Read Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath for Free Online

life and death. One no longer steps into Charon’s boat to be ferried across the River Styx—ill people are now detained, with one foot in the boat and the other still on shore. It is a place where mercy looks exactly like cruelty to the average visitor. It is a place that one leaves, if one is only a visitor, with the conviction that ordinary life is utterly miraculous, so that, going home from the hospital on the subway, one is filled with things one cannot express to the crowd that walks up out of the station or throngs the street of the block where he lives. But if the people caught in the revolving door between health and death could speak, would they not say—as Patrick Cowley reportedly did as he watched the men dancing to his music while he was fatally ill, “Look at those stupid queens. Don’t they know? ” Guard your health. It is all you have. It is the thin line that stands between you and hell. It is your miraculous possession. Do not throw it away for the momentous pleasures of lust, or even the obliteration of loneliness.
    Many homosexuals wonder how they will die: where, with whom. Auden went back to Oxford, Santayana to the Blue Nuns in Rome. We are not all so lucky. Some men afflicted with AIDS returned to die in their family’s home. Others have died with friends. Some have died bitterly and repudiated the homosexual friends who came to see them; others have counted on these people. Volunteers from the Gay Men’s Health Crisis have cooked, cleaned, shopped, visited, taken care of people they did not even know until they decided to help. We are discovering the strength and goodness of people we knew only in discotheques or as faces on Fire Island. We are once again learning the awful truth Robert Penn Warren wrote years ago: “Only through the suffering of the innocent is the brotherhood of man confirmed.” The most profound difference between men may well be that between the sick and the well, but compassionate people try to reach across the chasm and bridge it. The hospital visitor who conquers his own fear of something facing us all takes the first step on a journey that others less fearful than he have already traveled much further on. As for the courage and dignity and sense of humor of those who are sick, these are beyond praise, and one hesitates where words are so flimsy. As for a disease whose latency period is measured in years, not months, there is no telling which side of the line dividing the sick and the well each of us will be on before this affliction is conquered. We may disdain the hysteria of policemen and firemen who call for masks, and people who ask if it is safe to ride the subway, and television crews who will not interview AIDS patients. For they are not at risk—those who are, are fearlessly helping their own.

Snobs at Sea
    S OMEWHERE IN Remembrance of Things Past —which is to say, for the reader unable to find the line, somewhere in Russia, or the Amazon—the shock of learning that a rich man has fallen in love with a prostitute is compared to the trouble we have believing a man can die of a common bacillus. It’s a double metaphor—comparing the course of love with the course of disease (Proust’s favorite link), and social snobbery with the biological superiority human beings feel to other forms of life. The idea that an intelligent man with aristocratic friends, a fortune, family, career, can fall for a kept woman—or, in our day, be converted to a jar of ashes on the bookshelf by the action of an organism invisible to the naked eye—is somehow very hard for us to grasp. “The germs don’t need me,” said a friend at the baths one evening when I asked him if he wasn’t worried about dying. “If they needed me, I’d be worried, but they don’t need me.”
    In his metaphor the germs are hostesses making up guest lists for dinner parties, I guess—yet “The germs don’t need me” is perhaps only the craziest version of a denial that a lot of us have