(no subject)
Dec. 1st, 2003 09:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katallisonSo, 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.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-02 01:28 pm (UTC)and
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....
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-03 05:17 pm (UTC)