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Afterword (In)conclusion (In memory of Roger) In July 1981 while attending a month-long summer institute at the University of San Diego, California, I spent a four-day weekend in a city I had never visited, San Francisco. Alone for the weekend, I walked its streets as an energetic tourist intending to compress as many gay sites and tourist sights as possible into the brief visit. Very quickly I found myself in the company of the loneliness that I have tried to evade for decades, which I attempted to remedy by seeking all the usual places where gay men can find each other: an adult book store, a pornographic film theater , several Castro Street bars, and the opera house. However, I returned to San Diego untouched. Although I met and chatted up several men in San Francisco, I went home with no one. I yearned for it and I feared it. Paradoxically, I had locked out of house and home many of my desires, and since I denied them an honorable domesticity, they continued to vandalize me for several more years. To put it more directly, I was terrorized by the briny convulsions of gay male sexuality. The month before my visit to San Francisco, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on “A Pneumonia That Strikes Gay Males.”1 What does it mean, what is the significance of this fact, that I have survived the AIDS epidemic and remained HIV negative? During the 1970s and early 80s, I had engaged in some of the sexual behaviors that put one at risk for HIV infection. Even more astonishing, in San Francisco during July 1981, how could I have failed to find a sexual partner under the circumstances: a 28-year-old tourist visiting the gay Mecca of 177 178 AIDS and American Apocalypticism North America at the height of its erotic exuberance? Behind that lurks another question: What is the meaning of asking, “What does it mean?” The first question is sort of a blank screen on which I can project a variety of my inherited cultural and discursive referents. The Angel of Death passed over me. Or anxiety about sexuality per se and guilt about my homosexual desires produced a reaction formation in which I was policing the unruliness of eros by strictly defining the boundaries of my own body to avoid what I had configured as physical “defilement” and erotic “danger.” Or “inheriting” my mother’s health neuroses and alert to the medical concerns already circulating among gay men, I was consciously or unconsciously avoiding infection by herpes, hepatitis, or other sexually transmitted diseases. Or by the laws of statistical probability in a complex chaotic universe (and this mechanism is now confirmed by epidemiology), most gay men in the United States simply are not HIV infected, and, therefore, I fell among those in the “lucky” category, which is itself a fictional construction of a universe interested in our concerns. Or I am a “survivor” with a mission to bear witness. Or God saved me for a purpose. Or amazing grace. Or blind chance. Or all of the above. Settling on any one interpretation is reductive; what the AIDS epidemic “means” is greater than the sum of all of them taken together. Or it means nothing. Moreover, its various “meanings” compete and conflict. None of them may be verifiable, but any of them can be meaningful; that is, in Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress’s terms, those narratives perform valuable “semiosic work.” Thus even to assert that AIDS is “meaningless” is to place the epidemic within a horizon of signification that paradoxically asserts its meaningfulness by denying it. While any one of these mythologies is perhaps as good or bad as any other, the more beguiling question is the second: What does it mean that I (along with many others) am compelled to compose a meaning for my evasion of infection? From where comes our need for semiosic work? How does it continue to operate in ways that are harmful or helpful? Earlier in this study I acknowledged the inevitability of signification in the absence of any prelinguistic or unmediated “experience.” Paula Treichler has famously called HIV/AIDS an “epidemic of signification,” although AIDS is not alone in evoking such a response; perhaps it is just more overtly so. This study has examined not only certain kinds of signification—apocalyptic tropes of exile, prophetic jeremiad, Armageddon , and paradise—but...

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