.com]

Heh. My ex, with whom I lived and roistered in SF back in the late 70s, used to say that there had to be a pipeline that ran straight from Minneapolis to SF, because we kept meeting ex-Minneapolitans out there, or (when we moved back) kept meeting people who'd spent some time in SF.

And no, I wasn't at Woodstock. I had a *chance* to go! I was just too dorky to act on it, alas.

[jackiekjono.livejournal.com]

Maybe you did go to Woodstock and all of those normal things you remember doing instead were an hallucination.

[katallison.livejournal.com]

Heh. That would sure explain a lot about the '80s.

[twistedchick]

I also remember the time when sex was good and touch was good and condoms were only for birth control, when finding someone and going home together was not a life-threatening proposition but a possibility for closeness and pleasure. And in a lot of ways that's the universe my stories are set in. The universe we are in now is too Rogue for me in that way; when we put up barriers in the most intimate of places and situations, can they ever be completely transcended? Too simplistic, I realize, but the thought lurks.

I don't see AIDS as any sort of price tag, but as a marauder, almost demonic, without conscience, simply as a plague that affects everyone. I have lost friends and family to it, but I think of it as a disease as much as cancer, which has taken most of the rest of my family, or heart disease, which has captured the remainder. To me, it's as if AIDS looked around, figured out the most devastating way to hurt everyone and jumped right into the middle of it because it wanted to do that. That behavior, that intent to harm and nothing else, I see as evil. I don't see cancer or heart disease that way at all.

Sorry if this is too stream-of-consciousness; I am trying to distract myself from a number of difficult and unpleasant things, such as an impending dentist visit, and not doing it too well.

[katallison.livejournal.com]

Interesting thoughts, Kit. HIV certainly does seem to have that malignant intentionality about it, in how it affects our lives. I try to tell myself that it's just another organism trying to survive; the syllogism I construct is that human bodies, human lives, are to HIV as the earth itself is (all to often) to us humans; something to be consumed, a commodity that feeds our drive to reproduce and spread and dominate.

I hope the difficult and unpleasant things go quickly and as well as possible! Dentists, arrrgh. (I have a deteriorating crown myself that I must do something about soon...)

[twistedchick]

Perhaps it is just another organism, and the individual cells are simply opportunist, but it reminds me uncomfortably of army ants or killer bees -- individual stupidity but collective intelligence and the will to survive.
Hmm. That sounds far too much like the congressional Republicans, doesn't it?

Thanks for good thoughts re dental. That's tomorrow. I'm lousy at waiting but the alternative was to see the new person in the office, and I'd rather go with someone I know is gentle.

The world before AIDS

[namastenancy.livejournal.com]

Ah, my dear - I remember it well. The fun, the frolic, the sense of independence and freedom. Finally - the right to say yes! Unfortunately, we were too young to understand the consequences of that YES but fortunately for us, they usually weren't lethal. San Francisco in the 60's!
For me, the costs were emotional, not physical. I never contacted any of the various diseases but I also never found the stable and loving partnership that I yearned for - because all of us women were giving it away for free and men had a free garden of delights. Why pay for anything when it's being given away? SF had an extreme case of that among the male population - that is - the small straight male population. I had a close up view of what eventually happens in a world where desirable men are in short supply and where men were looking at the wild gay sex scene and taking their clues from that.
Then came the late '70's and the payment came due. I was working at a hospital at the fringes of the Castro and I remember the first guys coming in with weird cancers and skin diseases. AIDS didn't even have a name at that point. Then, the deaths; I must have lost 20 friends in the first years of the epidemic. I got phobic about sex because so many men in SF were (and are) bisexual and not being careful.
Now, it's 30 years later and I work at SF General, still in an AIDS program and am looking at the new wave of infections among the young. It breaks my heart.
The past is indeed another country.

namaste nancy

[katallison.livejournal.com]

This is lovely, nancy, and thanks so much for it! I had you in my mind when I was writing my original entry, knowing that you've been much closer than I to the whole thing, and have lived up-close and personal through the aftermath that I basically skipped away from.

The past is indeed another country.

That. Exactly.

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

You are so beautiful.

