Wednesday reflection: The AIDS years
Today we looked at HIV/AIDS as an ethical issue. My reflection today, however, is on the significance of the "AIDS years" both for MCC and for me personally.
The "AIDS years" in the US queer community and MCC were those years when the pandemic raged unchecked by life-extending treatments — that period of fifteen years from the beginning of the pandemic in 1981 to the advent of protease inhibitor treatments in 1996. One of the cities worst affected was San Francisco.
Rev. Jim Mitulski was pastor of MCC San Francisco from 1986 to 2001, during which time he officiated at over 500 funerals for those who died from AIDS-related illness. One part of Jim's story that struck me was his sense that God gathered MCC together in the 60s and 70s so that there would be a church for such a time as this. MCC (especially MCC-SF) became known both within the queer community and in ecumenical circles as the Church with AIDS.
Jim talked about the authenticity of worship and community experienced during those years. The church with AIDS was not an unjoyous place. It was "a community where it didn't matter what you looked like, in the midst of a community where appearance was everything."
In both The Samaritan's Imperative and The Church With AIDS, we read about the joyful and spirit-filled AIDS healing services, and how experiencing these moved ecumenical leaders to reflect on the meaning of the marks of the "true church" in a time of AIDS. What does it mean to be "one, holy, catholic and apostolic"? MCC embodied, and continues to embody, these marks in its witness, worship and community.
Jim also told us of AIDS funeral protests conducted in front of the White House, of the ashes of dead men scattered on the White House lawn. I'd heard of different ACT UP protests, but not of these ones. In researching these events afterward, I discovered the following quote from queer artist David Wojnarowicz, who died from AIDS-related illnesses in New York in 1992, at the age of 37.
"I worry that friends will slowly become professional pallbearers, waiting for each death, of their lovers, friends and neighbors,and polishing their funeral speeches; perfecting their rituals of death rather than a relatively simple ritual of life such as screaming in the streets."
The 80's and 90s were my entire young adulthood. Coming out in 1985, I never knew the sexual freedom of the seventies, I never knew or could even conceive an era without AIDS. Yet I lived in relative isolation from the impact of the plague. I was not politically active, and after drifting away from MCC in 1990 spent most of the following decade getting high in dance clubs and bars and being too neurotic to make the sorts of close personal or sexual friendships that might have exposed me to pain and grief.
It's difficult now to review what was really going on and not feel the sadness, anger and rage that I was largely spared from back then. I think a lot of HIV- men avoided dealing with the politcal reality of it all and we just focused all our energy on careers or clubbing or mindless anonymous sex.
Of course, only those of us who retained our health and economic advantage could indulge in this kind of withdrawal; others were forced by circumstances to have to deal. But we were another lost generation. Some of us only recently began emerging from the methamphetamine numbness of the nineties to begin to really care about making a difference in the world. Others are still missing somewhere in crystal city...