ACTing UP
I met Paul at an orgy in San Francisco during the Gay Pride festivities. A guy was fucking me in a leather sling. I saw Paul across the room. I gestured to him. He came over and kissed me softly while the guy kept fucking me. The anonymous cock seemed to go somewhere deeper inside me now that Paul’s kiss offered a subtle, sensual caress at my other extremities. It was a new sensation for me—though I’ve since repeated it—to be fucked and kissed simultaneously by two different men, and from optimal angles…
I guess the guy inside me felt ironically “left out” and took off. I stayed with Paul. He was on holiday from Paris, visiting friends in SF. He invited me back to the place where he was staying. We had some good sex. We spent the next week together. The sex got better and better. It started looking like “love.” There were hints of a future. Then one of us verbalized it—probably me—and the other confirmed: Romance. Love. Life together. He invited me to come and live with him, and I accepted…
Today, when I think of Paris, I think of crottes molles. Soggy turds. The acid rain drizzles continuously here, washing them into the gutters along with cigarette butts and paper that once held crêpes eaten by tourists near Les Halles. I’d like to blame Paris for cooling down my desire. Could Paul and I have really met at an orgy? How did we ever manage to get so domestic?
He bought 320 Francs worth of tropical fish to put in his new aquarium before leaving for San Francisco. I wonder how long before they need to be fed. Does the light stay on or go off? Dan would know about this stuff. The only book in the apartment explaining these beings is called Mein Aquarium. I don’t start German courses till a week from Thursday. By then they could all be dead—the fish, I mean.
Through the floorboards I hear neighbors fucking, muffled music, water in the pipes, the hum of something electric. Outside the window: neighbors speaking in Arabic, dishes, televisions, an airplane, fast shoes on crooked wooden stairs, traffic on the périphérique—the highway circling Paris.
• • •
I went to an ACT UP Paris meeting last night for the hell of it. It was a treatment meeting at the headquarters (le local) near place de la République. Ten people at a table covered in Xeroxes. Half in English. Half in French. There were acronyms like DGS, TRT-5 and DMI2.
I wanted to be helpful. They said I could translate texts from NY and SF.
“Hmm, translating from English into French might not be the best job for me. I’m much better at translating in the other direction.”
There was bitchy laughter in the corner.
“Maybe there are groups outside France who need your information,” I offered.
“You could translate the newsletter, for example. That would keep you busy for a while.”
“But is there a group who wants access to it in English?”
“Hmm. That’s the question, isn’t it? Go to the Actions committee and see if they have anything to work on.”
The fight to find a fight to fight.
In one of the AIDS journals from NY, there was an article about the degeneration of the vaccine study in SF that I’d worked on for over a year. There was no feasible vaccine project to take its place in the near future, just a laboratory lawsuit threatening to pop up.
HIV. Why is that the important one? Because my friends have it? How many other dormant viruses waiting to explode? Ironically, we’ve found some comfort in the little we know about this one pathetic—yet indestructible—little agent.
We have our Xeroxes from ACT UP, and they’re reassuring because they give it a name and practically a personality.
• • •
I saw Dan in Paris last week with his new lover. We stopped at the Prisunic for chocolate bars.
“It’s more or less understood that Mike will go first,” he admitted. Dan is preparing to place his new sweetheart into the tomb with the same loving hands that once caressed me.
“What will you do without him? Do you have other stuff going on in your life right now? Something to fall back on?”
“Ha! I can’t really imagine any of that right now.”
Stupid question.
How disconcerting that Dan could have ceased, just like that, to play the role of boyfriend in my life! The words “Dan” and “boyfriend” were practically inseparable in my mouth for three years—seemingly synonymous. Which didn’t make them so. They were in fact, two words that just happened to be placed next to each other for a while.
Which makes it even harder to trust the words “Paul, my boyfriend,” especially when they’re translated into French: “Pa-ool, mon petit-ami” (my little friend). The ambiguity is thick enough to stand between us: the words are walls because we haven’t yet adapted them to our needs.
