into the homosexual community, that homosexuals were dying en masse as a reaction to centuries of
society’s hatred and repression of homosexuality. All I could think of when he said this was an image of
hundreds of whales that beach themselves on the coastlines in supposed protest of the ocean’s being
polluted. He continued: “People don’t die – they choose death. Homosexuals are dying of this disease
because they have internalized society’s hate…” I felt like smacking him in the head, but held off
momentarily, saying, “As far as your theory of homosexuals dying of AIDS as a protest against society’s
hatred, what about the statistics that those people contracting the disease are intravenous drug users or
heterosexually inclined, and that this seems to be increasingly the case. Just look at the statistics for this
area of the Lower East Side.” “Oh,” he said, “They’re hated too…” “Look,” I said, “After witnessing the deaths
of dozens of friends and a handful of lovers, among them some of the most authentically spiritual people I
have ever known, I simply can’t accept mystical answers or excuses for why so many people are dying from
this disease – really it’s on the shoulders of a bunch of bigoted creeps who at this point in time are in the
positions of power that determine where and when and for whom government funds are spent for research
and medical care.“
I found that, after witnessing Peter Hujar’s death on November 26, 1987 and after my recent diagnosis, I
tend to dismantle and discard any and all kinds of spiritual and psychic and physical words or concepts
designed to make sense of the external world or designed to give momentary comfort. It’s like stripping the
body of flesh in order to see the skeleton, the structure. I want to know what the structure of all this is in the
way only I can know it. All my notions of the machinations of the world have been built throughout my life on
odd cannibalizations of different lost cultures and on intuitive mythologies. I gained comfort from the idea
that people could spontaneously self-combust and from surreal excursions into nightly dream landscapes.
But all that is breaking down or being severely eroded by my own brain; it’s like tipping a bottle over on its
side and watching the liquid contents drain out in slow motion. I suddenly resist comfort, from myself and
especially from others. There is something I want to see clearly, something I want to witness in its raw state.
And this need comes from my sense of mortality. There is a relief in having this sense of mortality. At least I
won’t arrive one day at my 80
th
birthday and at the eve of my possible death and only then realize my whole
life was supposed to be somewhat a preparation for the event of death and suddenly fill up with rage
because instead of preparation all I had was a lifetime of adaptation to the pre-invented world – do you
understand what I’m saying here? I am busying myself with a process of distancing myself from you and
others and my environment in order to know what I feel and what I can find. I’m trying to lift off the weight of
the pre-invented world so I can see what’s underneath it all. I’m hungry and the pre-invented world won’t
satisfy my hunger. I’m a prisoner of language that doesn’t have a letter or a sign or gesture that
approximates what I’m sensing. Rage may be one of the few things that binds or connects me to you, to our
pre-invented world. My friend across the table says, “I don’t know how much longer I can go on… Maybe I
should just kill myself.” I looked up from the Frankenstein doll, stopped trying to twist its yellow head off and
looked at him. He was looking out the window at a sexy Puerto Rican guy standing on the street below. I
asked him, “If tomorrow you could take a pill that would let you die quickly and quietly, would you do it?”