Resisting the Apocalypse: Telling Time in American Novels about AIDS, 1982-1992

(Doctoral Dissertation by Lisa Garmire, UCSB 1996)

Chapter Five: "Silent Apocalypse: Race, Class, Gender, Heterosexual AIDS"

No. She could never tell C’Anne this. Most of the people she knew didn’t talk about AIDS at all. Like if they didn’t say the word, the disease wouldn’t become real. If they talked about it, they spoke as if it were something none of them could ever get.

How could she tell them she had it? (Touch 92)

5.1 Introduction

       This chapter addresses the many silences invoked by the stereotype of AIDS as a “gay disease” and begins by providing important statistics regarding the epidemiology of the AIDS epidemic in the United States during the 1980’s and 1990’s. The chapter then proceeds by examining several of the key social, cultural and economic issues involved in discussing AIDS in populations other than urban, middle-class white gay men that have contributed to the lack of novels that represent their experiences. As we have entered the second decade of the epidemic, the silences are beginning to be broken and the chapter explores several of the new voices that have sought to break silence. Their novels indicate how these authors stand in a different relation to the dominant apocalyptic AIDS narrative than the other authors we have thus far considered in the dissertation. The chapter also addresses young adult AIDS novels. I conclude the chapter and the disseration with a consideration of both the possibilities and the limitations of the AIDS novels as forms of cultural critique.

5.2 Startling Statistics

       Though AIDS was primarily thought to be a disease of middle to upper-middle class, urban white gay men during the first decade of the epidemic in the United States, the epidemic affected other sectors of the population as well. Indeed, the transmission of HIV is not due to one’s race, sexual preference or to where one lives but is related to particular actions and behaviors.[1]  Unfortunately, the assumption that AIDS was a “gay white man’s disease” tended to predominate during the 80’s, as noted by a senior policy analyst of the National Minority AIDS Council, “...there has always been a higher incidence of HIV infection in communities of color than early statistics indicated, because people used to assume that AIDS was a gay white man’s disease only and did not look for it elsewhere” (Greeley 11). Though there was a great deal of publicity in the 80’s about white gay men with AIDS and white, middle-class “innocent AIDS victims” like Ryan White and Elizabeth Glaser, there was virtual silence about the many other people affected by AIDS: injecting drug users, heterosexual women, men of color having sex with other men.

       This silence has not reflected the demographics of the epidemic in the United States, especially as we have entered the second decade of the epidemic. Indeed, the statistical increases in these “silent” populations have been staggering. For example, by 1991, The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) noted,  “...the HIV/AIDS death rate for all black females was approximately ten times the rate for white females” (“AIDS” 648). When the CDC expanded its HIV/AIDS classification in 1993 to include tuberculosis and invasive cervical cancer, the number of AIDS cases rose dramatically: “...the number of AIDS cases reported among racial/ethnic minorities in 1993 increased 135% over that in 1992, while the number among whites increased 114%” (“AIDS” 646). The CDC’S HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report of December 1994 notes, “Among reported cases, 1994 was the first year when blacks and Hispanics together accounted for the majority (53%) of all cases reported among men” (Greeley 11). Additionally, by 1995, “Blacks, 12% of the population, account for one-third of all AIDS cases. Three out of five new AIDS victims now are black, up from one in five in 1986” (Rosin 21). Racial misclassifications may also contribute to inaccurate reporting of AIDS cases in populations of color, as noted by the MMWR: “AIDS surveillance may underestimate the number of AIDS cases reported among certain minority populations because of misclassifications of race/ethnicity on medical records, which are the source for AIDS case reports” (“AIDS” 646).

       Though these numbers indicate that the epidemic spread massively during the 80’s within populations of color and that it is still spreading today, there continue to be important silences about AIDS. Indeed, there are silences within silences. For example, when Magic Johnson disclosed his HIV+ status in November 1991, he broke silence about people of color living with HIV disease, and yet, as David Roman has remarked, “Johnson, single-handedly with his announcement, returned AIDS to the international spotlight, so much so that even George Bush was forced to admit that he needed to improve his AIDS record...And yet the media frenzy surrounding Johson’s disclosure barely touched upon AIDS and gay and bisexual men of color” (Roman 204). Today in 1996, silences continue. As more and more people are being infected with HIV each year, indeed as AIDS becomes even more of an apocalyptic threat, ironically, AIDS is now considered, like poverty and crime, to be a "chronic" problem. Perhaps not so ironically, these problems disproportionately impact specific sectors of the population, particularly people of color.

5.3 The Silences of "Gay" Identity

       The gay rights movement of the 1970's led to the development of coherent, organized and thriving gay communities in many urban centers, particularly in San Francisco and New York City. As with the feminist movement of the 70's, an integral part of the gay rights movement involved interrogating and revising existing cultural definitions of identity. "Homosexuality," which had traditionally been conceptualized as a pathological sexual disorder, was dismissed in favor of the term “gay,” the meaning of which was revised by participants in the movement and it came to include more than just a new and positive sense of a homosexual male's sexual identity. "Gay" also began to refer to the many different aspects of the growing communities of men who congregated in particular locations and participated in cultural institutions of  various urban centers. Businesses, social organizations and cultural institutions arose to serve the needs of "gay communities," and when members of these gay communities began to die of AIDS, members mobilized, forming, for example, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York City. Another, more troubling parallel between the gay rights movement and the feminist movement, however, was that, like the term "feminist," "gay" came to signify a middle-class, white identity. Silences developed with respect to the issues and experiences of people who did not fit these particular identities.

       Many post-colonial, feminist and race theorists have illustrated how sexuality, race and socio-economic status are closely linked. For black communities existing within a white-oriented nation, these linkages have led to particular effects. Within poorer populations, low socio-economic status has led to a greater emphasis on sexuality. “The capitalist nature of American society,” writes Benjamin Bowser, “has reduced Black male and female relations into commodities where men and women treat themselves as sexual objects” (121-2). White racist stereotypes about black sexuality have led middle-class blacks to de-emphasize sex. Phillip Harper remarks that “Indeed, some middle-class blacks have colluded in this defusing of black sexuality, attempting to explode whites’ stereotypes of blacks as oversexed by stifling discussion of black sexuality in general” (124). Some black leaders like Louis Farrakhan have openly condemned homosexuality (Stewart 16). Many black writers have viewed homosexuality as a white man’s disease. According to Charles Nero, black writers like Alvin Poussaint, Imamu Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver have all viewed homosexuality as a white man’s disease (231). Nero argues that even Toni Morrison “has written into her novels these ideas of homosexuality as alien to African cultures, as forced upon black men by racist European civilizations and as inability to acquire and sustain manhood” (232). Christianity is a major force behind black homophobia, writes Laura Randolph: “The greater religious conservatism in the Black community encourages a level of homophobia that leads Black gay and bisexual men to be more secretive about their sexual orientation and to define themselves as heterosexual in spite of same sex sexual activities” (123). Other writers like Hanna Rosin point out that black communities will tolerate homosexuals as long as they remain closeted: “The black community has always accepted homosexuality...It’s only when that person defines himself as gay, you know, adopts a gay white culture, like doing the rainbow flag thing, that the community reacts negatively” (Rosin 22). Indeed, Magic Johnson, the first black celebrity to reveal his HIV+ status, was quick to differentiate himself from homosexuals. David Roman has observed that the reception to Johnson’s remarks indicated pervasive fear of black male homosexuality: “Johnson’s own assurance on the Aresenio Hall Show that same week [as his disclosure] that he was ‘far from being a homosexual’ was met with cheers of heterosexist, if not homophobic complicity” (204).

       One consequence of this unwillingness to legitimate homosexuality has been the existence of black men who practice bisexual behavior in order to fit in with their communities. Randolph has commented that “...mainstream Black America must shoulder at least partial responsibility for the code of secrecy many Black bisexual men say they are compelled to live by” (123). There has been little research on the specific sexual practices of people of color. Lynda Doll et al. explain that “Because the sexual behavior of minorities who engage in bisexual activities has rarely been studied, the frequency of these behaviors among black Americans [as well as other nonwhites] is largely derived from surveillance reports of nonwhite AIDS cases” (33). In the public eye, these bisexual men may appear heterosexual and hold up the tradition of family and yet they may also engage in sexual encounters with other men. Unlike white gay men who have developed large, open support networks and communities for themselves, these bisexual black men may feel torn in allegiances. Are they gay, which means they must renounce their black identity? Or are they black, which means they must hide any sexual feelings for other men? Neither the gay community nor existing black communities can speak to their experiences and needs. “Because the gay community in the United States is viewed by some blacks as being dominated by white men,” write Doll et al., “in some communities there may also be an inherent tension between the development of ties to both the black and gay communities, respectively” (34). Indeed, as Stewart has remarked, white gay culture is largely segregated: “In most American cities the gay community is largely white and segregated, with most black gays participating in its institutions only occasionally if at all. This is particularly true of working-class blacks and those who live in predominantly black neighborhoods” (15). Both the anonymous sexual encounters which often become the norm for black men who have sex with other men as well as their fears of disclosing their bisexual behavior to their female partners puts both parties at increased risk for HIV transmission (Doll 31).[2]

       Another serious consequence for closeted black men is that they may not identify themselves as at risk for HIV infection. Like so many of the "general population" who think of AIDS as only a "gay disease," they may think they too are not at risk for AIDS and may thus not practice safer sex. Additionally, AIDS education has not been directed toward these populations. For black men living with AIDS, the resources available to white gay men may not be as easily obtained. If closeted, these men may prefer to die in silence rather than risk the shame the exposure of their AIDS might cause their families. “When HIV strikes and is associated with homosexuality,” writes Alexandra Greeley, “people deny its presence. This is true in some African American communities...where families often hide and treat infected relatives as long as possible so outsiders cannot suspect the presence of homosexuality” (13). Another aspect that may interfere with black men seeking treatment for AIDS is their suspicion of the conventional medical establishment, a suspicion which has grown since the Tuskegee experiment. As Rosin notes, “Long considered this country’s worst large-scale violation of medical ethics, Tuskegee has become the parable by which many blacks understand their relationhip to public health services” (24). The serious consequences of these issues have been both the continued spread of HIV through the black population and the shorter life expectancy of blacks living with AIDS. To date, only E. Lynn Harris’ AIDS novels, Invisible Life and Just As I Am, describe the experiences of closeted balck bisexual men.

