Ron Vawter was an actor and writer who worked with the Wooster Group, the legendary New York City underground multimedia group. He also had featured roles in films I loved like sex, lies, and videotape, Silence of the Lambs, and Swoon. I saw him onstage once, playing the intense dual lead roles in Roy Cohn/Jack Smith. He was amazing, particularly as Cohn, Senator Joe McCarthy's chief commie-baiting henchman, as well as one of history's great gay fag-haters. And now, like Cohn himself, Vawter was dead. Of AIDS. The scourge. The crisis.
Death--like real homosexuality, or real poverty, or real anything--had always seemed exotic and remote. Now it was everywhere I looked. And how absurd, how criminal that an artist like Vawter should be the victim of an affliction inextricably linked in my mind with injustice, and with governmental neglect. I even cried.
And that, I'm mildly ashamed to report, remains to this day my closest brush with the virus. In the John Donne sense--the "Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind" sense--then yes, my life has been irrevocably touched by AIDS. But in selfish, realistic practice--and at the risk of sounding horribly glib--the disease of the last two decades, whose advent forever altered the landscape of not just gay, but all human sexuality, hasn't affected my straight ass in the slightest.
Okay, it has. Condoms--yes. HIV tests--of course. Hysterical panic following incautious behavior--well, who hasn't? But I've never personally known anyone who died of AIDS. I've never even known anyone who was HIV positive. At least I haven't known that I've known. I've had unprotected sex. I've held the hands of friends as they had blood drawn for the test. And I've rejoiced with them when they heard they were negative, as every single one of them has. I've come no closer to the Human Immunodeficiency Virus than to the I.Love.You virus. My everyday life was more directly impacted by the failure of Kozmo.com than it has been by AIDS. "In the slightest" is exactly how it has affected me. And I'm not the only one.
In a casual survey of my straight contemporaries--some of whose best friends are gay (ahem)--I discovered only a couple who'd had any direct contact with AIDS. Beyond our inclination to deplore the disease and our honest sympathy for those afflicted, the concern evinced by me and my friends is largely theoretical. It's all ribbons and parades on this side of the rainbow.
In my family, people die of cancer, Parkinson's, alcoholism, or suicide. My dead friends include a murder victim, an accidental overdose, and even a guy who fell off a 150-foot cliff. But no AIDS. I say all this not in the interest of gloating but to make a clean breast of the straight man's burden, to put the lie to that great travesty of the liberal mind: the desire to lay claim to other people's suffering in an attempt to feel more human. We can say we care. We can even mean it. But when people's hearts go out to someone, as the expression goes, they always come back. While we may sympathize with or even covet the authentic pain of others (not only AIDS victims, but anyone who suffers and tells us about it), we seldom actually feel it.
When the syndrome was downgraded from "crisis" to "chronic manageable" status, the excitement was--if you'll forgive the pun--contagious, but so was the dwindling public consciousness. Prior to writing this article, I hadn't really thought about AIDS, except in passing (New York Times stories about the plague in Africa notwithstanding), for years. The news that I'd never known an AIDS victim startled my gay friends for a moment as they each calculated just how many victims they had known. Though no one actually said anything, the truth became painfully clear: Contrary to the old transit ad slogan, AIDS in America seems to be a gay disease after all.
Sean Nelson is a heterosexual.
