DIARY
CHARLES MOORE
the end of March there had been 4,689 reported cases of Aids here (the first was reported in July 1981). There have been 2,831 deaths and over 90 per cent of those who died were homosexuals. Appro- ximately half (about 30,000) of the city's homosexuals are HIV-positive. But according to Dr David Werdegar, the director of the San Francisco public health department, there are signs of improve- ment at last. The 'sero-conversion' rate (the rate of new HIV infections) is now less than one per cent per year. People, in this city at least, now seem to know how not to catch Aids. Homosexuals, in particular, have been educated. The only expanding category of victims is intravenous drug users.
Dr Werdegar is a wry, witty New York Jew whose friendly manner conceals the strain of one of the most difficult health jobs in the world. As if it were not enough to have to tackle a new and deadly disease, he also has to skirt round the political and moral confusion that Aids has brought. Everyone has a view about Aids, not necessarily accompanied by knowledge, and is seldom shy of putting it forward. Even the simplest vocabulary connected With it is controversial. I quickly disco- vered that one is not supposed to talk of Aids 'victims' or even 'sufferers' since this is thought to be damaging to their self- esteem: the approved phrase is 'people With Aids'. Neither is one permitted to call the disease fatal: it is 'life-threatening'.
Euphemism cannot conceal the horror, however, of which I saw something and heard much by visiting the Shanti Project last Saturday. Shanti is a voluntary orga- nisation with 70 staff and 700 volunteers. Its chief task is to minister to Aids victims. It has a practical support programme — washing, shopping etc for those too ill to look after themselves, a sheltered housing programme and an emotional support programme. I spent the day at the training of volunteers for this last. Several of these volunteers themselves have Aids. One, already trained and now training others, wore bermuda shorts, showing all over his legs the bruises that Aids causes to appear Without warning. Others have difficulty walking and cough badly. The form of the training was a large meeting. The director raised various emotional and psychological problems which Aids caused and invited anyone present to give their account of these. Many did so with the frankness of Which only Californians are capable. A middle-aged woman called Audree stood Up. She was diagnosed with Aids (con-
tracted from a blood transfusion) a month after separating from her husband. When she told him, all he said was, 'Don't ask me to pay for it.' She said that when you know someone who has Aids, you should be sure to touch them. She had been irrationally terrified of touching people lest she infect them (Aids is actually a very hard disease to catch), and this, with not being touched, had made her even more lonely. A man, a Greek, I think, said that he had flown his parents over to America to tell them about his diagnosis because he could not do it by telephone or letter. Marty, a homosexual but formerly married, described how he had decided not to tell his nine-year-old daughter because of how she would be treated at school if it were known. A New York woman, one of the rare cases who got Aids through heterosexual intercourse, said that this was the first day that she had been out for three months. She had been taking 140 pills a week for the various afflictions which Aids causes and some of these had turned her excrement orange. She had had fevers with temperatures of 103° continously for six weeks: 'I thought I was going to melt out of this world.' She gave birth to a daughter shortly before the disease appeared but decided to give her for adoption after it was diagnosed so that her child would have no association with her and her death.
Almost as sad were the stories of those who loved people with Aids. There was an Irish Catholic woman whose brother, a homosexual, will not speak to her since he got the disease: she was always the one member of the large family who tolerated his homosexuality, now he will only speak to his brothers who attacked him for it. There was a girl whose boyfriend with Aids would not kiss her, and a man whose English lover was so ashamed of his disease that he tried to kill himself and believed (wrongly, as it turned out) that his upper- class English friends would all repudiate him. Most extraordinary was the story of one young man whose lover announced that he had Aids by giving a party and baking a cake. Much of the proceedings
were almost a parody of Californian cus- toms. There was much embracing and talk of relationships and interest in diet ('Your brown rice is shit,' said the spirited New York woman). The artistic adviser for Shanti's latest video is called Trip Groover ('and he lives up to both those names"). One female volunteer told me she had just been to Nicaragua and was about to train for the Episcopalian priesthood. And yet what I saw was deeply impressive. The generation of West Coast Americans who talked inanely and incessantly about love in the Sixties and Seventies are now being asked to love in harsh circumstances, and they are responding. Many on the Shanti Project show the unconditional love which is the highest thing demanded by religion.
0 ne thing much disapproved of here is being 'in denial'. You should not be in denial' of your homosexuality, or of the fact that you have Aids. But I would say that many homosexuals here are 'in denial' about Aids's relation to their conduct. They are right to insist that they are not 'guilty' of Aids — they had no evil inten- tion — but they are largely responsible for its spread. Their idea of liberation for the 1970s involved extreme promiscuity (men with 3,000 sexual partners in one year were not unknown), and this is still not criticised morally. Respectable homosexual maga- zines like the Advocate or the Bay Area Reporter have serious articles about Aids and homosexual rights juxtaposed with advertisements for, among many other things, sado-masochistic equipment, men with huge penises and even underwear that has been urinated on. Here are people who have demanded to be free but, instead, have put themselves, sometimes literally, in chains.
It was with relief that I spent Saturday evening at somewhere very different — a meeting of the Northern California Specta- tor Subscribers Group. This was founded last year by Miss Jane Grenwald and two other young Americans, and I addressed its second meeting. It was touching to find people at the other side of the world who enjoy the magazine so much. One of those present has even written a short book (Common Knowledge) as a guide to the literary and cultural references which our writers make but which Americans do not always share. There were many express- ions of concern about the health of High and Low Life correspondents. I think the clean and welcoming air of this city would do them both good.
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