       Like black men, Hispanic men in the United States who desire other men may feel torn between allegiances to gay communities and to their ethnic and cultural communities.[3]  Also like black men, little research has been done with respect to their sexual behavior. Findings do indicate, however, that because the Catholic Church plays such a large role in many Hispanic communities, sexual behavior is strongly influenced by its mandates (Greeley 12). Church doctrine forbids the use of condoms in heterosexual sex and expressly forbids homosexuality as an abomination of god. "Safer sex" thus is not an option for an observant Catholic and homosexuality is silenced and enshrouded in deeper secrecy. Another factor influencing male sexuality in Mexican men is the cultural notion of "machismo,” which Doll et al. describe as “the culturally defined hypermasculine model of manliness” (36). Doll et al. note about Mexican men that “The masculine self-image of a man is typically not threatened by his homosexual behavior as long as he engages in the appropriate sexual role [insertive anal intercourse] and also has sex with women” (36). Other roadblocks which have hampered AIDS education and medical care in Hispanic populations include what Greeley notes as “the community’s language isolation and culture” (13), which have hampered efforts by non-Hispanics to provide AIDS education as well as outreach and other AIDS services to these populations. All of these factors contribute to the increased possibility of HIV transmission, which is supported by epidemiological data: “More than 65% of AIDS cases among men born in Central and South America, Cuba and Mexico were associated with homosexual intercourse” (Diaz et al. 504). Steven Corbin’s A Hundred Days From Now is yet the only AIDS novel to depict an Hispanic man living with AIDS.

       Another culture in the United States that involves male-male sex which "gay identity" does not describe is that of male prison inmates. During this era of "tough-on-crime," prison populations have grown enormously. Black men are disproportionately represented in this culture. Indeed, “...one-quarter of all black men in their 20s, and 15% of adult males, rotate through prison” (Rosin 23). With the growth of prison populations and especially with recidivist members, a thriving prison culture has developed. One aspect of this culture is male-male sex. Little data exists on sexual behavior in prisons but various studies indicate both coerced and consensual sexual encounters occur, as well as tatooing and injection drug use, all of which contribute to the spread of HIV in prisons (Hammett et al. 141). According to Hammett et al., “11,565 (5%) of the adult cases reported to the CDC were prison inmates” (136). Because many men behave heterosexually before and after their periods of incarceration, their sexual behavior does not simply fit under either a "heterosexual" or a "homosexual" label. Possible exposure to HIV while in prison also increases the risk that they may then transmit HIV to their female sexual partners once they are released from prison. There has been some effort to distribute condoms in a few prisons, but as with many governmental policies regarding behavior considered "immoral" by this society, there is the assumption that the provision of condoms (like needles) will promote the "immoral behavior." Instead, emphasis has shifted from “crisis” issues to “long-haul” issues, such as the provision of housing, programming, and medical care for prisoners with HIV disease (Hammett et al. 141). Life in contemporary American prisons is an experience that is not described in any of the AIDS novels published to date.

5.4 Silent Subjects: Poverty, Drugs and AIDS

       If the epidemiologic trends are any indication, class as well as race is a factor for increased risk of exposure to HIV. Class divisions within the U.S. population have distinct consequences for members of different classes.[4]  For the "lowest" classes in this country, HIV is a growing threat but is also only one of the many experienced hardships. With a hierarchy of needs common to all human beings, these populations fight daily for the bare minimums of existence: a safe place to live, food, something that makes life worth living. For the homeless, even these bare minimums may be unattainable. The well-being experienced from sex and/or drugs and the satisfaction of having children may very well be the few pleasures these people experience. Greeley notes several additional issues that affect these populations, including “...a lack of medical insurance, which results in a lack of access to health care; a higher incidence of diseases or maladies in general; fear of medical care, particularly among illegal aliens; limited or no means of transportation to a health clinic; and for some, particularly in rural areas, too few doctors” (12). For members of these populations living  with HIV disease, “‘...people may be sick, but without access to healthcare, they won’t do anything about it until they are very ill. Taking care of kids, housing and work...these basic needs are more important than worrying about HIV’” (Greeley 12).

       Though injection drug use (IDU) and poverty are not necessarily correlated (Bowser 119), there does appear to be a correlation between IDU AIDS cases and particular impoverished regions of the United States. Shooting galleries, sex for drugs and/or sex for money to acquire drugs are all aspects of the drug culture which contribute to the increased risk of its members and their sexual partners for infection with HIV. Friedman et al. note that there are regional differences in AIDS cases due to IDU: “There are considerable differences in geographic distribution of HIV among injection drug users, with seroprevalence rates as high as 50-60% in some northeastern cities, 15-17% in San Francisco, and below 5% of most other areas of the country” (68).  Other regions, however, are experiencing the fastest increases in new AIDS cases. Okey Nwanyanwu et al. report that as of June 30, 1991, “...58,879 (32.2%) of AIDS cases were associated with illicit drug use.The highest percentage increases were in the South, U.S. Territories and the North Central” (399).  There are no AIDS novels that describe IDU culture. Indeed, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, published over thirty years ago, remains one of the only American novels to describe aspects of this culture.

5.5 AIDS and Women

       AIDS has had a very different history in the United States for women as compared with gay men. As discussed in Chapter One, it was not until 1993 that the CDC revised its definition of AIDS to include one of the most common AIDS-related opportunistic diseases to kill women, namely invasive cervical cancer. There are many reasons for this lag in response to studying women with AIDS. As with all other non-white male people, women have historically ranked lower on the totem-pole of medical research. Women of child-bearing age have suffered the added burden that the potentiality of their bearing offspring is often used as an excuse for denying them the benefits that come from medical research. Tema Luft, a woman living with AIDS, has described her experience of being denied an experimental AIDS drug: “I have told them that I’ll get my tubes tied and that I’ll sign any paper they want, but they are just too afraid I’ll sue them one day” (67). Life expectancies for women diagnosed with AIDS are shorter than men’s: “At present the combination of unequal or delayed access to care and the male bias in existing knowledge means that women in both rich and poor countries have a shorter life expectancy than men after a diagnosis of AIDS” (Doyal 13). An important contributing factor for delayed diagnoses in women is the dangerous assumptions generated by the concept of being “at risk” for AIDS, which has had deleterious consequences for women. As MMWR reports, “In particular, women are more likely than men to be reported initially without risk for HIV because both women and their health care providers may not recognize or report the risk behaviors of the woman and her partners” (“Update” 88). 

       Though AIDS in other countries like Uganda, for example, affects more women than men (Barnett and Piers 32-33), AIDS in the United States has primarily been viewed as a gay male disease. Perhaps a reason for this has been that anal sex, a high risk factor for HIV transmission, has been considered solely as a gay male phenomenon. Indeed, for a time, women were considered less at risk for HIV infection than gay men, because of their “rugged” vaginas as opposed to the “fragile” anuses of gay men (Treichler 37). This conflation of AIDS with gay anal sex has led to further silences with respect to women’s sexuality and their risk for HIV. Indeed, as Katie King has noted,

 ...educational efforts by, for example, the World Health Organization, have often seriously misrepresented the sexual practices and behaviors currently understood to transmit HIV. Because of a debilitating fascination with the ongoing construction of a heterosexuality innocent of, yet mutually defined by, homosexuality, local sexual practices have been ignored or appropriated. ( 87)

 Within this heterosexual logic of HIV transmission, lesbian sex is completely invisible. Indeed, lesbians have not been considered at risk for AIDS, though there have been several documented cases of sexual transmission among women (“Update” 83).

