After the first 80 or so bodies have been wept over and fondly remembered, writes Pete, an e-mail correspondent from Canada, responding to my last article on AIDS, even that becomes, rather, a dreadful ritual to be undergone yet again, looking at the same almost-dead friends, gathered ghoul-like around the coffin of yet another victim. I would weep, but I have no more tears. After so many years I have no urge left for the battle against the disease, there is just passive blind acceptance, that the best, the brightest, and those with the most spirit, will continue to fill horrid oak boxes, and leave the rest of us alone.

It has been like living through a war in which we have designed and made our own concentration camp writes Sam, a HIV-positive man whom I first met many years ago when I moved to London who got the point of my mordant piece, (for those that missed it, it started with the ringing resolution: I want to get AIDS ), which was to highlight the part we gay men have played in our downfall most especially, those who have become infected through unsafe sex in full knowledge of the disease and how it s transmitted. Sam writes, anyone who has had their eyes half-open over the last few years will have known people who did seek out their own martyrdom with exactly the horrible detail you describe.
Trouble is, it s not the most comfortable point to hear, for those who are not robust enough to withstand the rigour of living without the security of a sexual identity. Marcus, from somewhere in the States, emails me to say that he thinks I am garbage for writing the piece, and hypocritable (sic) ignorant trailer-park trash . Delicious. Judge not lest you be judged he exhorts me, for spewing such vomit .
The downside to American political correctness, increasingly part of world culture, is that criticism of one s own tribe is seen as disloyalty, offering ammunition to the other minority groups jostling for political rights, power and influence. Marcus, who must have signed up to receive these words by email without really reading my website, accuses me in trenchant, if not pungent terms, of being in the closet, to account for my having written such hate. To be in the closet is the worst crime of all, apparently; to disavow membership of one s tribe.
There s a layer of debate missing in our culture, especially in the media, which seeks to demonise and to blame, and which sees the major problems of our society in black-and-white, linear, cause-and-effect terms. Such thinking proposes that AIDS is simply a disease of ignorance, and therefore is curable by leaflets and advertisements and education about safer sex, with plenty of condoms and lube. The same attitude posits that most crime is committed by drug addicts, so by imprisoning everyone who takes drugs, from the barons at the top of the evil empire down to the teenage pushers desperate to feed their own habit, crime will be reduced. Sadly, such an attitude can t account for each new generation of addicts, practically queueing up to take their places.
The murky chaotic truth is that, in this new century, getting infected with HIV in the Western world is mostly a self-inflicted wound amongst gay men and drug abusers, just as smokers get lung cancer, ignoring the cigarette-pack warnings. This is not to attribute blame, but to attempt to move the debate to a greater appreciation of the chaotic nature of life, and the oft-ignored power of psychological and spiritual malaise. There is always a part of human nature that seeks destruction through risky sex, alcohol, tobacco, smack, overwork, dieting, greasy fry-ups, beef on the bone, pollution, the greenhouse effect, the politics of no surrender to imperial armies or terrorists and, now, mobile phones. It s a human characteristic. But as long as we get our righteous kicks from blaming others for daring to be obvious about our deathwish, we won t learn a thing.
Decriminalising hard drugs would solve so much in our society; it would save many lives from disease, imprisonment, poverty, child abuse and misery and would decrease crime dramatically as a result, thereby improving the quality of life for many. It cannot be done for fear of letting chaos appear to win over the forces for order and stability. Government is supposed to be seen to set high moral standards, but not actually change our lives for the better. Real change involves messy compromise, and acknowledgment that high-minded principles can act as an obstacle to healthy living.
Military metaphors are hard to resist in writing about the experience of disease, such as drug addiction or HIV. But they do not serve those who are actually suffering, as Susan Sontag has written in AIDS as a Metaphor. The generation of young men who died for King and Country at the Somme still haunt our island to this day a blood sacrifice that must not go unremembered, a level of pain that is only endurable in the collective memory if it was all for a higher purpose. To seemingly dishonour them by, for example, shifting political allegiances generations later to make real peace, leaves us with the real messy truth about death no one escapes it, and its bloody rawness can t be made noble and clean. The brutality of bereavement can t be civilized away, and if we build moral, political, or philosophical structures to disguise or sanitise it, we do so at the peril of perpetuating it. To turn our grief into fuel to wage wars against, for example, cancer, AIDS, smoking, or war itself, may make us feel better in the short term, and may save lives in the long term, but our pain still has to be felt some time.
Postponing the sorrow of realising that so many young people are courting a miserable death is to enter a weirdly Faustian pact. If I redouble my efforts at alerting people to the dangers of AIDS, then I won t feel guilty for surviving, I will feel less impotent, less angry. I will remember the names of those who have died in my life and are seemingly forgotten by others, bafflingly invisible. As I m afraid I might be. I ll feel that I m doing something good, which is better than feeling something bad.
But I really want to lament, to wail, to sing a song of loss and let them go. Sacrificial lambs to the slaughter at the altar of desire or despair, it matters not, they are gone.
What is AIDS all for? What effect will the missing generations who have died of AIDS have on our world, in decades to come? Who will grieve? Who will get angry? What will change? Will anything change? What s gone wrong with our society that those who are most vulnerable and damaged as children get mangled in the dehumanising penal system, when they get caught seeking a way to numb their pain? What s gone wrong with masculinity that those who are most sensitive are destroying themselves?