E-Mail This Article to a Friend O brave new world AIDS and historical memory BY MICHAEL BRONSKI

I AM NOT EASILY shocked. In fact, these days I am hardly ever shocked. Not that the world is short on shocking developments. The sheer destructiveness of much of US foreign policy, the audacity of the Boston archdiocese in condemning civil-marriage rights for same-sex couples in the wake of its own massive cover-up of child sex abuse, and the Department of Agriculture’s (and beef industry’s) flagrant disregard for public health in its massive under-testing for mad-cow disease all spring immediately to mind. Somehow I take all this in stride as part and parcel of the way we live today. But this past fall, while teaching an undergraduate course called "Plagues and Politics: The Impact of AIDS on US Culture" at Dartmouth College, I was shocked — profoundly shocked — by the fact that only three of the 34 students in the class had any idea that AIDS was once widely regarded as a gay-male disease. As someone who lived through the AIDS epidemic, who has lost lovers and friends too numerous to count, I was literally stunned: how could this be?

As much as I had prepared for this class, it never occurred to me that the students would not share one of my own basic assumptions about AIDS, not to mention about US history. But in matters both large and small, the students had almost no concept of the relationship between AIDS and gay men. They had no idea that a homophobic stigma was once attached to AIDS. They had no idea that mainstream magazines, such as New York, routinely referred to AIDS as "the gay plague." They had no idea that William F. Buckley Jr., that most respected of moderate conservatives, in a March 18, 1986, New York Times op-ed piece called for mandatory HIV testing of gay men and for those who were HIV-positive to have this information forcibly tattooed on their buttocks. They had no idea that the religious right (as well as high-ranking officials in the Reagan administration, such as chief domestic-policy adviser Gary Bauer and Secretary of Education William Bennett, and politicians, such as US Representative William Dannemeyer of California and Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina) did its best not only to blame gay men for the growing epidemic, but to vigorously, and successfully, fight to impede government funding for research and AIDS education. But most important, they had no idea of the catastrophic effect AIDS had on the gay-male community in the United States, nor of the amazing and resilient fight the community waged against these onslaughts while dealing with massive death and unbroken mourning.

Maybe, as a friend pointed out, such ignorance of AIDS’s early years is a good thing, a sign of positive social change. After all, from the beginning of the epidemic in 1981, gay activists had insisted that AIDS was not a "gay disease" even as they were forced to fight tooth and nail for gay men affected by AIDS who were being denied basic services because of social and institutionalized homophobia. "De-gaying" of AIDS has always been tricky because, while AIDS has never been a "gay disease" in a clinical sense, for the epidemic’s first decade it was primarily gay men, and men who had sex with other men, who were affected by it. For those of us who lived through that horrifying period between the early ’80s and the early ’90s, de-gaying the disease, while welcome, would strip us of a momentous part of our history. Now that I was standing before a group of people for whom the disease had been, in fact, de-gayed, I was also standing face to face with my own ambivalence.

TEACHING CAN BE a tricky business — as I constantly discover, having tumbled into the profession only recently at the age of 50. It demands that you bring to the classroom not only your knowledge of the topic at hand, but your own relevant experience as well. But, of course, bringing your actual life into the classroom can be a recipe for disaster. After all, classroom learning is — or should be — about students exploring new material, not about the professor’s relationship to that material. In the past, when I have taught "Introduction to Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies" or "Contemporary Issues in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies," it was easy enough to bring my own experience to class without also divulging the details of my life. When discussing the history of political organizing, for example, I might find it useful to tell students about a Gay Liberation Front (GLF) meeting I attended in the early 1970s, but to talk about the specific arguments I had with fellow GLF members during those meetings or whom I went home with afterward served no pedagogical purpose. A week or so into the term, I realized that this course on AIDS was going to pose a very different challenge, for my relationship to the epidemic was far too personal, too intense, too invariably emotional for me to extricate myself from the subject’s endless dimensions. And yet, to be an effective teacher, it was imperative that I do so.

It wasn’t as though I hadn’t thought about all this ahead of time. Partly, I suppose, as a way of putting some distance between me and the material, I had originally proposed a course on AIDS and representation, an investigation into how AIDS has been addressed in film, novels, and art. But after discussion within the department, we agreed that it made sense to do a more basic AIDS 101 course, since most students — who, after all, were born in the early-to-mid ’80s — would be encountering the subject on an elementary level.

I knew immediately that teaching "Plagues and Politics" would be different from any other course I’d taught, since shortly after I agreed to teach it, I began, nightly, to dream about my lover Walta Borawski, who died of AIDS in 1994. They weren’t bad dreams — anxiety-producing or disturbing — but there they were: regular reminders burbling up from my subconscious of just how deeply embedded AIDS is in my life. Nonetheless, I made the decision while planning the class never to mention Walta or his death. When I told this to friends, they were often surprised. How could I not talk about something so integral to the subject and to me? But it was clear to me that bringing Walta’s illness (and, for that matter, the deaths of so many other men I was close to, or was friends with, or had slept with) into the classroom could inhibit students from speaking freely, in deference to my feelings and experience. That would be disastrous for the spirit of inquiry essential to learning.

But there was another reason for my deliberate reserve: for the first time in my teaching career, or for that matter in my public life as a writer and lecturer, I felt the need to protect myself. Months before the course began, I had a growing sense of unease. It was difficult to put into words: I wasn’t dreading teaching the course, I wasn’t nervous or skittish, but when I contemplated being in the classroom leading discussions about safe-sex guidelines, lack of government funding for HIV education, homophobia, opportunistic infections, HIV drug protocols, threats of quarantine, the effect of AIDS on the arts — everything I associated with the AIDS epidemic — I became overwhelmed by a nameless dread, a mysterious force I feared would render me literally speechless in class. Was I afraid of crying in class, my therapist asked? Was this two decades of accumulated grief? A possibility — aside from losing a lover of 20 years, several former boyfriends, and at least a half-dozen very close friends, I had witnessed the deaths of innumerable men I knew. I recently came across a list I once kept of friends who had died in the epidemic. By 1986 I had noted 29 names; the deaths continued, sometimes at the rate of several a month, though apparently I stopped keeping count. But the more I thought about it, I realized that it wasn’t unacknowledged grief in the face of such staggering loss that sat so darkly within me. Nor was it sadness or anger. What became clear was that, when contemplating AIDS in its earliest years, I was simply overwhelmed by history, by experience, by life.