        Another issue that greatly impacts heterosexual women's sexual behavior (both in the United States as well as in other countries) is its relationship to male sexual behavior. Some women may not have the option to negotiate the terms of these sexual interactions with male partners. Indeed, marital rape is still not legally recognized in several American states. Another issue is that of practicising safer sex. For some women, the decision to not use condoms is tied to issues of "love" and "trust," whereas "safer sex" becomes a sign of mistrust and/or infidelity. “Young girls in particular,” Lesley Doyal has noted, “often fear that they will be accused of mistrust, of ‘not loving him enough’, or of being too sexually assertive” (68-9). Most of the heterosexual "safer sex" campaigns have targeted white, middle-class women, particularly young women, to take responsibility for their sexual encounters, though they are less at risk for HIV infection than women from other sectors of the population and though they are not the ones who wear the condoms. Catherine Waldby et al. have noted the bias of this education campaign: “...the implicit privileging of heterosexual men within AIDS policy...attempts both to protect male bodies and to maintain masculine sexual ‘freedom’ in the age of AIDS through placing greater restrictions upon women’s sexual behavior” (38). A crucial factor affecting the ability of women to practice safer sex is the issue of self-esteem, which Muriel Whetstone notes as particularly important for black women: “Education, empowerment and self-esteem - These are the tools Black women need to become better equipped to protect themselves” (121). Waldby et al. point out that even more needs to be done in order for women to be able to protect themselves: “As well as education and community support, alternatives to the condom are urgently needed if women are to have the means to protect themselves” (15).

       During the media hype of the mid-80’s, which portrayed AIDS as something that primarily affected gay men, Haitians and drug users, the most publicity regarding women with AIDS was directed toward  a few white women. These few women contracted HIV through "innocent" blood transfusions, and these women fit the public's image of the good, middle-class, white mothers who care for their kids. For example, Elizabeth Glaser (wife of the actor who played Hutch on the television show, “Starsky and Hutch”) became an advocate of people living with AIDS and her autobiography, In the Absence of Angels: a Hollywood Family’s Courageous Stroy, was well-received by the "general public." The experiences of other white women living with HIV disease - poorer, prostitutes, injecting drug users, women who acquired HIV sexually - have received little attention. As Tema Luft has remarked about her invisibility as a woman with AIDS, “Who would think that a nine-to-five woman worker like me could have AIDS? It’s those ‘other people’ who get it” (70). Mirrorint this silence is the lack of novels that describe the experiences of women living with AIDS.

       The women in the United States hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic have been poor women of color, particularly black women (CDC 975). The two major factors that have contributed to this trend have been the use of injecting drugs and sexual relationships with male partners who use injecting drugs. Another, less prevalent, but significant contributing factor for some of these women has been their having sexual relationships with men who also have sex with other men. Studies have indicated that the female partners of these men “...are frequently unaware of their partners’ sexual contacts with men” (Doll et al. 31). In his novel, Invisible Life, E. Lynn Harris repeatedly addresses the complex issues surrounding black males who practce bisexual behavior and the ignorance of their female sexual partners as to their double sexual identities.

       Lack of services for poor black women living with AIDS poses real problems for their healthcare. Additionally, care for them is difficult to maintain. As Dr. Joe Timpone, director of Washington, D.C., General Hospital’s AIDS Unit, remarks, “It’s hard enough...to persuade people with no money for bus fare or for a babysitter, who miss an average of half their appointments, to stick to a regimen of bimonthly visits and fifteen pills a day” (Rosin 25). Consequently, their life expectancies following an AIDS diagnosis are much shorter than for white women and for men in general (Doyal 13). The desire to have a baby as a way to help deal with the spectre of one's own mortality is another issue for many women. Approximately 7,000 infants are born to HIV-infected women each year (“Update” 768), and there has been controversy over the ethics of mandatory testing of pregnant women for HIV. Several studies have indicated that Zidoduvine therapy (AZT) has been shown to prevent HIV infection in babies born to HIV+ women (Rosin 25). However, chronic suspicion and paranoia of the conventional medical establishment have kept some black women from seeking the treatment. Their suspicion may not be altogether unjustified. For example, Charlotte Watson Sherman’s recent novel, Touch, describes the racist corruption in a white hospital, including the coercion of a pregnant HIV+ black woman to have an abortion by a white male doctor, who then, without her knowledge or consent, sterilizes her.

       As with black women, injecting drug use and/or sexual relationships with injecting drug users are primary sources of HIV infection for Hispanic women born in the United States and Puerto Rico (Diaz et al. 504). Additionally for many Hispanic women, the Catholic church plays an influential role in their sexual lives with respect to HIV transmission. Because the Church actively condemns the use of condoms, an Hispanic woman has little recourse for demanding safer sex practices from her male sexual partners. Additionally, as Ledia Martinez, Hispanic HIV/AIDS Coordinator for the Red Cross, has noted, “Hispanic women often lack empowerment in sexual relationships...” (Greeley 12). Church doctrine and machismo promulgate power imbalances in the sexual relations between Hispanic men and women, and like black women, Hispanic women may also be at greater risk for HIV infection due to a male partner's undisclosed bisexual behavior. Language and cultural barriers may also prevent Hispanic women from obtaining necessary AIDS services, from safer sex information to medical services. As with black women, Hispanic women have not been targeted by AIDS organizations. For Hispanic women living with AIDS, there may be a series of other issues that impact their quality of life, including problems with language barriers that reduce access to information about AIDS and related AIDS services; shame and/or fear of stigma for having HIV disease, which may lead to hiding a positive diagnosis; a lack of precendent and language from which to speak openly and honestly about sex with a male sexual partner. As with all women living with AIDS, Hispanic women may be caregivers to their families in addition to themselves. As Antonia Coello Novello, the first female and first Hispanic Surgeon General of the United States provocatively asks, “All that matters is that women - even when they are sick - are asked to take care of their families. I believe the time has come to ask: who will take care of them?” (xiv). Perhaps it then comes as no surprise that with so many issues plaguing these women’s lives, they have not written novels to describe their experiences of living with HIV disease and that no one else has chosen to do so, either.

5.6 The Literary Marketplace

       The literary marketplace reflects many of these economic, social and cultural issues that lead to prevailing silences about some people’s experiences living with HIV disease. First and foremost, the publishing business is a business. It is an industry that exists in a capitalist society and like any good industry in such a society hopes to turn a healthy profit. In order to do so, publishing companies hope to market and sell products that appeal to the widest number of consumers and to consumers who have enough expendable income to buy their products. Books about "the American people" are the most likely to be published, since editors assume that the "general public" wants to buy books that speak to them. This "general public" is assumed to be heterosexual, white, middle-class and educated enough to read. Perhaps not surprisingly, the publishing business continues to be dominated by white men. Black gay writer, Steven Corbin, acidly describes the exclusionary practices of this industry: “The publishing world is decidedly an exclusive, white male, predominantly heterosexual, elite fraternity that stretches itself to any length to protect its narrow confines, even in its exclusion of women who, statistics convincingly show, comprise the majority of readers and book buyers” (“White Men” 14).

       With the growth and development of gay communities since the 70's, presses that cater to gay and lesbian readerships have grown in number. Indeed, as Victoria Brownworth has noted, “Gay and lesbian literature is the publishing trend of the ‘90’s” (80).  Larger publishing houses like St. Martin's have had sympathetic editors like Michael Denneny who have assisted  various "alternative" (i.e., non-mainstream) texts to make it to publication and there are a significant number of smaller presses, like Naiad, Alyson and Knights Press to name just a few, that specialize in publishing gay and lesbian literature. Like the straight publishing companies, these presses are still businesses and as such need to turn profits in order to survive. Unfortunately, many of the editors for gay presses have also thought that this means catering to a white, middle-class, urban market who only wants to read about people like themselves. As with the straight presses, “The booming trade in gay books,” writes Brownworth, “is still the domain of a select few gay white men” (80).  There is more to the issue, however. As Michele Karlsberg, a book publicist who has handled such well-known black gay authors as Assoto Saint and Melvin Dixon, says, “‘There is an underlying racist and classist idea that blacks don’t read and buy books’” (Brownworth 80).

       These assumptions by the gay publishing industry have led to a prevailing silence about the experiences and issues of non-white and/or non-middle class gays and lesbians. “Read any good black gay fiction lately?” asks Steven Corbin. He points out that “Unless one is literature-savvy, one could easily subscribe to the misconception that African-American gay male fiction - and its writers - had died along with James Baldwin in 1987” (“The Dearth” 39). Though several black female novelists, both straight and lesbian, like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, have had a good deal of success publishing their work, indeed Toni Morrison has won the highest honors for Beloved, according to Corbin, black male novelists and especially black gay novelists have had difficulty finding places to publish their work. He has extensively criticized what he perceives to be the racist assumptions and practices of both straight and gay presses.

We can presuppose myriad perennial assumptions and baseless theories to justify these classic patterns. Black [male and/or gay] literature isn’t commercially viable; black literature is second-rate; black literature has no audience; only blacks are interested in black art; blacks don’t read; and, finally, that one black voice is representative and encompassing of all black people, which succinctly explains why we have been doomed to celebrate one solitary literary icon at a time, posturing as the ‘flavor of the month.’” (“White Men” 4)[5]

Though Corbin dismisses as racist the assumption by editors that black authors lack the financial and time resources to write extended works of fiction like novels, time and money are issues for some writers of color, as Nancy Bereano, publisher of a small lesbian press insists, “‘But when we’re talking about big [publishing] houses, they want novels, and many writers of color don’t have the time or the money to write novels’” (Brownworth 82). Corbin also argues that since most editors themselves are white men, they do not identify with black gay experience and/or they may find that experience threatening to their own notions of identity - racial, sexual, otherwise. Indeed, as Barbara Smith, publisher of the Kitchen Table Press, notes about gay and lesbian writing of color, “‘There is also an inherent critique in what we write of the society, and many editors take that critique personally’” (Brownworth 82). The lack of black editors of any sort also influences the selection of novels chosen for publication (Brownworth 83).

