The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

The Stories of AIDS

Disclosure 133 TheStoriesofAIDS To disclose that one is HIV positive, especially within the logic of confession ,sheds retrospective light onto what now seems to have been a narrative all along; in fact, several narratives. This is true of every kind of disclosure, of course, but I’ll limit myself to the one we’re all here for. There is the narrative of the illness, from infection to suffering to death maybe, or perhaps endless deferral in the serialized stories of what is called chronic disease. People often want to know how you became infected, how exactly it all started, and sometimes they even ask. They want to know what the future holds for you.There are elements of suspense too,now that treatments have displaced certain death to less fortunate corners of the world. How long can you expect these particular meds to work? Then what happens? Does the treatment have side effects—­ subplots, one could call them? And there is also the story of the epidemic, with its heroes and villains and its international intrigue. There is the research narrative, half whodunit and half treasure hunt. There are the stories of sin and redemption, of rises and falls, falls and rises, that have framed deviant sexualities for a long time. The stories may not all be compatible with one another, and they tend to be full of holes in any case. After all, different people tell them for different purposes and to different putative audiences—­ one of these audiences being themselves. It can all be very confusing but also rich in possibilities. Much fun can be had with gaps and discrepancies—­ as implied in the double sense of the French verb jouer, to play but also to be loose. To begin with, if HIV disclosure is a narrative act, it logically follows that it must be subject to the rules, presuppositions, and various parameters that make up narratives, such as genre conventions with their power to organize social relations, susceptibility to transgressions, shifting contours and interrelatedness , but also style, register, complex and specific conditions of utterance, historical context, multiple interpretations, readability, viral transmission as in gossip and rumors, even the death of the author. But these constraints are also too many not to allow for playfulness. I am not so naive as to think that I can escape the stories of AIDS; they have become far too entrenched in our collective reactions to the epidemic and unavoidable if we are to make sense of it.Indeed,we don’t try to uncover the meaning of these stories but, rather, produce these stories—­ and produce them as one would fictions—­ to make up the meanings of HIV and AIDS. These are the stories that I tell, directly or indirectly, when I disclose, and 134 Disclosure the stories that people like k*** tell themselves—­or hurl back at me—­when they hear the news. They are not lies, however, but more like games of seduction and desire that allow me to oppose, by inhabiting them, these stories that I cannot escape yet cannot let determine me and my relations with others entirely. If I don’t want to find myself disciplined by my disclosure—­ that is, if I don’t want to find myself trapped within disciplinary regimes of knowledge and my“truth” captured by discourses—­ I have no choice but to use my stories as seductively as I can. This is one reason that I keep referring to this sort of disclosure as a form of sharing. To share, in that sense, is a matter not of unveiling some kind of truth but of making and remaking knowledge together in order to serve our needs,as different,situational,and ephemeral as they may be. ...