The Good Old Bad Old Days
Three things I know for sure after living half my life under the cloud of the HIV/AIDS epidemic is that life is complicated, sex is complicated, and HIV is complicated. There are almost-countless numbers of tributary issues that flow into the ocean we find ourselves navigating, metaphorically speaking, that it can sometimes feel as if we’re trapped in a perfect storm of relentless waves of watery doom.
But I’ll be damned if the New York Times editorial didn’t dash off more than half a dozen of them (and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, to belabor the high seas references) in a mere 403 words with a thorough veneer of judgment buoying the proceedings. There’s the “problem with these young whippersnappers of today” angle; the “people are irresponsibly letting their guard down” angle; the “what is the deal with young men of color?” angle; the “gasp! people drink and do drugs” angle; and the hope-undermining “nobody even knows how long these treatments are going to work, anyway” angle.
Each of these points needs a nuanced dissection and discussion of its own, but the most important thing to get at is the underlying nostalgia for the Good Old Bad Old Days that often tints the discussion of the AIDS epidemic now, particularly across the generations in communities of men who have sex with men. When the disease was new and terrifying, the Times informs us, the gay community helped change behavior by preaching loudly against taking sexual risks. Hold the phone. Are we really going to argue that if only we could go back to when we were all terrified, to a simpler time when AIDS was all but untreatable and we buried friends who died after being horribly ill that the complicated business of prevention would all but take care of itself?
I can’t believe that anybody who actually lived through those first waves of the epidemic could ever think it would be worth going back to that time, even for what they perceive as our own good. Instead, I would argue, that it’s more important than ever for us to look toward the future with cautious optimism by sharing our stories with each other, stories of our hopes and dreams and our successes and failures and our pleasures and our problems in all their messy complication. You know, to tell the stories of our real lives now and acknowledge the possibility of a better future. That was what was at the heart of early and mid-period HIV prevention efforts, and what lies there today, often encumbered by funding dollars with strings attached. That is the true power that needs to be unleashed again.