       Other literary and artistic forums besides the novel have proven to be more successful ventures for articulating black gay experience. Since the mid-80’s, several anthologies have appeared that address the silence of black gay male experience. The earliest of these was Joseph Beam’s In The Life, which appeared in 1986, and the more recent Brother to Brother has done quite well.[6]  The videowork of Marlon Riggs as well as the film documentary Paris is Burning have also received a good deal of critical attention. An important concern for critics has been to read these cultural productions in such a way as to resist homogenizing black gay experiences into the experience of black gay men, which would silence the diversity and variety of these many different identities and experiences. As Hemphill says in his introduction to Brother to Brother, “It would be impossible to say there is one type of black gay male for all seasons. We haven’t yet, nor do we need to, become clones” (xxx). Unfortunately, the tendency by mainstream society to canonize particular authors is a reality of history. As Corbin notes, “...the one voice who [has] been our sole, black, openly gay author for four decades - James Baldwin” (“White Men” 14).   Black gay novelists have had to find strategies to circumvent these assorted difficulties in order to publish their work. Corbin went overseas and found a British press willing to publish his second novel, Fragments That Remain, which was eventually published two years later by the American press, Alyson. As he sees it, gay American publishers were too racist and afraid to publish such a charged novel which deals with interracial gay relationships and the problem of racism in American gay culture. Overseas, Corbin found that “...the English, not unlike most Europeans, take delight in, even relish, stories that deal with  racism - American racism...” (“White Men” 15).  E. Lynn Harris originally self-published his first novel, Invisible Life, with Consortium Press in 1991. His skills at marketing paid off when the major publishing house, Vintage Books, republished Invisible Life as well as its sequel, Just As I Am, in 1994. Harris’ financial successes have continued with his latest novel, And This Too Shall Pass, which occupied a spot on The New York Times Book Review’s best-seller list for several weeks.

5.7 Risky Business: Literary AIDS

       Why would a reader want to read about disease and suffering? In particular, why would a reader who has little fear of and/or is at little risk for HIV infection want to read a novel about AIDS, especially a novel about a person of color with AIDS? For an editor of a large, extremely profitable New York publishing company, these questions would immediately steer her/him away from risky novels toward “safe” AIDS novels. Indeed, Alice Hoffman’s At Risk (ironic title in this context) was the first AIDS novel to be published by a major publishing firm in 1988 by Putnam’s Sons, and it received a great deal of attention. Her novel is a “safe” one, discussing the plight of a suburban family’s experience of AIDS, when the daughter Amanda “innocently” contracts HIV from a blood transfusion. Another factor that affects the risks publishing houses are willing to take to publish non-mainstream work is the issue of downsizing. Reflecting nationwide industrial trends, the publishing industry has seen a great reduction in the number of small publishing companies and the booming success and domination of the market by large publishing houses that can consolidate their capital. Additionally, many large chain bookstores place book orders not directly with publishing companies but with book distributors, who buy mass quantities of books they feel will be a sure sell. This process homogenizes the selection of reading materials available at large chain stores, which carry only a limited, generic supply of books that will garner the largest profit. Readers and invidual bookbuyers are directly impacted, since chain stores squeeze independent bookstores out of business with their cheaper prices, their greater numbers and their ability to afford more convenient locations and better advertising. Though some of the large chains now include a “Gay Studies” section in their stores, the selections are often minimal, tending to highlight best-selling white gay male work.

       All of these issues that I have been discussing have impacted which AIDS novels are published. Gay novelists of color who have written about AIDS face a difficult battle to find a place for their work. As Corbin has said,

“Even though the face of AIDS has changed,” says novelist Steven Corbin, who is HIV-positive, “you can’t find publishers willing to take on books related to AIDS and black queers...there is no market for an AIDS novel that is multicultural. Our men are dying too. Our writers are also doing work like Paul Monette and other white writers with AIDS. We need to be able to see the multicultural context of AIDS. We too are fighting this killer.” (Brownworth 83).

To date, Corbin’s A Hundred Days From Now is the only AIDS novel published to describe the experiences of a black gay man living with HIV disease. Besides Corbin’s explanation about market politics, there may also be several other reasons for this prevailing silence. Judith Pastore has suggested that literary genres may not be the best ways to talk about AIDS (Pastore 10). Another contributing factor to this silence may be the lack a support network for these writers. Paul Monette and David Feinberg, for example, benefitted from their membership in the urban, white gay middle-class, which both welcomed and celebrated their work.

       The lack of AIDS novels about of men of color living with AIDS has been mirrored by the lack of novels about women living with AIDS. For women living with AIDS, the issue of longevity poses an even greater issue than for gay men of color. With little time left, poor health, few financial resources, possibly children to care for, perhaps it is no surprise that there is not a single novel yet that focuses on the experiences of women of color living with AIDS. Charlotte Watson Sherman’s quite recent novel, Touch, published by HarperCollins in 1995, is the first novel to describe a black woman’s coming to terms with her HIV+ status. At present, there are only two novels that focus on white women who acquire HIV disease, Sharon Mayes’ Immune and Alfred Ignegno’s Shared Legacy. Both novels were published by small presses (New Rivers and Birch Brook Impressions), went through single printings, and now are impossible to find for sale in bookstores. Mayes has written about the difficulties she experienced in having her novel published and the negative reception it received. She writes, “The publication of this novel, for which both I and my publisher had grandiose fantasies of success, was met with disagreeable silence. Reviewers called it ‘disturbing,’ ‘depressing,’ ‘a scathing attack on modern society,’ and ‘of questionable taste’” (85). Mayes thinks that “The critics, at least, were not interested in reading about the downfall of an attractive, successful professional, probably much like them. People who spread or had AIDS could not be viewed as like them. In the minds of mainstream Americans, AIDS must remain a disease of homosexuals and IV drug-users” (85). As Katie Hogan has observed, “...female characters in AIDS literature are often confined to the work of mourning while male characters brazenly express anger and sexual desire even as their bodies give way to physical deterioration.” Hogan provocatively asks, “Why is AIDS still conceptualized as a male disease?...What does the absence of women as people with AIDS teach us about women’s predicament in our culture?” (84). The same could also be asked about the literary representations of men of color living with AIDS.

5.8 Background Sound: AIDS Novels and Men of Color

       During the first decade of the epidemic, most of the AIDS novels focused on describing the experiences of white gay men living and dying of AIDS. Novels about and/or by men of color living with AIDS were a small background sound. Well-known novelists like black writers Melvin Dixon and Larry Duplechan did not write about the experiences of men of color and AIDS, though Duplechan’s Tangled Up in Blue does describe a white gay character’s experience of ARC.[7]  As Emmanuel Nelson remarked in 1990 about the famous gay Chicano novelist, John Rechy, “While many of the novels he wrote prior to the AIDS era insistently and explicitly dealt with gay life, his two post-AIDS novels - Bodies and Souls and Marilyn’s Daughter - deal with homosexuality only marginally. Neither one even alludes to AIDS” (49). The same could be said of his most recent novel, The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez. Though Michael Nava refers to AIDS in his mystery series featuring Henry Rios, it is not the Chicano protagonist but Henry’s younger, Jewish lover, Josh, who Nava depicts in his mystery series as living through the stages of HIV disease.

       Men of color with AIDS appear in several AIDS novels by well-known white male authors because of their relationships with white male characters. In one of the earliest AIDS novels, Howard Fast’s The Dinner Party (1987), Jonesy, a black man with AIDS, exists in the background of the novel, which centers on the description of his white lover, Leonard, the son of a senator coming home to the suburbs of a northeastern city to disclose his AIDS status to his family. Though Leonard has brought Jonesy with him to the dinner party, the bigotry and racism of guests at the party are so insulting to Jonesy that he leaves the party (as well as the narrative of the novel). In the more recent AIDS novel, Afterlife, Paul Monette depicts a Chicano gay male’s experience with AIDS in the character, Dell Espinoza, as I discussed in Chapter Four of the dissertation. Like Jonesy, Dell’s existence in the story is determined by his relationship to a white man. The novel does not focus on Dell’s own HIV disease but instead focuses on his inability to emotionally recover from the AIDS death of his lover, Marcus. Most recently, Reynolds Price’s The Promise of Rest is haunted by the ghost of a gay black man named Wyatt, who has died of AIDS-related complications. The novel foregrounds how the aging white protagonist, Hutch, copes with the slow, agonizing death of his son, Wade, who has returned home to Virginia from New York City and his gay life there. Forever in the background of the novel and Hutch’s consciousness, however, is the figure of Wyatt, challenging Hutch’s claims to Wade’s love.

