AFTER THE JAR
200 poz loads is one sticky taboo. After his interview with the director of Viral Loads, probes the psychology behind fetishising HIV and discovers the missing link.
I SPENT AN ENTIRE YEAR believing I’d contracted HIV. I’d been behaving pretty badly and, I eventually reasoned, this was my punishment. That is so insane. Punished for being a human being doing human being things? I’d heard the religious right use that hateful simpleton’s rationale and felt ashamed I’d used it on myself. I fell down a hole. It took a succession of doctors and negative test results to convince me I was okay, a paranoid cycle I later discovered is not uncommon to anyone who fucks around unsafely and then googles “flu symptoms”.
The disease had never been there, but the feelings I experienced under its imagined duress hung around. I could not stop wondering what it must be like for people who really did contract HIV and then work out how to exist with it. I remembered how I’d stopped caring about everything for a while. One afternoon I walked into the middle of peak-hour traffic, and I thought it was the funniest thing. I dared those cars to run me over at speed, and it was only by the shocked braking grace of homebound office workers that I’m not dead. It was fucking stupid as hell, and stupider still when my blood came back HIV-negative. I was more useful than that, regardless.
And so I learned about people living with HIV (t he vast majority being men, it seemed to me) wherever I could, and developed a kind of incomplete empathy for t hem t hat would only be complete much, much later. The f irst and even pre-date rituals of some gay men linking up on Grindr include discussing “viral loads”; straight people talk about t heir favourite movies. The composite irony of scoping out Salon one night (an incredible lef tist website t hat is US-centric and unfortunately ignored by most Australians) and f inding that San Franciscan gay porn studio Treasure Island Media had made a movie pointedly called Viral Loads was a heavy scene. It was a heavy scene, f ull of heavy scenes; Viral Loads’ press release loudly proclaiming t hat some performers involved are positive, some are negative, and “who t he f uck cares?”
Heavier still was t he interview Tracy Clark-Flory had conducted with t he movie’s centrepiece, Blue Bailey. I t hought Blue honest enough but inarticulate, and wasn’t satisf ied. This was a blatant, even brutal fetishisation of HIV t hat, to me, signified something deeply felt in other ways, as strange as t hat might be to say about a jar of 200 cumshots being poured into one guy’s ass. I went after Treasure Island Media’s head honcho, Paul Morris.
It was very, very difficult to get him to talk to me on the phone, which is what my employers insisted had to happen. They were right. This was no place to let a man get away with hardto-contest rhetoric exclusively via email. Paul hadn’t given a verbal interview in years, he said, but he would for me. I suppose he liked me (he doesn’t anymore. He seems to feel our interview misrepresents him somehow, an objection he won’t explain to me).
Throughout our discussion, Paul would periodically insist he couldn’t translate his world into mine so that I would understand. At the time I was annoyed by that. I thought it was a convenient excuse. Now I see where he was coming from, even though I believe my unorthodox background makes me an exception to a great many cultural language barriers. Was I convinced? I was surprised at how much sense he made to me. Shocked, even, but he unfortunately talks in very privileged absolutes. Not everyone has access to PrEP, and the work of so many brave AIDS activists is not to be shit on like that. Psychologically, at least, I agree with him: fear is a hell of a thing to live with.
Before and after this piece went out, I talked about it openly and a lot, wherever I went. It kept me up at night. People thought the jar of cum was gross, but it was still not gross enough to dissuade them from the point of what I’d tried to explore, and that was enough. A girl at a party told me a story of when she was younger and sharing house with two gay guys who’d just hit their early twenties. They wanted a threesome, because fuck yeah threesomes. The person they invited into their bed chose not to disclose (or did not know – I like to believe that) their status. One of these two young guys contracted HIV from the encounter. The other one, she said, developed something close to survivor’s guilt even though his boyfriend hadn’t actually died (and hasn’t). He became obsessed with becoming infected – getting ‘pozzed’ – but his boyfriend refused. They eventually separated not because of simple sero-discord, but because of how unique HIV’s cruel complexity is to men who love men.
One afternoon I walked into the middle of peak-hour traffic, and I thought it was the funniest thing. I dared those cars to run me over at speed.
To those outside of gay culture who think they understand it, who see it as wonderfully melodramatic and fabulous and all those theatrical clichés – like I did prior to this story – I say: to transcend that superficial perspective was ultimately the point of this. It is not enough to march rainbows down the streets and appropriate heteronormative causes that will bleed the hearts of the majority. True human empathy is the missing link, and no it is not pretty. Sometimes it looks like a jar of 200 cumshots.