But it’s too early for the whole cultural-difference discussion. There needs to be an image here. Let’s have a glimpse of Paul in his office, speaking German into the receiver. His deep voice echoes through the four stucco rooms in which we pass our days typing lists of addresses into hopelessly complicated computer programs where they are scrambled and unscrambled and eventually printed into brochures, which are in turn sent to tour organizers who use them to schedule the shipment of busloads of tourists back and forth over the German-French border in an effort to increase souvenir sales in quaint little towns and cities that have become dependant on the tourist industry for survival.
Paul wants to see what I’m writing, but I told him no. First of all, he’s my boss, and I’m supposed to be generating a text about Bluebeard for a brochure. Secondly, what would he make of my writing about Dan and not him? He would think, maybe, that I still love Dan, which is true. He would think I want to go back to San Francisco, which is also true. He would think I don’t love him, which is not true.
True + true + not true = 3 true + not = 1 true = true.
Like I told Paul, “It’s not ready yet.”
• • •
Gilles de Rais was born in 1404 in the Black Tower of Champtocé-sur-Loire. He was brought up by his grandfather, Jean de Craon, a violent, unscrupulous character. At the age of twenty, he led a brilliant military career serving the French Crown at the side of Joan of Arc. He began having delusions of grandeur and squandered his fortune, spending mad amounts of money to maintain a cavalry of 200 sumptuously dressed men. On the verge of ruin, he turned to alchemy and the Infernal Powers in his quest for gold. Imprisoned in Nantes on charges of infanticide & corruption, he was condemned to be hanged and burnt on October 15th, 1440. In the course of his long trial he admitted to the torments inflicted on his young victims, yet his remorse was so great that a crowd accompanied him to his place of punishment in tears, praying for his salvation.
• • •
I go down into the metro, coming up and out at St Germain-des-Prés. I’m late for the ACT UP Paris meeting at l’Ecole des Beaux Arts. They’ve covered everything on the agenda, and it’s only 9:15. There’s an hour and a half remaining.
“Should we have a debate?” someone suggests.
“There’s nothing left to debate. Anne isn’t here with the debate topic.”
“Do we really need Anne to have a debate?”
“Who’s Anne?”
“I’d like to propose a topic!” It’s a frail little man with thinned out hair, dry purple lips, KS lesions, cloudy CMV eyes, swollen lymph nodes… An HIV skeleton. “I have three things I want to say: First of all, why hasn’t ACT UP changed at all since 1989 even though AIDS has changed so dramatically since then? Secondly, what are the new strategies we can use to change the AIDS Activist movement to correspond with the changes in the epidemic? And thirdly,… well, I forgot the third part, but it will come back to me…”
There are snickers from around the room. “Jesus, Christopher! You really want a debate, don’t you?”
“I didn’t hear him. What did he say?”
“Oh, Christ! Do you really want to hear him?”
“He forgot!”
With that, there are little explosions of laughter. No one seems saddened by the effects of dementia anymore. It’s another annoying given.
“I think you’re all a bunch of losers,” says the facilitator. “If we can’t even manage to vote on whether or not to have a discussion on a topic without Anne, then what fucking good are we?”
A voice rises from amidst the mutterings that have all but drowned out the recognized speakers: “I don’t want to vote on this topic because I’m not in agreement with the principal on which it’s based! ACT UP has changed in the last six years. There’s a treatment and research group. Our demonstrations have taken on a totally different direction. There’s no point in discussing something which has no basis in reality.”
Christopher stands up and tries reformulating his idea, adding little pokes at various recent demonstrations organized by the action group.
Everyone dives in: “Hey! There’s no reason to resort to personal attacks!” and so on. Twenty minutes later, the meeting disbands in waves of fleeing bodies. Finally, the facilitator concludes, “Well, it looks like the meeting’s over.”
But no one is really listening anymore. They’re already gone.