Some days ago someone was tested positive. Unluckily for me, she’s a good friend. More than that, I was first to get the message. After half a bottle of whine and me sending out some pathetic Video-Messages to another place in the world, I started researching things I didn’t previously know about (only in a surprisingly superficial sense): Syndromes, therapy methods and medical stages from Acute Infection over Clinical Latency to the actual thing: Aids. That’s quite a depressing thing to do. In tiny dimensions you actually start to hate the one who makes you do this. As a twisted act of love of course – it’s like you go two slow steps forward, one sideward, don’t see straight anymore, lose proportion. The most absurd: At a late point of my unintended love-hate-liaison with HIV, it must have been two at night or so, I find that it’s first of December. I mean I knew it was first of December, what I found is that it’s officially World-AIDS-Day. It seemed too much of a weird coincidence, like this Sauna-Ad, which wandered around Facebook recently and invited for a romantic “Kristall-Nacht” on 9th of November, somewhere in Thuringia. I couldn’t believe it. Also with my friend, I suspected this thing to be a cynical joke. She must have made it up for her own sick reasons, I thought. Maybe to test my availability. To dig on the limits of my affection. “See”, she could say if I had kept silent, “you don’t give a shit. Even if I have HIV, you’re still busy running after people you hardly know. Q.E.D.” In response I’d send an official cancellation of our friendship, signed with the blackest ink, saying: “Choices in life are limited. Take it serious. Or don’t.”
Well, there was no cynical joke. I cooled my own waves watching Angels in America, a brilliant HBO-Serial in six parts following the playwright Tony Kushner. It portraits the connections of six people, to whom Aids develops as sort of a twisted metaphor for he limits of friendship and the struggle for visibility. And one can see Meryl Streep as a Rabbi or Al Pacino theorizing about the Cloud, which is hilarious enough. There is a another scene so fiercely honest and poetically shady, I felt it pervaded my day. Roy Cohn, who’s a (closeted) gay lawyer and a product of Reagan and his anti-communist predecessors is already in the end stage of the sickness. He slurps out of the hospital room, obviously high, and looks at Belize, who is a black nurse and a former drag queen. Roy says: “Oh, The bogeyman is here. Lookit, a schvartze toytenmann. Come sweetheart, what took you so long?” – “You’re flying, Roy”, Belize answers. “It’s the morphine. Can you see who I am? Who am I, Roy?” Roy is cloudy: “The Negro night nurse, my negation. You’ve come to escort me to the underworld. But let me ask you something, sir.”
Belize: “Sir?”
Roy: “What’s it like? After?”
Belize: “After…?”
Roy: “This misery ends.”
Belize: “Hell or heaven? … well, it’s like San Francisco.”
Roy: “A city. Good. I was worried … it’d be a garden. I hate that shit.”
Belize: “Mmmm. Big city, overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty-corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, fierce gusts of gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens.”
Roy: “Isaiah.”
Belize: “Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths.”
Roy: “And a dragon atop a golden horde.”
Belize: “And everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are Creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain’t there.”
Roy: “And Heaven?”
Belize: “That was Heaven, Roy.”
Roy: “The fuck it was. Who are you?”
Belize (Whispering): “Your negation.”