Most At-risk Group for AIDS: Relationships or People?
My friend recently found out that his boyfriend was diagnosed with HIV, and I was surprised by how he talked about it. “HIV isn’t really a big deal anymore. You can live with it, and the government pays your rent. But it kills you psychologically.” He spoke about the idea of living with the knowledge that you already have the cause of your death within your body. Knowing that inescapable death is always approaching, like the clock ticking down to the millenium. What surprised me was his view that HIV isn’t a big deal medically, as I realized I still thought of it as an effective death sentence. The psychological impact seems strongest, however, not in the way it may affect your perception of your own life, but in how it may affect your closest personal relationships.
From a Google image search for “AIDS”
What might HIV look like if it had a different history? Divorced from politics, would AIDS look like just another cause of death? Diagnoses claim power over our lives. Heart disease and cancer, the leading causes of death, are commonly thought of as being caused by lifestyle choices, such as being overeating or smoking cigarettes. Smoking or being obese places you beneath the thumb of judgement from people around you. As you are pressured to change the way you live, biopower tightens its grasp around you. Judgement of you becomes excusable under the guise of helping you reform. HIV places you firmly in the grasp of biopower as well, but there is no hope for a cure. Societal pressure is replaced by abandon and stigma. Silence attends your living funeral, and you are blamed for your own death, a constant companion. People retract their hands, since helping a god-forsaken corpse offers few of the benefits that helping a truly living person might.
I am curious about the power relations between Prior and Louis, and Joe and Roy. Roy, versed in the language of power, is fully aware of the ways his AIDS diagnosis makes him vulnerable. Following his mantra, “Make the law, or subject to it,” (Kushner 108) Roy circumnavigates the societal implications of his disease, but still can’t avoid it. The ghost of Ethel haunts him. Roy shares his heritage with Ethel Rosenberg a Jewish American woman controversially convicted and executed for espionage during the Cold War. His visions of Ethel reflect the denial of his own subjectivity to the power influencing him. Viewing himself as the primary broker of power, the thought of seeing his own vulnerability relfected in Ethel frightens him, which is why it meant so much to him to get her executed in the first place. Seeing Ethel return as a ghost signals the manifestation of his own vulnerability through his disease. By denying Ethel’s possible innocence, he denies his own subjectivity in the world, despite his efforts to resist it.
Prior is painfully aware of his vulnerability, and does not hesitate to let Louis know how he feels about it, and what Louis’s responsibilities are. Louis is afraid of seeing Prior sick and weak, and of living with his lover’s suffering. He exercises his own power by leaving Prior, in an attempt to escape Prior’s subjectivity extending into his own.
Weston’s essay describes the view of gay people as a threat to kinship and the family unit, and of the ways in which various kinship ties within gay families and gay communities challenge the status quo of the delineated nuclear family. Maintaining close relationships with people with AIDS seems similar to this act of resistance. By giving a person what they are so regularly denied, namely attention and care, one challenges the status quo of AIDS stigmas.
Tags: AIDS, Angels in America, HIV, Kushner, Power
April 23rd, 2013 at 9:24 am
I forgot to write this in my post, but I would like to claim Act 2 Scene 6, with Joe, Roy, and Martin at the restaurant.