       It was not until 1991, a full decade into the epidemic, that a number of secondary AIDS novels began to appear by men of color. An American Indian doctor, Aragam Subbarao’s The Riddle of AIDS, was published by the small Carlton Press and is a very short (91 pages), poorly written and edited, scientific thriller. The novel focuses on the search by an American white man, Robert, for the person whose blood infected his son, Peter, with HIV, when Peter received a massive blood transfusion following an auto accident. Robert’s search leads to the discovery of a surprising explanation for the origins of the AIDS epidemic. (The Russians did it!). The novel ends unrealistically with a surprise happy ending and the discovery that Peter actually does not, and never did, have HIV disease. Indeed, the first AIDS test had been a false positive. Also appearing in 1991, The Greatest Performance, by Cuban American poet and author, Elias Munoz, was published by Arte Publico, a press that specializes in publishing work by Hispanic authors. This novel recounts the homophobia that threatens the lives of the two first-person narrators and best friends, Rosita, a lesbian, and Mario, a gay man, and traces their youth in the intolerant Cuban society to their immigration to the United States. AIDS provides a closure mechanism for the novel. Mario tests positive for HIV and both Mario and Rosita perceive this to be a death sentence. The final chapter resists the tragedy of this conclusion by denying the entire narrative that has proceeded this point in time, including that Mario and Rosita had ever even known each other in Cuba. Rosita insists: “We never heard of Castro. (Not even Castro Street). Nobody hides, waving a dagger in the air, behind the mask of God. A plague hasn’t broken out” (150). The novel ends with an act of self-reflexivity, a looping in time that promises to break out of the apocalyptic trajectory AIDS has imposed on the narrative. Rosita speaks, “Yes, I will create this place where you can be who you’ve always wanted to be Marito. Where You and I have become the same person. This moment of greatness. I will create it. When the performance ends. And life begins” (151).

       Black novelist, E. Lynn Harris’ first novel, Invisible Life, was self-published in 1991 with Consortium Press. The novel focuses primarily on the first-person narrator, Raymond Jr.’s coming to terms with his sexual identity, which is complicated by other aspects of his identity, being a Christian, well-educated, middle-class, black closeted bisexual man. The novel traces the course of his love life, from his relationships with Sela and Kelvin at a southern college, to his life as a successful attorney in New York City and his two subsequent love relationships with Quinn and then Nicole. Like Munoz’ novel, AIDS enters Harris’ novel only at the end and brings the plot-strands of the novel to a close. When Nicole’s best friend, Candance is suddenly hospitalized near death with PCP, Raymond is forced to finally reveal his bisexuality to Nicole, who promptly breaks up with him. Candance’s death from AIDS-related complications fills Raymond with guilt for his bisexual behavior: “I was overcome with a tremendous amount of guilt regarding Candance’s death. I was part of a secret society that was endangering black women like Candance to protect our secret desires. Would this have happened if society had allowed Kelvin and I to live a life free from ridicule? (253-4). The novel ends with Raymond seeking emotional refuge from his love life by returning south to stay with his parents in Alabama, still unhappy with his sexuality: “I don’t know if I thought being back in Alabama would cure my gayness. The opportunities didn’t exist as they did in New York” (261). He vows celibacy, hoping he can control his sexuality by suppressing it: “Redirecting my thoughts was something I could control. I had made my sexuality the primary focus of my life for too long; from now on, I would allow it to be only a small part of my identity” (262).

Just As I Am, Harris’ sequel to Invisible Life, was published in 1994 by the big company, Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing, that also reissued Invisible Life in paperback that same year. The story told in Just As I Am takes place three years following the events of Invisible Life. This time, the narrative is split into two alternating first-person narrations, Raymond’s and his ex-girlfriend, Nicole’s. The novel continues to trace Raymond’s evolving acceptance of his sexuality as well as describing Nicole’s love life and her search for a suitable man to marry, which is complicated in the course of the novel by her Christian faith, her experiences of racism, her own homophobia and her sexual experiences with closeted bisexual black men. The novel is divided into three sections, with the middle one focusing on the two narrators’ relationships to the only  black openly gay character portrayed in the novel, Kyle, who is dying of AIDS. At the end of Invisible Life, Kyle had entered a rehab program for his addictions to crack cocaine and alcohol, and now in the middle of Just As I Am, he discloses to Raymond and Nicole that he had tested HIV+ back then, but that he had not wanted to tell anyone. He explains to Raymond, “‘I blocked it out. Long story short, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life dying’” (188).

       Part Two of the novel enacts the apocalyptic AIDS narrative structure in describing Kyle’s deteriorating life and how his friends come to his aid. This is Raymond’s first encounter with AIDS and the spectacle of Kyle’s AIDS-ridden body frightens him: “He didn’t have on a shirt and his frail body was covered with large, purplish black spots. It was the first time I was face to face with AIDS and it looked horrible” (209). Harris uses Part Two of the novel to comment on the impact of AIDS on the black community:

I guess maybe the heterosexual community had finally realized that this was not only a white gay man’s disease. But I still felt the African-American community had a long way to go in the areas of education and support of minority AIDS patients. Kyle often mentioned that there were  very few support groups run by African-Americans...

       All the support Kyle received outside of family and friends came from the white gay community. (205)

Part Two of the novel not only ends with Kyle’s death but also with the novel’s consideration of AIDS as a thematic issue. Part Three briefly describes Raymond and Nicole’s mourning process, but then moves on to focus on Raymond’s entrance into therapy, his finally coming to terms with his being gay and his meeting of a new male love interest, as well as Nicole’s engagement to the perfect white man, Jarred, and her announcement to her therapist that she now feels ready to end therapy.

       Harris’ project in his two novels seems to be, finally, the rejection of black male bisexual behavior. In his review of Just As I Am, Canaan Parker praises the novel for its efforts to deal with male bisexuality: “The subject of bisexuality gives Just As I Am some needed weight - it is a relatively unexplored issue in contemporary gay fiction - and presumably works as well to broaden the cross-over market potential of the novel...” (20). Surprisingly, however, Parker mentions nothing about the racial and religious issues addressed in the novel. Addressing how the novel treats these issues would help explain why the novel ultimately rejects black bisexual behavior as an acceptable lifestyle. Indeed, by the end of the novel, Raymond finally admits that he is not bisexual, but “gay,” and the only truly unpleasant character portrayed in the novel is Basil, a black, closeted, bisexual football player, who is represented with little redeeming features. Perhaps another reason for Harris’ rejection of male bisexuality reflects his efforts to find a larger market for his work. Parker aptly remarks about Just As I Am that it is “a very commercial novel, both in style and content” (20). Both of Raymond’s parents as well as his best friend seem too good to be true. Indeed, in Invisible Life, when Raymond finally discloses his homosexuality to his father, his father gulps and then easily accepts Raymond. At the end of the novel, when Raymond has returned home following Candance’s death, his mother quietly assures him that she loves him unconditionally. When Raymond finally reveals his bisexuality in Just As I Am to Jared, the gorgeous white man he has been quietly worshipping, who also happens to be straight, Jared expresses no other emotions but instant acceptance. In Part Two, Raymond introduces Jared to Kyle, and though Kyle has physically deteriorated and looks like the classic “AIDS victim,” deathly thin and covered with KS lesions, Jared does not hesitate but instantly begins caregiving to Kyle.

       Steven Corbin’s A Hundred Days From Now, published in 1993 by Alyson, is the only primary AIDS novel that centers on the experiences of gay men of color and their experiences of AIDS. The novel traces the course of a love relationship between the protagonist, Dexter, a struggling Hollywood screenwriter, who is black, openly gay and HIV+, and his lover, Sergio, an extremely wealthy, white-looking Mexican American, who is a closeted, HIV+ gay man. The novel presents the story as a flashback, framed by this present time of Dexter’s loss, aloneness and life with asymptomatic HIV disease. Within this frame, the narrative traces an apocalyptic AIDS narrative, from the time that Dexter and Sergio first meet, through the wonder and joys of their romance, to Sergio’s discovery of KS, which switches his HIV+ status to AIDS, to his eventual hospitalization, and then to his death. This all takes place over a period of one year. In the course of their relationship, Dexter is forced to confront issues of class, race, homophobia and culture, all of which complicate the power balance of the relationship and which eventually lead Dexter to leave Sergio three months before Sergio dies of AIDS-related complications. Throughout the novel, Dexter focuses on his lover’s AIDS. Only once does Dexter dwell on his own HIV status, late at night, as he listens to a clock ticking, trying to fall asleep:

       Tick... tick... tick...

       This is what he heard inside himself. The ticking of a bomb that could possibly explode inside him, succeeded by an aftermath of symptoms and opportunistic infections. Though he had not thought much about it recently - which was just as well, since he welcomed distraction - it dawned on Dexter that, in a number of years he could be in Sergio’s predicament, living, breathing, and battling Sergio’s illness. (186)

Though the novel does not end in death like so many other AIDS novels, neither does it end with sentimental, cliched messages of hope for Dexter. Seven months have passed. Dexter is alone. His lover is dead. He is broke. His request for money from Sergio’s family has been rejected, though at Sergio’s funeral they had previously offered to help. Dexter’s dog, Bigger, has left a pile of dog shit on the floor. Dexter is trying to get on with life: “Seven months. That’s how long it had been. Seven months since Sergio’s death. And Dexter was still reliving the nightmare, trying to climb out of the abyss it had plunged him into, attempting to piece together the fragments of his former life and get on with the business of living, the bitter aftertaste of the nightmare lingering in his mouth still” (219).

