All I ever knew of the AIDS crisis when we left the Soviet Union in 1989 was that it was an American problem and things like this do not happen to us in the good old Communist Empire. The news reels of emaciated bodies and the white sheets covering their bodies were meant to tell us that we are safe behind an Iron Curtain and the fear and shame are not ours to manage or dissect. It is for the liberal gays to sort out and it is a Darwinian problem. Russia offers lies like maggots removed from old meat and served to the masses sans steak sauce.
The cruelty of my government followed us to this new land when we arrived in 1990. I began seventh grade at an ultra-orthodox yeshiva and did not have access to my autonomy or the sight needed to actually experience the terrors and lies of the virus until I entered high school and the club scene, the drug scene, the punk rock feminist queer scene, and really, the scenes that ACT UP was responsible for creating or saving. An addendum to teevee.
My rape and sexual abuse as a child kept my underwear in knots for others to try to untie and never enter. I kept a padlock on my jean shorts and on my vintage rhinestone dog collars alike. Fashion for the sake of mean-girl advertisement. An ad about protection and failure. About resistance at any cost.
By 1995 when the CDC announced that the most people had died of the AIDS virus to date, I had taken enough ecstasy to be depleted of any good vibes and made out with or was felt up by so many girls and boys that I lost count and didn’t want to keep a tally in my diary any more. I established my virginity as defined by genitals and genitals is where I thought HIV came from and so I had to double book myself in this jail of little horrors. One washed the other until nothing was left of me or my sanitized desires. I experienced my childhood rape as a death and not dying in a non-conceptual or consensual way from there on became my best practice. My hygiene was to quarantine my pussy. The condom on cucumber in health class made me nauseous and that repulsion was going to be my safety net.
The girls who rubbed my shoulders at a rave in a warehouse in NJ tried to finger me an hour into the drugs kicking in, but I kicked them off. The boys at Tunnel wanted a blow job, but I spat back. The Everyone who liked by backless shimmer see-through dress with no bra at Limelight got the same treatment as a jam band—I plugged my ears and moved circles.
A car full of drunk boys on the way to an empty Upstate New York cottage who “joked” about gang raping me were talked out of it when I screamed that I am the slut they think I am and I have The AIDS, as they called it. The the the means over there; not me. Removed. If the object is too foul with death to touch they will throw it out of the car. At a diner near our destination they left without me. I was saved. Free to hitch back to Brooklyn.
An older boy who was trying to force-negotiate me into having sex with him even after I told him that it hurts to have things inserted inside me and I know my body enough to not go there, called his mother, a nurse, and dictated her advice to a roomful of his friends. It was my fear and lack of ability to relax that I should be working on, she said. Breathe through the pain is the answer. I asked him if he is terrified of getting a disease or if he thinks sex can kill or if he can tell me about his previous partners and their HIV status. He stopped calling me, but as he abandoned me he told me to never eat broccoli because it makes pussies stink.
Before I left my dad’s basement hovel in Bensonhurst for good he caught me bawling my eyes out listening to the testimonies that went with the plans to display the AIDS Quilt on the Washington Monument that October. I would be in college the day before I turned eighteen at the end of September. I was still a frigid bitch while being called a whore by him and every man around me. He wanted to understand why I was so upset. I was ashamed because it wasn’t a good enough reason to cry. I thought the quilt was kind of a catch-22; it fed the machine its message and absolved them of the true anger they should feel, the rage those of us who began our body’s urges with a death sentence as a firm possibility could not sum up in stitches and cloth. But I was also petty and jealous that there was a symbol, a white sheet, a marker to put over the body. I wanted a monument to my rape. I wanted a monument to my motherlessness. I wanted a monument to my tight fist of a “virginity.” I wanted a monument to him beating us, to all the violence I experienced. The Quilt was not a monument to the deafening silence I felt. It was not about me and I was a selfish pig for internalizing its lack and abundance. I could only watch a mirror pointed at the sun.
Harvey Milk was murdered the same year I was born, 1978. I have always carried this fact around me without a clear reason except for the hope of his electric energy possibly escaping into me when he expired—the troublemakers uniting.
I still call Planned Parenthood and schedule my HIV screenings after almost every new encounter I have with my padlock now clipped off and dangling off my shorts.
The Quilt continues to do something slippery to me. I am programmed to love it and I hate myself for it.
