AIDS and the Homosexual Body

In the gay literature of AIDS, the silence of the body gives way to utter cacophony: one after the other, each organ and each part of the body becomes a source of alterations and changes, pain and suffering. The body becomes so present that it seems to be screaming for attention:

The advent of AIDS […] has literally made the body of the gay male an object of massive public curiosity and relentless cultural inquiry. His body is now widely perceived as a site of mysterious and fatal infections—a perception that has prompted its radical (re)othering and (re)medicalizing. The body has emerged as a supertext, a territory over which a bewildering number of competing medical, political, and cultural fictions seek domination. (Nelson 2)

2The body is a “supertext;”  the impact of AIDS on the body of the gay male, has two characters: 

• first, the “homosexual clone”, theorized and analyzed by artist Martin Levine, and then 
• the “AIDS clone”, created by writer David Feinberg. 

The description of those bodies in pain and of those dying bodies will demonstrate that the issue of identity (its construction and its preservation) is central to the gay literature of AIDS.

THE GAY MALE CLONE (pre-AIDS)

Levine describes the “clone”:

[The] gay clone [was] a specific constellation of sociosexual, affective and behavioral patterns that emerged among some gay men in the urban centers of gay American life [and] was the indigenous form of the urban gay enclave. (7)

points out the very strong link that exists between being gay and taking care of one's body: going to the gym is an integral part of the gay urban lifestyle; gyms are places that are as important to gay neighborhoods as bars, discos and bathhouses. The idea is to sculpt one's body:

[The clone] had a gym-defined body; after hours of rigorous body building, his physique rippled with bulging muscles, looking more like competitive body builders than hairdressers or florists. (Levine 7)

8through such a process and managed to transform his slender body into a mountain of muscles: “[Feinberg's] hours at the gym had sculpted the skinny kid into the Gay Urban Clone” (Burkett 342). A phrase was even coined to refer to the result of such intense effort:

Clones developed ‘gym bodies,’ which denoted the physique associated with weightlifters. A gym body included tight buttocks, washboard stomachs, and ‘pumped-up’ biceps and pectorals. (Levine 59)

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“Gym bodies” were ideals that were pursued by those who claimed the status of “gay clones,” 

IMPACT OF AIDS ON THE GAY MALE BODY

12It is only fair to say that the world has changed when it comes to describing the consequences of AIDS on a community that had previously glorified the body. 

• In Queer and Loathing, which dates back to 1994, David Feinberg draws a table in which he pits the “Clone Classic” (his version of Levine's “gay clone”) against the “New Clone”, which he also calls the “AIDS clone”; his observation is that in the AIDS era (which he calls the “Age of Anxiety”, as indicated in the title of the second part of his first novel Eighty-Sixed), going to the gym still takes up a lot of gay men's time:

The Clone Classic was found in gyms, discos, and on Fire Island. […] The New Clone could be found at the gym, at ACT UP meetings, at Queer Nation demonstrations, and on Fire Island. (217, my underline)

13“In the age of anxiety gay men go to the gym five nights a week, just to keep out of trouble. […] Any way to sublimate desire; anything to avoid sex” (Eighty-Sixed 201). 

• The goal is reversed: before AIDS, he went to the gym to have a body that would trigger desire; after AIDS has hit his community, he goes to the gym in order to tame his desire. In gay neighborhoods, bodies and the way they are thought of have completely changed:

The Castro wasn't the den of iniquity I had remembered five years earlier on my last visit, but then neither was Christopher Street. Cruising was almost obsolete. In bars, men focused on their glasses, not each other. Allan told me that last year stuffing crotches with socks was all the rage, but I saw no evidence of the “padded look.” This year the boys seemed chunkier. If anything, the pads had gravitated to the hips. Richard said that lean was out in San Francisco because it held that “sudden unexplained weight loss” aura about it, and that everyone had a good ten pounds to spare, as if ten pounds could protect one from death. (Spontaneous Combustion 40)

14Crotches are not artificially padded any more, hips are, which would have been considered heresy a few years earlier. In Borrowed Time, Paul Monette makes the same observation:

Within six months, lean—let alone thin—would become synonymous with the flashing amber of AIDS. […] Thus in a year you would start seeing men at the gym who had chiseled themselves like Phidias now suddenly running to fat, the empty pounds accumulating in the waist and buttocks, evidence of the late-night binges on Oreos and Ring Dings that had replaced the faster food of bathhouse sex. (52-53)

15Before AIDS, the desire to look like every other gay man could be considered to stem from aesthetic concerns only—although this is certainly not Levine's idea, since he views the “clone style” as a subversive affirmation of gay identity. But once AIDS has settled in the community and profoundly modified the way the gay male body is viewed, it is easily understandable that what is at stake is fear. The object of this fear is stigmatization, of course, but it goes beyond that, as Feinberg's last remark shows: 

• “Everyone had a good ten pounds to spare, as if ten pounds could protect one from death”. 
• Fear is not triggered by other people's eyes, but by one's own eyes on one's own body. It is not about looking exactly like the others, it is about not looking like some others, those who have AIDS. 
• Uniformity persists, but it does not stem from a will to dissociate oneself from the straight population; it is the result of the will not to be associated with those whose weight loss they cannot control. Even inside gyms, the specter of AIDS imposes itself on the patrons:

People simply disappear. Obituaries are posted on the bulletin board at the gym next to Fire Island shares. I always wonder whether someone had just died when I see notices for furniture at drastically reduced rates. (Queer and Loathing 184)

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AIDS AND THE SUFFERING GAY MALE BODY

When it comes to describing the emaciated and suffering bodies of the same young men who spent hours at the gym after HIV has entered them, authors have trouble finding their words. In What I Did Wrong, John Weir (David Feinberg's close friend) tries his best to make us visualize Zack's body (Zack is undoubtedly Feinberg's fictional double in Weir's novel):

Zack is starving to death. […] He looks wasted. […] He weighs ninety-five pounds. […] When I get back to the bathroom Zack's got the top of the toilet seat down, and he's sitting on it, with his legs crossed. […] He has hiked his genitals in order to cross his legs, and when I look down I see the bones of his legs, his right foot swinging, the sag of flesh from his thighs, the sack of his balls, his penis, the pubic hair as limp as the hair on his head, his belly sunk, skin stretched over a void, rib cage, his nipples clipped to his chest like buttons sewn unto a coat, the gauze bandage guarding the catheter near his right armpit, his long arms of nothing but bone, his sinewy neck, his shoulder plates in back and spinal nubs that poke through skin. My friend. (27-100)

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• Zack/David's body is in no way aestheticized, which, according to many scholars, is typical of the treatment of AIDS in literature; the idea is not to find beauty in decay, but simply to try and convey this decay through painfully detailed descriptions.
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The way Kushner stages the body of Roy Cohn in Angels in America is worth mentioning. His emaciation is immediately recognized and acknowledged by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg; the first words she says to him are : 

• “You don't look good, Roy. But you lost a lot of weight. 
• Throughout the play, many stage directions convey that he is in a lot of pain

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While the issue of looks was central to the construction of gay identity, with AIDS, it is linked with the preservation of one's identity, since in the case of such an epidemic there is a great risk to fall into anonymity. 

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I had tracked down the last photograph of Zack taken before he went into the hospital, and we had gotten it blown up, and it was standing on an easel next to the rabbi. An awful picture, though it was how I would always remember him now: a huddle of bones under sacked skin, which happened to be my dying, now dead, friend. His body had nothing to do with him. (205-206)

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• 1 Frank is not sure such a term is appropriate, contra Anne Hunsaker Hawkins in Reconstructing Illnes (...)

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