       There are a few American AIDS novels that describe AIDS in other places than the United States. Science fiction and medical thriller AIDS novels like Ray Buck’s The Master Cure and Aragam Subbarao’s The Riddle of AIDS have portrayed Africa as a site for nefarious AIDS experiments. Several more recent AIDS novels published in the United States have described the plight of people living with AIDS in other countries. Published in 1994, Patricia Powell’s A Small Gathering of Bones describes gay life in Jamaica during the late 70’s and how a character named Ian is suffering from what at the time was an unidentified, mysterious set of ailments. Terese Svoboda’s Cannibal, which was also published in 1994 and which won a literary award, describes the American white female narrator’s experiences of traveling in Africa and mentions the decimation of AIDS in a particular African village. Finally, Tibbie Kposowa’s Silence that is not Golden, published in 1995, is set in a west African country and describes how AIDS has impacted the elite, heterosexual communities of that country. All of these novels are framed in such a way that though they may often contain apocalyptic AIDS narrative strands, these strands do not infect and destroy the larger narrative frameworks.

5.9 Silence: AIDS Novels and Female PWA's

       Though women have composed a portion of the AIDS epidemic from the beginning, and though more and more women, particularly women of color, are living with HIV disease as the epidemic continues, there are extremely few novels that focus on the experiences of these women. Before 1992, there were only two novels that briefly referred to the experiences of women of color and AIDS. In his description of a multiculturally composed AIDS support group in Afterlife, Paul Monette briefly describes several women with AIDS, including Charlene, a poor black woman who contracted AIDS from a drug-using boyfriend. Her children provide her with a reason to continue fighting for life. Toward the end of E. Lynn Harris' Invisible Life, Candance, a young black woman is abruptly diagnosed with full-blown AIDS and then dies. In many of the novels about gay men living with AIDS, when there are female characters portrayed, their depictions are often problematically simple and reiterate cultural stereotypes about women as madonnas or whores, or as Katie Hogan describes them, “as either the site of disease and pathology, or as a symbol of affect and virtue” (84). Most of the AIDS novels portray women as versions of the cultural stereotype of the “Ministering Angel,” in which “women are cast as caretakers and nurterers of men and children, as if their genuine activity in life is their self-sacrificing service to others” (Hogan 85). Hogan notes that “Rarely, if ever, do we encounter richly developed, autonomous female characters who are themselves at risk for HIV infection - unless the female character can be depicted as an ‘innocent’ (read asexual) victim” (85). Their caretaking, however, is not enough to save their loved ones, because the narratives of these novels depict AIDS as a death sentence, tracking the apocalyptic AIDS narrative to end in death.

       The earliest published American AIDS novel to describe a woman contracting HIV challenges Hogan’s assertion that there are only “innocent” female characters in AIDS literature. Sharon Mayes' Immune was published in 1987 by the small, New Rivers press. The novel consists of four parts with the first three attempting to uncover why Suzanne, a virologist who had been studying the AIDS virus, has apparently committed suicide by drowning in the ocean. We follow these parts through the point of view of her lover, Chris, and his reading of her diary, which he has found at the beach where her body is missing. The final section of the novel moves back in time to the events immediately prior to Suzanne’s suicide and are told from her point of view. This section confirms that she had just tested HIV+, which explains her motivations for committing suicide, and it ends with the description of her drowning in the ocean. From the very opening scene of the novel, Suzanne is not represented as “innocent.” Indeed, if anything, she seems more like the stereotype of woman as pathological and “guilty” for her desires. As he searches the beach, Chris remembers her: “Once when they were making love on this beach and he was about to explode into her, she stopped moving with him. She taunted him playfully, ‘I’ve got you now; I’ll never set you free’” (6). Her words invoke images of the desire-ridden, all-devouring, pathological monster-female. Her words also ring prophetically true, when all of the other primary characters converge at the beach at the end of Part Three and realize that she was diseased (had HIV) and could have infected all of them, since they were all sexually connected with her. Suzanne is definitely not a “Ministering Angel,” with her addiction to consume prescription drugs, alcohol and sex. Indeed, immediately before she commits suicide, we discover that Suzanne cannot be a mother: “The botched abortion that left her sterile...Simone de Beauvoir had written she had only one regret about her life and that was never having had a child. Well, she’d always agreed with Simone” (253). Without a child, there is no reason for Suzanne to remain living. Mayes’ portrayal of Suzanne fits the “guilty” stereotype of desiring, acting women. Rather than let AIDS kill her, Suzanne kills herself, but the effect of this is the same, apocalyptically terminating the life of the novel as well as that of the protagonist. As discussed earlier, both gay and straight critics have criticized the novel. Straight audiences have dislike the “filth” Mayes describes. Gay audiences have disliked the depiction of Suzanne’s character, both for its sexuality as well as its failure of nerve to face an HIV+ diagnosis.

       In direct contrast to the negative reception of Mayes’ novel was the large popular appeal of another early AIDS novel, Alice Hoffman's At Risk. Published by the major house, Putnam’s Sons, it has been one of the best selling AIDS novels and has received a great deal of critical attention. The novel invokes the classic apocalyptic AIDs narrative, describing the course of four months in the lives of a suburban family, the Farrells, during which the eleven-year-old daughter, Amanda, is diagnosed with full-blown AIDS in August, gets sicker and then dies in November. She had apparently contracted HIV when she had had a blood transfusion five years previously and the novel describes how the family deals with the tragedy. Does the novel through its depiction of “mainstream” Americans confronted by AIDS help increase public concern and empathy for people with AIDS? Or, does the novel merely reinact the prevailing cultural silences with respect to the experiences of those people most affected by AIDS? In their reception to the novel, critics are divided along these lines. On the one hand, Judith Pastore counters the criticisms of the novel made by gay critics by arguing that the novel has educational value: “...the criticism that Hoffman is playing it safe by writing about a white, middle-class child - an ‘innocent victim’ who is bound to elicit more sympathy than gays or drug addicts - to some extent misses the value of the novel as a tool for educating the general public” (46). She goes on to say that though the novel does little “to combat the mounting homophobia in our society...Both Amanda and Brian as PWAs can elicit general sympathy without unduly disturbing conventional attitudes” (47).  Joseph Dewey, on the other hand, disagrees and scathingly attacks the novel, saying,

Instead of confronting AIDS, Hoffman manipulates its impact as a hot buzzword. Forsaking the tensions caused by AIDS on the margins of society to register the impact within the settled middle, Hoffman sanitizes the epidemic, making it reader-friendly. Not surprisingly, her book received enormous critical attention and significant sales, including movie rights. (27)

       In her more recent feminist analysis of At Risk, Katie Hogan nuances these opposing criticisms of the novel and focuses on how the novel represents Amanda’s mother, Polly, as a “Ministering Angel,” caretaking for her sick child. She disagrees with Pastore’s assertions that the novel portrays how everyone is “at risk” for AIDS, writing, “On the contrary, HIV and AIDS continues to highlight the inequalities among various communities, genders, races, classes and sexualities; HIV infection and AIDS illuminates injustices that are deeply disturbing and culturally reinforced” (87). Her central argument supports that of this chapter, namely, that issues of gender, race, class, culture contribute to prevailing silences in AIDS literature about the experiences of particular populations and AIDS. As she says in her criticisms of how Amanda’s mother, Polly, is represented, “At Risk is not interested in presenting complex women characters who experience genuine and clear sexual arousal, making women’s sexuality almost invisible” (89). She also disagrees with how gay critics have read the novel, commenting on David Leavitt’s review that “Curiously, however, while Leavitt exposes the politics of Amanda’s character in terms of gay male sexuality, he seems  unaffected by the invisibility of women’s sexuality and complex experiences with HIV or AIDS, or the ways in which gender and sexuality get constructed” (88).

       Like At Risk, Perri Klass' Other People's Children, also depicts a “Ministering Angel,” this time in the figure of the first-person female narrator, Amelia, who is a well-to-do pedatrician. Not only is she caregiver to her own middle-class, white family, which includes herself, her husband and her preschool-age son, and which she does not consider to be at risk for AIDS, but she is also caregiver to many children at the hospital where she works, including a poor, black boy, Darren, who is about the same age as her own son and who is sick and ultimately dies of AIDS. The novel does not smoothly slide over these contrasts in whom Amelia cares for. Indeed, Amelia reflects at some length about them. In her reading of the novel, Hogan praises its portrayal of Amelia as a complex female character, but Hogan feels the novel does not go far enough: “...Klass’ novel sadly portrays Amelia Stern’s witnessing and critical thinking in the most privatized, isolated manner” (92). Hogan adds that “Amelia’s retreat [from thinking about these issues] suggests that when an unusually thoughtful, talented, skilled, creative and educated woman begins to piece together the systems of sexism, racism and classism, she is reigned back in with the threat of loss” (92). As with At Risk, this novel traces an apocalyptic AIDS narrative with respect to a child living with AIDS, portraying the deterioration and death of Darren from AIDS-related complications. These two novels hearken back to nineteenth-century sentimental conventions of portraying the tragedy and pathos of dying children (ala Little Nell and Little Eva).

