Read Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone for Free Online Page A

azidothymidine?): I am four years old, hands tied to the crib to prevent me from “touching” myself, totally disempowered, standing with the black-and-white TV on in the next room. It’s time for “The Mickey Mouse Club” show. “Sing us a song, Bobby,” chorus the Mouseketeers, and Bobby straps on his guitar, strums a few chords, and begins to sing. Bobby B. finishes his catchy rap and everyone applauds. I sit on my hands. I know, it’s just professional jealousy. Why aren’t writers ever so lionized? I don’t want to have to become an alcoholic to be famous.
    National Public Radio tapes our meeting.
    The Quilt fuckup has been resolved. After four thousand phone calls to the Parks Service and negotiations with the Ukrainians, the Millennial Society had agreed to withdraw to the Washington Monument area and ceded the Ellipse to the Quilt, in exchange for the use of some of the Names Project’s sound equipment.
    Gregg of pirate earrings and swarthy sexuality tells us that the FDA has canceled most meetings for the day of the demo, and that employees are being encouraged to take the day off. “We have already seized control.” He leads the “Seize control” chant again. On Wednesday, there will be the last pre-action meeting. My affinity group, a nameless ragtag collection of misfits and otherwise unaffiliated homorganisms (we had formed at last Monday’s meeting; vanilla activists who wanted to be arrested for transgressing police lines), will be meeting an hour earlier.
    One of the several thousand Michaels tongues me in the ear during the meeting and I lose my balance as a miniature tsunami crashes through my inner ear. Is this a proposal of marriage? I can no longer think straight.
    Megamouth Michael gives a postmortem of last week’s disastrous demo. One ACT UP member was arrested for assaulting a policeman, clearly a trumped-up charge: Faggots don’t hit police, they just dress like them in riverside cocktail lounges. Megamouth was also arrested for disturbing the peace. Megamouth complains about rumors that some people are blaming him for inciting the group to do unsafe actions. To increase the level of paranoia, he tells us that the police are playing hardball now.
    Stephen Joseph, the health commissioner, has been getting a lot of phone calls in the past few weeks; last Wednesday, the police woke up and questioned an individual at his home at five in the morning. Our legal-support team hands out a flyer titled “SILENCE = GOLDEN”: We don’t have to say anything to the police. It’s the old “right to remain silent” clause. Some splinter group called Surrender, Dorothy may be behind the phone calls. “Don’t call Stephen Joseph unless you’re a close friend,” we are advised.
    I leave the endless meeting at ten for dessert: another sugar infusion and a caffeine injection.

Pornography, Music Videos, and Blood
     
    I’m pissed about the timing of Wednesday’s meeting: I’ll miss the vice-presidential debate. I never watch television. I bought the boob tube only as an accessory for my VCR. I try to keep an even split between the adult and nonadult movies I rent. Luckily, PBS carries the debates an hour and a half later: It was doing live coverage of some Wagner operafest, and some of the divas had a mud-wrestling fight in the middle, forcing a delay in broadcasting the debates.
    My affinity group meets in the pantry, with yet another Michael facilitating. In our disaffected group, this is pretty much equivalent to taking control. No one has any specific ideas. We just want a simple, vanilla arrest: to transgress police boundaries, get arrested, post bail or pay our fines, and be back in time for the evening news. Some of us are willing to get dragged off by the police, but only as long as the cameras are covering us. None of us is interested in dragging out the civil-disobedience thing to the point of noncooperation with the police, refusal to identify ourselves at the courts (or using