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

So Am I

158 Disclosure SoAmI I’ll move on now to a more complex example of disclosure—­that of the first time I knowingly said “it” to someone who was also HIV positive. For I’m not the first person to be HIV positive. I’m finagling with my argument a little here, since I didn’t say “I’m HIV positive” that time, but rather, “So am I.” My interlocutor and I were involved in a discussion about our adventures and misadventures in online cruising. At one point, he said,“I’ve tried putting ‘HIV+’ in my profile, but it didn’t exactly help me get laid.” You’ll recognize the anti-­ announcement tactic I had used myself: to embed a seemingly secondary but possibly more central statement within a primary one that may become relegated to the status of context, equalizing center and margin and tactfulfully leaving the listener with the freedom to choose on which piece of information to articulate the rest of the discussion. The larger context of our conversation provided me with enough clues to understand that my friend’s revelation also implied a question:“Are you HIV positive too?” Then, after I made sure that he was indeed HIV positive and not talking about some strange sociological experiment, I said“So am I”—­a statement worth lingering on for a while. “So.” So what? This“so,” the HIV-­ positive status, does not constitute a stable object of knowledge, since the experience of living with HIV results from various social determinants.Clearly,medical“facts”that appear similar on the surface have very different significations and consequences in different cultures or different parts of the world.To be HIV positive in a country where you are likely to die as a result is just not the same “thing” as to be HIV positive and have access to first-­ rate medical care, as I do. To live in a rural area can turn a routine visit to your HIV specialist into a long and costly expedition. To be HIV positive and African American means that you have been caught up in a racist system that often precludes equal access to resources and that you belong to a demographic group with a shockingly low life expectancy. Not “so” for everybody. And there are personal factors as well. Does one have a network of friends? A supportive family? And so on.My interlocutor,although younger,had lived with HIV for much longer than I and once, on a later occasion, started a sentence with,“In my day . . . ,” a phrase I couldn’t have used at the time, since I had been diagnosed for a little over a year and my day was another day for him. Older than him in age, I was a callow youth in HIV time. And now that people who recently seroconverted have started to turn to me for advice and support, I too have acquired the aura of a veteran. But advice is one thing and knowledge is Disclosure 159 another. They overlap only if you understand them as situational processes of sharing and exchange. In other words, what we share—­ “so”—­ is neither fully known nor fully knowable. “Am.” In this particular instance, the use of the verb“to be” doesn’t carry a stable ontological dimension, at least not in the traditional sense. If, according to the Cartesian model, categorization is supposed to be the precondition of thought and thought the precondition of being, then the sharing of an unstable, unknowable, uncategorizable trait, and one so fraught with affect—­ “so”—­ cannot support the kind of being grounded in the sort of rational thinking that the cogito proposes. “I”? Really a “we,” not only in the context created in and by this particular sentence, but because no “I,” not even that of “So am I,” may be articulated apart from a process of exclusion. The implied “we” includes the one other “I” that one is like but inevitably indexes all those other I’s that one is unlike. As the philosopher Judith Butler explains it, referring to the notion of lesbian identity but in a deconstructive way that I find legitimate to generalize: To claim that this is what I am is to suggest a provisional totalization of this“I.” But if the I can so determine itself, then that which it excludes in order to make that determination remains constitutive of the determination itself. In other words, such a statement presupposed that the“I...