Recently in HIV/AIDS Category

The assigned reading for today's class was from Eric Rofes' Reviving The Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men's Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic. What I really took away from this book was an understanding of some of the ways in which queer activism was coopted by the dominant discourse as a result of AIDS. After the gay liberation of the seventies, there has been a repathologization of queer sex under the guise of medical expertise and safe-sex education.

One example is the way safe-sex education and HIV prevention campaigns often prresent gay male sexuality as a force that needs to be brought under control (for our own good and for that of society). We are "transgressive bad boys." Heterosexual resistance to and ignorance of safer sex practices are winked at (after all, unprotected vaginal sex is only natural, and necessary to the reproduction of the species), while unprotected anal sex (between men) is treated with moral opprobrium.

Tied up in all of this is the fact that even queer men, especially younger men who never experienced the political activism of the sixties and seventies, have a tendency to substitute "love" for sex in their political discourse. Queer rights and queer marriage are not about the right to love one another — we have been loving one another for centuries and no system of powers can stop that. They are about our right to fuck, about the unchaining of our erotic power. Endless prattle about equal love (of which I am myself guilty) obscures what it is we are really fighting for, and what it is that heteronormative discourse so virulently seeks to suppress.

We began the class itself, however, on an entirely different note. Jim Mitulski and Penny Nixon shared stories concerning their recent visit to the Mother of Peace AIDS orphanage in rural Zimbabwe. An interesting and powerful juxtaposition of issues and images... The cultural apartheid brought about by AIDS in post-Reagan America, contrasted with the physical apartheid of gender and poverty in post-revolutionary Zimbabwe.

Today we looked at HIV/AIDS as an ethical issue. My reflection today, however, is on the significance of the "AIDS years" both for MCC and for me personally.

The "AIDS years" in the US queer community and MCC were those years when the pandemic raged unchecked by life-extending treatments — that period of fifteen years from the beginning of the pandemic in 1981 to the advent of protease inhibitor treatments in 1996. One of the cities worst affected was San Francisco.

Rev. Jim Mitulski was pastor of MCC San Francisco from 1986 to 2001, during which time he officiated at over 500 funerals for those who died from AIDS-related illness. One part of Jim's story that struck me was his sense that God gathered MCC together in the 60s and 70s so that there would be a church for such a time as this. MCC (especially MCC-SF) became known both within the queer community and in ecumenical circles as the Church with AIDS.

Jim talked about the authenticity of worship and community experienced during those years. The church with AIDS was not an unjoyous place. It was "a community where it didn't matter what you looked like, in the midst of a community where appearance was everything."

In both The Samaritan's Imperative and The Church With AIDS, we read about the joyful and spirit-filled AIDS healing services, and how experiencing these moved ecumenical leaders to reflect on the meaning of the marks of the "true church" in a time of AIDS. What does it mean to be "one, holy, catholic and apostolic"? MCC embodied, and continues to embody, these marks in its witness, worship and community.

The readings for today were about heroic myth and transformed consciousness. Dying and rising gods, ritual shamanism, and all that. It was all a bit dry and academic for my liking (perhaps it reminded me too much of those know-it-all anthropologists I had to read for my honors class in religious studies all those years back in university).

In class we devoted far too much time to two exercises that annoyed the hell out of me (way more than they should have). These revolved around identifying the queer stories in scripture and in the queer/postmodern 'canon' (you know, the kind of pop culture analysis that is grist for the mill in any number of college cultural studies courses). Here again I could feel the gravitational pull of so many heads about to disappear up their own asses.

Sometimes I want to shout, "hey, that cigar really is just a cigar, nothing more!" The Samaritan woman just had a bad life, she ain't no lesbian! But on reflection I realized it is very easy for someone with my healthy level of self-acceptance (and relative privilege) to be critical of the need for validation. It is important that people find their stories in scripture, even if I don't agree with their reading of it. Give me Queer Eye for the Good Book over Left Behind theology any day!

During one discussion I was misunderstood as defending a primitive resuscitation theory of Christ's resurrection (as opposed to the classic liberal view of it as symbolic or mythical). I need to state that I do not believe in the literal resuscitation of dead bodies (any more than I believe in snakes and asses that strike up casual conversations).

There are many different views of the resurrection of Christ. Some take resurrection quite seriously as a real event in cosmic time, without relying on the concept of the resuscitation or revival of corpses. You can be liberal/progessive and even queer in your theology without having to compare the resurrection of Christ to the memory of Judy Garland. Resurrection is one of the great mysteries of faith; it doesn't have to be explained away or downgraded to a 'living memory'.