Will masks protect us adequately, and how much distance do I need to keep between myself and others? Can I have sex if we don’t kiss? Is it even okay to pet someone’s dog? For the HIV-positive, the questions twist in new directions. We would know much more about the virus, as years went by, but not enough to prevent the death of my partner, Wally, ten years later, in 1994, of a viral brain infection that left him half-paralyzed and childlike, a sweet man capable of laughter till the very end.Ī new health crisis, appearing almost 40 years after HIV, returns us to that same kind of psychological discomfort: Fear without knowledge. That imaginary territory vaporized when a good friend grew ill, and in a few months died on another friend’s couch. We considered ourselves lucky, followed the news, paid attention to our health, tried to have faith in the same sort of zone of safety I’m occupying now. Before that, AIDS had been a presence on the horizon, stories of men sickening and dying miserable deaths while everyone stood helpless around them, terrified of contagion. It astonishes me to think that I felt like this the first time in 1983, when my new partner and I left behind his apartment in a crumbling townhouse in Boston’s Back Bay and my sublet loft in an old piano factory in the South End and moved into half a country house south of the city. I know this may well be a useful illusion, a strategy for staying on an even keel while I can. But I’ve remained, for now, in a personal zone of relative safety. My city has been rocked by the coronavirus, and like the rest of the country we’ve come face to face with the realities of police brutality and entrenched, systemic racism. I’m healthy, no one I love is ill or has died, and I try to maintain a faith that this will not change, though I lost a colleague at work, a brilliant older scholar I liked very much but knew only a little, from exchanges at meetings and an occasional sly joke in the hallway. It’s odd to dwell in the heart of a catastrophe and feel at a distance from it too. Until just a couple of weeks ago, when new deaths sharply declined, New York City was the shellshocked epicenter of America’s nightmarish pandemic. I’m living in the molten center of a crisis, in an apartment in Chelsea, on the Lower West Side of Manhattan.
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