       To date there is only one AIDS novel that focuses on the experiences of a woman living through the entire course of her HIV disease, from testing HIV+ to development of full-blown AIDS.[8]  Alfred Ingegno's Shared Legacy appeared in 1992 and was published by the small press, Birch Brook Impressions. The novel is dedicated to the memory of Olmitella Ingegno, though it is unspecified of what relation this woman was to the author. The novel tells a straightforward story of a white, middle-class woman’s love life, which is complicated by HIV. The novel opens with Sharyn Goldberg, an attractive insurance agent who works in New York City, finding out that a series of routine blood tests reveal that she is HIV+. When she feels empowered enough to reveal her HIV status to her boyfriend, Gerard, he reveals that he had previously had sex with a woman whose bisexual boyfriend had died of AIDS. He admitted that he'd tested negative until about six months ago, when he tested positive but he'd been afraid to tell her. She throws him out. Part One ends with her hearing from a friend that Gerard has died of PCP. Part Two begins after several celibate years have passed and with Sharyn meeting a new boyfriend, Rod. In order to insist they practice safer sex without revealing her HIV status, she lies to him, telling him that she has a lethal allergy to semen. Unfortunately, Rod is a jerk. When she confronts him in bed with another woman, he attacks and rapes her without using a condom. She then reveals that he may have been exposed to HIV. Part Three involves the trial in which Rod presses charges against Sharyn for having infected him. Part Three ends with the case being thrown out. In Part Four, Sharyn encounters trouble with her company because of her HIV status, though the difficulties are finally resolved. Part Five describes Sharyn's diagnosis of full-blown AIDS when she is hospitalized for PCP. While in the hospital, Rod comes to plead forgiveness and reveals that he is now HIV+. She quits her job to reduce the stress on her life. Though the novel begins tracing the apocalyptic AIDS narrative, it does not end with her death. Instead, the novel ends on a positive note, with Sharyn at her birthday party surrounded by her friends, one of whom is a doctor involved in looking for an AIDS cure. The novel focuses on the private lives of its characters and, besides describing Sharyn’s job difficulties, does not tackle many of the cultural, political and economic issues influencing the AIDS epidemic.

       Unlike Shared Legacy, Charlotte Watson Sherman's novel Touch addresses some of these other issues. Touch was recently published in 1995 by the large publishing house, Harper/Collins. Touch is also the first novel to focus on the experiences of a woman of color learning she is HIV+ and the novel traces in complex psychological detail her coming to terms with her HIV status. Rayna is a 35-year-old, middle-class, black woman, who quit lawschool and an unsupportive husband to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. The novel opens with an art reception that she and her friend, Novel, are putting on to celebrate the opening of a new AIDS hospice in Seattle. 

       From the very beginning of the novel, Rayna is uncomfortable with thinking about AIDS. She notices the members at the reception who look like they have full-blown AIDS: "Rayna began to appreciate the reality of the chilly specter of AIDS circling the room, reaching into each corner, its evil dust swirling in every nook and crevice, brushing its icy fingertips across the heated temples of too many, searching for more, too many more to clutch to its empty bosom" (5). In her review of the novel, Jill Petty has aptly praised Sherman’s skill as a writer: “Sherman has a gift for rendering the peculiar inner dialogues that personal crises can force” (79). The first chapter foreshadows Rayna’s own involvement with HIV disease and her fear of AIDS. Her feelings about AIDS peak at the end of the chapter, when she is confronted by her friend Ricky’s AIDS and her own feelings:

       She had been afraid of Ricky. Afraid to touch him, afraid to be near him, breathing the air he breathed.

       A snake's tail of shame coiled itself inside her belly. She could feel its poison sinking deep inside her bones, oozing into the core of her soul. (18, my emphasis)

The rest of the novel plays upon the word, “touch,” which is also the title of the novel. AIDS touches Rayna's life, first at the art reception. Then, there is a demonstration by angry women of color with HIV and AIDS outside the hospital where Rayna works as a crisis-line counselor. Called the Prejudice Posse, they protest how the hospital has dealt with one of its patients, Latosha Briggs, a poor black pregnant HIV+ woman, who has been coerced by one of the hospital's doctors, Dr. Van Horne, to have an abortion and who has been sterilized by Dr. Van Horne without her knowledge or consent. The angry demonstraters confront Rayna on her way to work, accusing her of collusion with the racism and AIDSphobia of the hospital. One of the women corners Rayna and explains why people with HIV crave life affirmation. Again, the theme of touch is emphasized:

 “We got this thing in our blood and they wanna deny us life, and the right to keep making life. For some of us, that's all the power we want. The length of our lives has already been cut to the quick... They're afraid to work with us, to sit by us, to breathe the same air we breathe. They're even afraid to touch us. Afraid to touch us in a time when we need human touch most of all.” (56)

       When Rayna subsequently learns of her own HIV+ status, she spends the rest of Part One of the novel wrestling with the doom she feels because HIV has touched her and with how to conceal her HIV+ status from her friends and family members. Part Two of the novel then describes how she reaches out to her family and friends and learns to let them touch her. She also refuses to simply be a victim to AIDS. She reaches out to touch others, becoming an activist by helping to expose Dr. Van Horne's horrific practices and by volunteering at a home for AIDS orphans, Dancing Unicorn House. Through the course of the novel, Rayna also develops a loving, sexual relationship with a black HIV- man, Theodore, whose own brother has died of AIDS. Together, they develop the pleasures of touching each other sexually in the age of safer sex, which she describes in one of her diary entries:

       Theodore touches me. I told Novel. Told her we are still able to be intimate. How I've grown to love surgical gloves and have found a certain kind of sexiness in latex. A little lube inside a rubber can go a long way. Told her Glyde dental dams do feel like silk stockings.

       All it takes is an imagination. And Theodore has plenty of that. (201)

Rayna’s family, friends and lover unite together in their support of her. Sharon Wilkins in her review of Touch has found this universal sympathy unrealistic: “...much of the story is unrealistic: all of Rayna’s friends (including her lover) are supportive, caring, and nonjudgmental. In the real world, it often isn’t that easy” (39). I would argue that Sherman’s intent in this novel is to represent Rayna’s own interior, psychological development and to illustrate how the issues of support, caring and acceptance are qualities that Rayna, herself, must learn, not the people around her. The novel does end with an AIDS death. Not with Rayna's, but with that of a 10-yr-old black girl named Anika, who Rayna has been planning to adopt from Dancing Unicorn House. The final scene takes place at Anika's burial, with Rayna surrounded by her friends. Rayna’s last diary entry articulates her completed coming-to-terms with her HIV status and with her enhanced understanding of the importance of community: “... I do know this: no matter what, when I come to that jumping-off place where the two branches of this life meet and separate, and I step off into air, those who love me will be there, holding my hand, urging me forward and loving me, as I step from the light of this world into the darkness of the next” (214). As with many of the other AIDS novels, Touch ends somewhat sentimentally with the protagonist learning an important lesson from her experience with AIDS.

5.10 Young Adult Novels: AIDS and Adolescents

       The young adult AIDS novels tend to fall into three categories: those novels that deliver a moral message about prejudice and that try to defuse AIDSphobia; those novels that depict a young adult coping with the loss of a family member to AIDS, which sometimes also involves confronting the person’s homosexuality; and those novels that describe a protagonist who is a young adult dealing with living with HIV disease. Most of the novels have a didactic purpose, aiming to teach their young readers about AIDS in its different aspects, though the novels approach this task in very diverse ways. Several of the novels are aimed at a Christian audience and most of the novels describe white suburban, middle-class adolescents and their experiences of AIDS, which typically revolve around a gay relative with AIDS or another youth who acquired AIDS from a blood transfusion. Most of the authors of these books have been women. More recently, several young adult AIDS novels have appeared that have discussed the experiences of people of color and AIDS, including Gayle Roper’s Christian The Mystery of the Poison Pen and Barbara Ann Porta’s excellently orchestrated novel, Something Terrible Happened. Most of the young adult AIDS novels attempt to soften the message that AIDS is fatal and most of them do not utilize the apocalyptic AIDS narrative.

       The earliest AIDS novels all sought to combat the AIDSphobia of the time and delivered strong moral messages that a person with AIDS was not someone deserving of discrimination. Besides being the earliest young adult AIDS novel to appear in 1986, M. E. Kerr’s Night Kites is also one of the better AIDS novels. It tackles more than AIDS prejudice, describing Erick’s life one summer in which he not only combats the AIDSphobia of both his family and the summer resort community but also comes to terms with his brother’s revealed homosexuality. Other examples of early novels whose primary purpose is to educate their readers against AIDS discrimination include Miriam Cohen’s Laura Leonora’s First Amendment, Patricia Hermes’ Be Still My Heart, Martha Humphreys’ Until Whatever. Since 1992, there have been fewer novels published that focus specifically on the issue of AIDS discrimination. Perhaps this is because AIDS now occupies a less mysterious and frightening place in the general public’s cultural consciousness. Examples of these more recent novels that still deal with this issue include Judy Baer’s The Discovery, Clayton Bess’ The May Day Rampage, and Gayle Roper’s The Mystery of the Poison Pen. Interestingly, the novels by Baer and Roper focus on AIDS discrimination by Christian communities and aim to teach their Christian audiences to be more tolerant of people with AIDS. Roper’s text is particularly interesting in its additional attention to the issue of racism by white Christians toward black Christians.

