The Testimonials

Barbara Peabody was among the very first to chronicle in journal form her experiences in caring for her son, sick and dying with AIDS. In The Screaming Room^{[ 6]} she describes how her gay son, Peter VonLehn, aspired to a career in opera and theater but worked mostly as a waiter in New York. She remembers him as bright, inquisitive, musical, introspective, intellectual, imaginative, humorous, and independent. After being diagnosed with AIDS in December 1983, Peter returned from New York to live with his mother in San Diego. Peabody tells of tending her son on the good days and the bad. In this account small events loom large against the confines and constraints of Peter's illness; as a result, her story has much in common with the often slow, tedious, and oppressive narratives of prison life. There were sleepless nights and intractable diarrhea, reclusive behavior and loss of memory, endless trips to doctors and hospitals, spinal taps and drug regimens, the loss of sight, and finally the watch at the deathbed. There is pain and suffering on every page of this book. At Peter's death there is nothing left for Peabody but tears: "I am just another mother who has lost her child, who holds his empty, wasted body in her arms and mourns, grieves, cries for loss of part of her own body and soul."^[7] But for all the suffering, for all the costs she paid in caring for him, the book remains nevertheless a memorial to Peter and to her love of him. And despite the suffering they both endured, she never hoped for his death.

Andrew Holleran's novel Dancer from the Dance appeared in the late seventies and told the tale of drag queen Sutherland and his handsome protégé Malone as they spent their lives looking for love in Manhattan's nights, discos, parks, and bathhouses, at summer parties in the Pines, in drugs, in any pair of eyes, really, that offered a promise of repose. Instead, now, of stories about long nights, extravagant parties, and the art of cruising which were integral to his Dancer and the later Nights in Aruba ,^[8] Holleran writes mostly about the consequences of the HIV epidemic, about hospitals and funerals, about the deeply felt loss of friends, about the loss of the period he described in his haunting first novel, a period that looks to be gone forever, felled by the most archaic form of life, a virus. Nostalgia permeates these essays, which continue to appear in Christopher Street , nostalgia for the forms of intimacy and belonging which the epidemic has closed off to gay men.

Holleran also offers reflections on the all too many men in his circle who have died. There is a remembrance of Cosmo, thus nicknamed for his worldly air.^[9] He and Holleran became friends in Philadelphia. Cosmo had a mania for puns as well as a wicked sense of humor. "He seemed, on his ten-speed with his knapsack, utterly independent, as if all he needed in life was a combination lock, a Penguin paperback, and a can of V-8 juice." After a separation of a few years, Holleran dialed Cosmo's number only to be told that Cosmo was dead with AIDS. "Cosmo was not like everyone else," Holleran says, "Cosmo was special." "Cosmo loved life, treasured his body, was only thirty-five, succeeded in his career, and had much to look forward to." Holleran is grieved to observe that despite the death of a person so much to be treasured that New York and the world at large could proceed as if Cosmo were utterly dispensable. The New York Times would continue to make its daily report and Chernobyl's radioactive cloud would spread westward across Europe as if there had never been a Cosmo. Though Holleran had already experienced other deaths with AIDS and knew as well as anyone that everyone dies, still he was shattered by the inexplicable death: "Cosmo's death horrified. What a waste! What an insult!" No theory could make sense of the death as a moral judgment, as the consequence of self-hate, the inability to love, or even shame at being gay: "His death does not illuminate anything that leaves us morally edified, or superior, or enlightened—it was just part of the vast human waste that is occurring; just mean and nasty."

Holleran also remembers Ernie Mickler, author of the well-known White Trash Cooking . Holleran points out that Ernie was funny, had high spirits, nerve, wit, style, and stories to tell. Mickler planned the details of his funeral down to the menu to be served at the luncheon afterward, and Holleran finds himself feeling helpless at not being able to thank his friend for this last kindness. He finds the world emptier without Ernie even as the world seems to bespeak his presence: "The day is hazy and warm, the river flat and still, the woods soft and empty, and the whole afternoon, somehow, like the lunch itself, part of Ernie."^[10] Holleran also recalls Eddie, whose life Holleran found essential to the vitality of New York. Eddie lived nocturnally, was in the clubs almost every night, knew the details of New York, knew where to get a Shiatsu massage, to buy cowboy boots, to see a strip show near Times Square. Eddie unfailingly enjoyed everything new in the city: nightclubs, phone systems, winter coats. Holleran has the impression that Eddie got AIDS only because,

ironically, he was the first to do everything. After Eddie's death, Holleran finds, the city is less vital even as, somehow, Eddie remains present in spite of his death.^[11] This refrain recurs in much writing about people who have died with AIDS: death does not extinguish personal presence. On the contrary, death and absence may confirm its very existence and importance.

Holleran writes about many more deaths besides. There was the death of Charles Ludlam, the founder of the Ridiculous Theater Company. Holleran is lavish in his praise here: Ludlam was actor, playwright, genius, anarchist, madman. He was loony as Rasputin and funny beyond accounting.^[12] There is also a reflection on O., sick with AIDS, less known to the world but worldly nevertheless, especially as a host par excellence. Facing O.'s likely death, Holleran wonders how it is possible to thank him for the many years of wit, wine, conversation, laughter, happiness. How is it possible to make sense of so substantial a man laid waste by this disease?^[13] There is an account of Michael, who came from a good family, went to Cornell, kept a garden, was a talented architect, and, before the sickness, was concupiscent and lascivious. What, Holleran wonders, did the germs need with him?^[14] In tracing the swath of death through his friends, Holleran also memorializes the late George Stambolian, professor at Wellesley College and editor of the well-regarded Men on Men collections, as "handsome in a way faces were handsome hundreds of years ago, in Byzantium."^[15] As the dying is not over yet, one may suppose that Holleran will offer more memorials as there comes more death day after day, name after name, without end in sight. Such portraits as these put a face on the epidemic and offer a counterliterature to the discourse of medical journals where PWAs are described as patients or cases or to the discourse of the media where PWAs are still described and represented as victims and predators. These testimonials certainly give the lie to the notion that PWAs are beyond the moral community—are both unloving and unloved. Such portraits may not always "analyze" the broad cultural assumptions which encase the epidemic, but they do identify those in whose name analysis and activism go forward. One could not, after all, find Peter VonLehn or Eddie Mickler when looking at the numbers in the latest edition of the HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report from the Centers for Disease Control. As a mere assortment of diagnoses and treatments their medical charts would also be unrevealing. If there is a counter-discourse to the stereotyping and stigmatizing uses of "AIDS," it must

begin with the names and lives of those who have borne the burden of the epidemic.