Harlan's Race

strangers hadn’t been able to destroy us, or silence us.
    Nine miles farther, another change waited — one that we’d dreaded to see. Here was Fire Island Pines, once so rich in men. The men had come like a storm of pollen on the wind, like monarch butterflies going south. They came in search of liberation, sensation, dignity, sleaze, a lifetime love, a summer thing. Now the Pines skyline had changed — gaps where houses had been tom out, like missing teeth. Hurricane Gloria had swept away houses and boardwalks.
    Farther, beyond the scrub forest, Cherry Grove loomed into view. The image of Vince go-go dancing on the bar was still so powerful in my brain that I could smell his sweat.
    But today it was mostly lesbians who filled the two towns on weekends and holidays.
    The men were gone because they were dead. Their migration cut short, lives fallen to the sea, wings shredded by the mystery disease that we now know as AIDS. The sickness had stalked us singly, the ultimate sniper, invisible as Chris had been — one shot, one kill. We’d unwittingly put our own bodies right where the crosshairs meet. Two hundred five names of men I’d known personally were on a list in my desk drawer.
    The family now realized that Angel’s and Steve’s deaths were probably among the earliest from AIDS. And Steve, like Vince, had probably contracted the vims through shared needles. My bout with TB probably came about through exposure to Steve and George—the Pneumocystis pneumonia sometimes had TB complications.
    The test, when it came out in 1985, told us what we’d already suspected: Vince was positive for the HIV vims that causes AIDS. So were Harry, Russell, and Jacques. Through some quirk of immunity, I was still negative. Chino was negative too, and so were Marian and John. I didn’t know if Betsy had tested herself, but she and Falcon were probably okay. Something called “safe sex” was now part of our lives.
    TV newscasts told me that millions of people worldwide had AIDS — most of them heterosexuals. But I had not experienced those millions of deaths. All I knew was that our own government had done little to combat AIDS, and far too many Americans were pretending it was a “gay disease”. All I knew was the exhausting work that so many of us had done to help rouse some honesty and humanity about AIDS in nongay Americans. All I knew was that most of the men I’d ever known, and a few of the women, were gone.
    Coming here told me how a survivor of Hiroshima felt, seeing the flatland of ashes. Standing here dazed, asking how and why I’d been spared.
    What was missing from my understanding of those years?
    Like most men, I'd been hot to unload my virginity when I was young. All the authorities told me that innocence and virginity are the same thing. One time only, I’d lose them both, as a coming of age. Today the authorities tell us that the Seventies were a depraved time, when the weeds of disease went to seed. But I had to disagree. The Seventies were a case of innocence without virginity.
    Innocence has little to do with sex, I thought.
    Real innocence is more like sea-water — comes and goes with the tides of hope. Mine ebbed by degrees, through my years of loose sex. It came surging back with Billy’s love. After his death, my innocence was heavily polluted by the years of harassment. Innocence was won again with Vince. It was tinged red by Chino’s pain, and Chris’ hate.
    Men, women and children alike lose their innocence to hate. A nation can lose its innocence with a single crash of gunfire. For the U.S., I think, this dreadful moment came in 1969, with the massacres of students at Kent State and Jackson State. Uniformed American men marched onto campuses, and shot at young people, both colored and white, to make them bow the knee.
    The Seventies were a desperate try at forgetting these slaughters happened.
    Many still believed in our own goodness, our American dream — in jobs for every graduate, in elbow room for every immigrant. We believed that peace and love could be found, that justice would be done, that the system could work, that holocausts were over, that green revolution would feed the world, that rain forests could be saved. After all, we still believed that condoms were for birth control. We believed that government microbe-fighters would march on every disease the way they’d marched on TB.
    I was 30-something then. I too believed—till I saw Billy
    die.
    Today Kent State cancer