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I started mentioning AIDS to my parents around the time that Don got sick. I waited to see how they would respond. When they didn't respond, I couldn't say anymore. I just mentioned. mentioned, mentioned, mentioned, mentioned. By 1985 I was mentioning it every time I saw them. I started repeating names of different young men, saying what hospital they were in, that I had gone to visit this one and that one and how they were doing. I'd say their names over again.
"I just came from visiting my friend Robert at NYU. You remember Robert? He's the one I mentioned last time who is in Co-op Care? Remember, I mentioned that he was trying out this new drug that was really promising? Well, I gotta go now. I've got to go over to visit Robert and bring him some vitamins. I'll let you know how he's doing next time."
But the next time I'd wait and wait. I'd wade through all the stories of eighty-year-olds with heart attacks and whose daughter was getting married and I'd wait and wait for one word. I just wanted them to utter that word. That word was Robert.
"Remember my friend Robert? Robert? Remember I mentioned him to you last time? He's the one who is in NYU Medical Center. You remember Robert. Robert? That's the one. Right?"
I'd come to seders straight from funerals and have to sit there wrenched with anger and pain as my parents would go on and on about their stupid opinions about this city policy and that city policy and who got fired and hired and whose daughter's husband got his whatever degree.
I went out to San Francisco to spend two months living with Paul, sitting around with him in the house watching Geraldo Rivera from his bed until he was too weak to hold the remote. I called my parents before I went and told them four times I was going to stay with Paul. Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul. I wanted them to call me. I cried at night on the mattress on the floor. But they wouldn't call me and say that one word. Paul
My brother came out there on business with his girlfriend but could never find the time to come by the house to meet Paul. Finally, I had to go way over to the other side of town, the straight side, where he was staying and we went out for dinner. He never asked about Paul. Never mentioned it. He just went on and on about his business connections. Finally I started saying something about what it is like to live with a dying thirty-two-year-old. But my brother didn't...never brought it up.
The boundaries of parental love are so narrow.
My parents have always hated me for being gay. They've always wished I would disappear, but nothing has ever made me so nauseous and vicious as the gulf that AIDS has created between me and them. I came from Beekman visiting Saul with lesions on his lungs to a family dinner for my sister's birthday. She was feeling down because her seventy-year-old graduate school professor had just died and my mother turned to her and said, "You've had more people die in your life than anyone I know."
I froze, bread halfway to my mouth. My mother caught me as though I had committed the crime.
"You mean the AIDS thing," she said. "You're always looking for ammunition against us."
And these reactions are so typical. My friends and I exchange them like baseball cards. This is how America treats us. It's not AIDS that makes them hate us. They hated us before because they could not control us. They could not make us be just like them. Now they're glad we're dying. They're uncomfortable about how they feel but really they're relieved. There's nothing on earth that could kill us more efficiently than parental indifference.
-- Sarah Schulman, Rat Bohemia
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