This will not be my most uplifting of newsletters, but it contains recommendations for a lot of stuff I’ve lately found revelatory, so I will say that I think it’s worth the moments of being brought low — by the authors, filmmakers, podcasters I reference; I am not giving my SubStack newsletter such credit — in exchange for the level of insight these various artists provide.
That said, if you don’t want to read about AIDS and climate change, I one-thousand percent understand and will say only: please read The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai. It’s so so good.
For those who stick around, the frame for this conversation is that, in the last year, I have found myself increasingly drawn to histories and artistic explorations of the AIDS epidemic. For context: I was born in 1981, the same year the New York Times published its story, neé harbinger of doom, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” I was a naive, cis-gender heterosexual 15-year-old when protease inhibitors and “cocktail” therapy ended HIV+/AIDS-as-absolute-death-sentence in 1996. So while the concept of AIDS was deeply present in my understanding of sex — I recall messages around intercourse being: use condoms; AIDS is scarier than pregnancy — I never thought that much about the epidemic. I knew it happened, I knew it was tragic, I could name some of the famous casualties. But I knew these things in the broadest of strokes. In 2010, volunteering in Cape Town, I’d pass the school-sponsored graffitied images at the Grade 1-5 school urging safe sex and AIDS prevention, and think — with remarkable naivety — “Well, thank God they found a treatment.”
What changed, via the insights and beauty of a series of books, films, and podcasts that I’ll detail below, was that I started to better grasp the contours of the plague’s devastation (inasmuch as someone outside the community of the af(in)fected, who didn’t experience events directly or lose anyone personally, can). Specifically, I started to push toward a concept of the mental effects of HIV/AIDS during the long years where it was at last understood what the virus was—and it was simultaneously understood that there was no cure, no viable course of treatment, and no one with the political/financial power to fund the search for said cure/course of treatment who gave a shit what was going on; how many brilliant, beautiful people were dying. As I pressed at that feeling, I started to get a sense of why it feels so important for me to understand this history, now. And why I think we should all think about this time, read about it, carry it forward with us — as much as is possible for each person, in their particular course, with the burdens they already bear.
The link, the why, for me, is climate change — the coming epidemic (not quite the right word, but it captures the parallel) that is even now encompassing our globe, and that will kill millions and millions of people and animals. Living beings will die from hunger and thirst; they will die trying to make impossible migratory journeys away from suddenly uninhabitable areas. They will die from government neglect and willing ignorance. Many of them — perhaps the vast majority — will be minorities: poor people; black and brown people; people rich capitalist governments can Other, can look at and say, “Well, if you’d just lived a better life, it wouldn’t happen to you.”
We are living through a great dying. A new age of extinction, to crib carelessly from the New Yorker’s phrasing. And the people who could stop it, who have the power to change it, don’t care.
It’s this feeling that I see in the faces and hear in the voices of the AIDS activists. They were losing a vibrant, beautiful generation, a generation coming into its own — still beleaguered, still discriminated against, but a generation that was creating art, forging relationships, building communities and choosing families and carving out sections of cities, of the world, that were theirs. In The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai’s young gay protagonist, Yale, describes this time as follows: “‘A few months ago, someone was saying to me how we used to be fun.’ His hands were deep in his pockets. ‘And it’s true, there was this tiny window where we were safer, and happier. I thought it was the beginning of something. When really it was the end.’”
The end. I try not to think about climate change too often. It’s like a hot stove for me; I touch it and get burned; my brain jerks away and has to focus on something else. Reading about and absorbing the stories of AIDS, of ACT-UP and their and other activists’ continued focused resistance in the face of annihilation, is a way of coming at that hot stove obliquely, of trying to remind myself that people have been in apocalyptic situations before and have fought with their entire being while under literal death sentences. I want to honor their memory. I want to honor their struggle, and use it to chastise and drive myself, because soon a struggle of equal severity and urgency will be ours. I’m not equating the histories, but seeing in the blithe ease of climate-change denials today an echo, a historical resonance of George H.W. Bush playing golf and laughing blithely while, minute by minute, people died.
To get on this level with me, read/watch/listen:
Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers. I quoted it above; I could quote every page. This is a perfect novel — in addition to being an almost unbelievably insightful depiction of AIDS coming to the close-knit Chicago Boystown community. Three parallel storylines examine PTSD, bring alive Paris of the 1920s and explore the parallels between the losses the artistic community suffered after WWI/the flu epidemic and the impact of AIDS; there’s cults, there’s love, there’s insights so perfect I’d write them here if it wouldn’t spoil the novel. You have to read this book.
David Francis’ How to Survive A Plague is a brilliant nonfiction account built off Francis’ 2012 documentary of the same name. In addition to providing a detailed history and devastating personal account of the AIDS epidemic, both book and film focus on the scientific search for a cure, and highlight the Treatment And Data wing of ACT-UP. Book and documentary act in tandem — the book has a fascinating and useful section on the early years of the plague (1981-1985) that the doc glosses almost entirely. The doc has incredible footage of meetings and the players, particularly Bob Rafsky, the activist who confronted Bill Clinton during his 1992 presidential run, who comes to true poignant life in the documentary. Get the book here, or at your local independent bookstore. I streamed the doc on Amazon but it’s available from multiple places, including YouTube.
Carol Rifke Brunt’s Tell The Wolves I’m Home; this I read years ago, but my mind returns to it often. It’s about a little girl whose beloved uncle, a renowned painter in New York City, has died of AIDS — though her family has kept that truth from her, and many other truths about his life besides. Like all these books, this one makes you wrestle with your perceived loyalties, with hugely deep life-or-death moral questions about relationships that most of us have the privilege of not facing, and it makes you bawl your damn eyes out. I love it; I love it; I compare so much else I read to it. Get it here.
And last but not least, there’s a sad, sobering, fantastic podcast out from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation called Uncover: The Village. It’s not overtly about HIV/AIDS; rather, it starts out with the serial killer Bruce McArthur, who murdered eight gay men (that we know of) in Toronto. Many of them were men of color, many of them were vulnerable (uncertain immigration status; closeted; poor). Justin Ling, the host, traces the obliviousness that led to the police letting McArthur get away with his crimes for so long — one of his first victim’s friends gave them McArthur’s name; McArthur was brought in for questioning; he was let go — to the long-standing divisions between Toronto’s PD and the gay community, and the former’s disdain for and fear of the latter. It’s particularly chilling when he plays audio of police in the 1970s blaming the gay community for not working with the police. The audio around the McArthur murders, from today, is the same. Again, this is a testimony to the love and power of the community in the face of hatred and willful disavowal, and a brilliantly made podcast besides.
My next read is likely the OG: And the Band Played On (though I’ve read a lot of valid critiques of how it unjustly targets so-called “Patient Zero”). I would love other recommendations. And thanks for reading.
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