[katallison.livejournal.com]

Oh, heavens, m'dear, that would be *you*. I'm just lucky to know you. {{{hug}}}

[zoerayne]

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.

and bethbethbeth said:

But my students, Kat...most of them don't know - not really - that they're not in that Garden. I don't know whether it's innocence or willful ignorance or just an acceptance born of never knowing a different world, but whatever it is, they're *far* less conscious of AIDS than anyone I know who was old enough to have watched as it appeared in the world.

As someone who grew up in the middle of it all - I was a freshman in HS in 1983 - I think that it's less a matter of watching it happen and more a matter of the imperviousness of adolescence and a typical lack of maturity in the 14-21 set.

I was sexually active by 1982, when the big STD was herpes - not a terminal disease, admittedly, but one you had to live with for the rest of your life - and none of my friends worried about it at all. Nor did I, for that matter. And then AIDS became a bigger and bigger thing in the media, but still I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people I knew who worried about it - even my gay friends felt it was something that happened to "other people."

I was guilty of the same casual attitude until I was 21, despite having many friends who had contracted various non-AIDS STDs. (And perhaps that's the difference; I never knew anyone who was HIV-positive when I was a teen.) It wasn't until I picked someone up at a party and took him home, only to notice open sores on his arms the next morning (Karposi's sarcoma, my panicked brain screamed at me) that I finally woke up to the danger. I don't think I'm that atypical of people of my generation, either. (Luckily, it turned out that the guy shaved his arms and had developed infected ingrown hairs, but I was about an inch from a full-blown nervous breakdown until I verified that he was clean.)

Despite my awareness of the dangers, and despite my forthright (sometimes to the point of being in-your-face) parenting style, I still think my teenage daughter is far too casual about the risks. I've done what I can to try to ensure her safety, but I can't (unfortunately) be present to make sure that her boyfriend uses a condom. I'm just glad she's conscientious enough to take her birth control pills on a regular basis....

[katallison.livejournal.com]

God, I can't imagine what it would be like to be the parent of a young person nowadays ... it's hard enough watching my advisees, feckless young loons that they are, stumble their way through life. Best wishes to you and her both, and thanks for your comments!

Ah, Athens...

[(Anonymous)]

Catherine the lurker here again.

Speaking as one of the younger-ish crowd (born in the Summer of Luv)...Has there really ever been a civilization in which sex whenever, with whomever, really seemed uncomplicated to the mainstream population? The streets of Plato’s Athens, supposing you were lucky enough to be a man and a free citizen? The seventies in San Francisco?

I ask because I’m not sure how much difference AIDS made to what I would otherwise have done. Coming of age just as AIDS starting getting mentioned in the high-school sex-ed classes was a distant tenth to the real limitations on my sexual behavior: being a mostly straight female (thus having cut my teeth on stories of True Love, not one-nighters), being middle-class (ditto), living in a rural area where everyone knew everyone, being the social pariah that some if not all language geeks are in high school (thus having no recognizable opportunities to be anything but celibate) . . . any one of these was a lot more visible than AIDS in my neck of the rural woods. I can’t remember ever needing death to inhibit me; without it, I still would’ve had to negotiate the then-more-pressing concerns of guilt, fear of pregnancy (the story of my college years), fear of emotional entanglements, social ineptitude, being in a relationship at any given time, knowing the guy I really wanted to be with was in his own relationship at any given time. . . on and on.

For those of you of the proper age, did the legendary license of the seventies really negate guilt and fear of pregnancy and social ineptitude and all those inhibitory things your mothers taught you? And, if it did, what on earth did that look like? Was it really easier to hook up some night with that friend you’d always had a thing for? Could you walk up to a hunky prof twice your age and come on to him without feeling like a complete idiot? Could you go home with that married someone and the next morning walk on back for coffee with your own spouse, supposing you had one? And if you could do all these things, was it fun, without repression and inhibition and guilt and all those nice slashy emotions to give it zing? I mean, sex being simple and basic and unrestricted sounds wonderful in Marion Zimmer Bradley, or Starhawk, but those are way different (and oh yeah, imaginary) cultures. When it comes to THIS culture, Kat’s right: I can’t imagine it.