From a plague to a disease
Francis King
LOVE UNDETECTABLE by Andrew Sullivan Chatto, f12.99, pp. 252 The first of the three essays which make up this strenuously argued, eloquently expressed and often moving book takes as its starting point that moment two years ago when the author suddenly realised, among many other people who were also HIV positive, that the prescription of new protease inhibitors along with older drugs had had the effect of turning Aids from a plague into merely another disease. This disease, like diabetes or MS, was not yet curable, but at least it was controllable, so that its sufferers were not doomed to a cer- tain death within a cruelly short space of time.
The effect of this knowledge on stricken homosexuals was, as he shows, not always entirely welcome, as one might have sup- posed. Some patients refused to bombard the virus with a huge battery of pills, preferring the familiarity of illness to the unfamiliarity of the world which they would be obliged to re-enter once they were well. Some felt that the solidarity which the disease had created among its victims would now dissipate. Some even feared the loss of state support.
In discussing the whole concept of a 'gay plague', Sullivan makes the important point that Aids could only be so described in Europe, North America and Australasia. In the world as a whole, as distinct from our privileged area of it, far, far more het- erosexuals than homosexuals have per- ished. In that privileged area, he sees the `plague' as having the same effect on atti- tudes to homosexuals as the Holocaust had on attitudes to the Jews. Horrendous vic- timisation, by the Nazis in the case of the Jews and by a no less horrendous disease in the case of homosexuals, undercut victimi- sations of more subtle kinds. Both groups, previously thought to be powerful in their clannishness and cliqueishness, were now seen to be powerless before forces over which they could exert no control.
The second essay tackles the question of the 'normality' of homosexuals; and here I wish that Sullivan had at the start made clear that to ascribe to the majority of homosexuals all sorts of character traits, most of them undesirable, from which the majority of heterosexuals are assumed to be immune, is something which is largely confined to our Judaeo- Christian culture. For most Japanese, for example, the only difference between a homosexual and a heterosexual is that the former is sexually attracted by his or her own sex and the heterosexual by the oppo- site one.
In this essay Sullivan effectively takes on the reparative therapists who regard homo- sexuality as a disease which it is their duty to cure. That lasting cures are so rarely achieved, and that their patients suffer so much anguish in the course of their treat- ment, in no way deters them. Such thera- pists believe that their patients' homo- sexuality is not something innate but the result of early family patterns, usually of a disengaged father and an over-controlling mother. Sullivan's answer to this is that the family pattern is not the cause of the homosexuality but the result of it: father and mother both intuit the nature of the son's sexuality and all three parties react accordingly — the father distancing himself, the mother becoming increasingly protective, the son finding more and more in common with the mother than the father.
The final essay is a moving plea for a recognition of friendship as something as important to a fulfilled life as love or sexu- ality. In earlier times, friendships between men and men or women and women could, as in the case of Tennyson and Hallam, achieve a rare intensity, because neither the participants nor outside witnesses were constantly posing the question, 'Is there something abnormal about this?' Today heterosexuals are often wary of close same- sex friendships, since that question can be so easily provoked.
There is much here that will cause heterosexuals to shake their heads in dis- agreement or disapproval. But no one can fail to be impressed by the cogency, clarity and humanity with which Sullivan puts for- ward his arguments. My only criticism of his book is that, long resident in the United States, he confines his observations almost wholly to that country. I also wish that he had explored the mystery of why, even in these days of sexual equality, women homosexuals are spared most of the disap- proval and legal discrimination suffered by male ones.
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