       Besides combating AIDSphobia, another focus of some of the novels is the portrayal of how a young person can successfully cope with loving and sometimes losing a loved one to AIDS. These novels are more likely to invoke the apocalyptic AIDS narrative for representing someone living with AIDS. Early examples include Penny Durant’s When Heroes Die and Alida Young’s I Never Got to Say Good-bye. Many novels published since 1992 also deal with this issue, including Lee Bantle’s Diving for the Moon, Paula Fox’s complex psychological study, The Eagle’s Kite, Teresa Nelson’s Earthshine, and Barbara Ann Porta’s Something Terrible Happened. The later novels tend to be more multi-dimensional than the earlier ones, not only tackling issues of AIDS education and mourning but some also describe adolescents living with HIV disease.

       Few of the young adult AIDS novels depict protagonists actually living with AIDS. Gloria Micklowitz’s early novel, Good-bye Tomorrow, published in 1987, not only describes a teenager living with AIDS but also, unlike many of the novels which shy away from explicitly describing teenage sexuality, describes Alex and Shannon’s first sexual experiences. Unfortunately, Alex has been infected with HIV from a blood transfusion he had received several years previously and he is diagnosed with full-blown AIDS after he and Shannon have had unsafe sex. Shannon tests negative for HIV at the end of the novel. Critics have rightly complained that the novel conveys inaccurate information about AIDS. Only one novel, Fran Arrick’s What You Don’t Know Can Kill You, describes a protagonist who has become infected with HIV through sexual intercourse. Neither of these novels invokes the apocalyptic AIDS narrative structure.

5.11 Generic Boundaries and Unfinished Conclusions

       The dissertation began with a discussion of the apocalyptic narratives of the early AIDS novels which, by rendering AIDS a death sentence, compressed time. These early novels reflected the cultural perceptions of the epidemic at that time, which perceived AIDS as a swiftly striking plague, robbing beautiful young gay men of their lives. There was an urgent sense of time running out, as the years passed, more people died and no cure was found. For gay men living with HIV disease, the cultural narrative that represented AIDS as a death sentence posed a site for cultural critique. The AIDS novels of David Feinberg and Paul Monette resist the apocalyptic cultural AIDS narrative and invoke narrative strategies that demonstrate that people living with HIV disease do not have to be passive victims but can live with their condition. For many people, HIV disease has now become just that, a condition. With new developments in medical treatment, life with AIDS has been prolonged. The time of AIDS has lengthened. Recent AIDS novels reflect this sense of increased time. Though for many, AIDS still means death, the narratives of these novels do not move in a singular apocalyptic trajectory to death. Instead, their narratives are more multidimensional or more fragmented, portraying the many other people impacted by the deaths of loved ones from AIDS-related complications, and most recently, characters living indefinitely with asymptomatic HIV disease.

       Since the election of 1994, the United States has undergone a conservative backlash, from gutting both the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to repealing affirmative action laws on university campuses across the nation. The political rhetoric of this backlash villainizes the poor, targetting "welfare mothers," often depicting them as uneducated black women with too many children. At the same time, however, with Tom Hanks' Academy Award for his role in Philadelphia and with the positive reception both to Greg Louganis' admission of being HIV+ and to his recently published autobiography, the nation seems to have grown slightly more knowledgeable and tolerant of white gay men with respect to AIDS. However, even with Magic Johnson's admission of his HIV+ status and with Arthur Ashe’s death from AIDS-related complications, there has been a prevailing silence with regards to the epidemic as it has spread through populations of people of color. Regardless of whether or not this silence is due to inherent lack of concern for the plight of people of color by the public arena or due to the perception that AIDS is now only one of many chronic problems plaguing the nation and therefore less deserving of the spotlight, AIDS is rarely depicted in its effects on people of color.

       Even though more and more AIDS novels appear every year, for the most part, they have reflected this silence. Does this silence challenge the central tenet of this dissertation, that AIDS novels can be a form of cultural critique? Throughout the dissertation, I have argued, no. It does seem, however, that AIDS novels do not perform radical cultural critique. As I have discussed in this chapter, the politics and economics of producing, publishing and marketing novels have had a direct impact on which AIDS novels have made it to the bookshelves of bookstores and libraries across the nation. Obviously, some novels (for many other reasons besides subversively portraying AIDS) will never make it into the public light. Additionally, though novels are written and read by people from every sector of the population, they still predominantly occupy a place as a middle-class cultural form, cheaper and more widely available than theatre tickets but requiring at least a semi-literate audience. As such, they have tended to reflect mainstream aspects of middle-class sensibility and experience (either straight or gay), and there are silences about aspects of sexism, racism, poverty, drug addiction, prostitution and alternative sexualities. For the many injecting drug users, their sexual partners, the prison inmates, the prostitutes, who died of AIDS-related diseases in the first decade of the epidemic in the United States, there are no AIDS novels that describe their life experiences and this silence will probably remain.

       AIDS novels have thus remained a limited form of cultural critique, primarily targeting the apocalyptic totalitarianism of medical science and homophobia as well as testifying to the impact of the epidemic on personal lives. As time moves on, however, new AIDS novels have appeared that tackle a broader range of AIDS issues. As we have seen, E. Lynn Harris' Invisible Life and Just as I Am, Steven Corbin's A Hundred Days From Now, Charlotte Watson Sherman's Touch and Barbara Ann Porta's Something Terrible Happened have all appeared in the last five years and have begun to map a new area for AIDS novels, describing the experiences of people of color and AIDS. With the passage of time, not only has the genre of AIDS novels grown, but it has developed and deepened its coverage of AIDS-related issues. Gay and lesbian authors, straight authors, novelists of color, even well-known, extensively published authors like John Berger and Reynolds Price have all sought to represent their understanding of AIDS in the form of a novel. The swift, deadly striking of the early AIDS epidemic, which lent a rushed urgency to the early AIDS novels has lessened. Many recent AIDS novels reflect this sense of more time, being more carefully crafted, presenting more complex narrative structures (see, for example, Dale Peck's Martin and John and Berger's To the Wedding), as well as telling more complicated stories about AIDS. Until a cure for AIDS has been found, however, it would seem that the apocalyptic AIDS narrative will continue to exert an influence on the narratives of American AIDS novels.

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Notes

[1]. The most common forms of HIV transmission include infected male ejaculate coming into contact with broken membranes of another person’s anus or vagina or from an infected needle being used to inject drugs.

[2]. Not all black gay men are without community, however. For example, a group called Us Helping Us: People Into Living was founded by black gay men in the Washington, D.C. area in order to support black gay men living with HIV disease (Rosin 23).

[3]. I use the term “Hispanic” to refer to people of Spanish origins and to those places colonized by the Spanish. Unlike “Latino,” Hispanic is a gender-neutral term.

[4].  Unlike the epidemiologic trends here in the U.S. which have shifted away from financially elite white gay men, in African countries like Uganda, HIV still exists primarily in the "elite" classes and is a heterosexual disease. Instead of homophobia, there is discrimination against the "elites." (For a discussion of this, see Barnett and Blaikie).

[5]. Corbin’s criticisms of the racist assumptions about black literature reflect his personal experience and frustrations as a black gay novelist trying to find places willing to publish his work. Though I think he has an important point about the hurdles to publishing black gay novels, I disagree with his easy totalizing of these difficulties to include all black literature. Novels by and about black women have continued to find mass appeal, including Terry McMillan’s recent smash-hit, Waiting to Exhale, about which a popular Hollywood film was recently made. Novels by and about black men, whether gay or straight, have not fared as successfully.

[6]. Corbin rightly criticizes several “gay” anthologies for their failure to include any work by contemporary black gay men, besides the canonized token, James Baldwin (“White Men” 14).

[7]. Melvin Dixon died of AIDS-related complications in 1992.

[8]. Alejandro Morales’ The Rag Doll Plagues also includes a description of a woman living through the course of HIV disease. The novel is composed of three sections, linked by their sharing of the same narrator, though each section is separated by about 200 years time. The central section, which is set in the contemporary period, describes the narrator, Gregory’s love relationship with an “innocent” AIDS victim, a woman who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion. Morales’ representation of Sandra enacts the apocalpytic AIDS narrative for this section of the novel and ends sentimentally with Gregory’s undying love for her: “While I looked upon the faces that cared for Sandra, she gently expired. She, Sandra, who entered, changed and loved my life exactly as I loved hers, who called from deep within my soul an ancient tear that would forever tast to me like our love, the tear both of us shared at that final moment of her passage” (129).

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Lisa Garmire's Home Page

Resisting the Apocalypse: Telling Time in American Novels about AIDS, 1982-1992"
(UCSB English Department Doctoral Dissertation 1996, Lisa Garmire)

• Chapter 1: AIDS Novels in Context
• Chapter 1: Works Cited
• Chapter 2: The Apocalyptic AIDS Novel: Facing It: A Novel of AIDS
• Chapter 2: Works Cited
• Chapter 3: Resisting the Apocalypse: David Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion
• Chapter 3: Works Cited
• Chapter 4: Borrowing Time in Paul Monette's Afterlife and Halfway Home
• Chapter 4: Works Cited
• Chapter 5: Silent Apocalypse: Race, Class, Gender, Heterosexual AIDS
• Chapter 5: Works Cited
• Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography of AIDS Novels, 1982-1992
• Selected Bibliography of AIDS Novels 1993+