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

Reason to Exclude

132 Disclosure ReasontoExclude The exclusion of the infected must be forceful and resolute. It must appear to be based on objective knowledge and not irrational fear, because it needs to veil the fact that, by definition, the uninfected is vulnerable—­ to infection . In fact, every rejection will be a reminder of that defining vulnerability and, therefore, the more you reject people with HIV the more unsafe you’ll feel. (And the more unsafe you feel, the more often and forcefully you’ll reject. That’s both the point and the operating mode of the police.) This sort of rejection endows itself with all the trappings of reason and puts forth the notion of a responsible, autonomous individual making the right decisions to ensure his or her own bodily integrity. (“Neg and I intend to stay that way.”) Waver and you’re screwed.The person who rejects,however, doesn’t realize that reason has already been infected—­with irrationality and magical thinking, with affects (such as fear, hatred, contempt, admiration, desire, etc.), and with the complex and ever-­ changing meanings imparted to bodies in social situations. These various forms of infections, subjective and internal as they may feel, testify to the fact that some kind of encounter has already taken place. The self has willed nothing, somebody has rejected somebody for nothing—­ other than for the sake of rejection. Now I wouldn’t be completely honest if I didn’t disclose something else: that I, too, once rejected a guy because he was HIV positive. Or to put it more accurately, I didn’t reject this guy because he was HIV positive—­ as if he were responsible for the rejection, which the phrase hypocritically implies—­but because I was afraid of coming into contact with him. I wasn’t even brave enough to be brutal about it. This was the kind of act of cowardice that e-­ mail and IM chat let us enjoy with impunity, the way a face-­ to-­ face meeting or even a telephone conversation never quite could. Instead, I wrote the guy a long, convoluted reply, telling him that, in all likelihood, I had already slept with poz guys but that this was the first time I would be doing it knowingly and that there was no telling how I would react, blah-­ blah-­ blah . . . Bullshit, basically. He didn’t bother to respond, and I never heard from him again. Frankly, I can’t blame him. I was trying to reason and I acted like a fool. And how could I blame him anyway now that I am him? But I’ve never forgotten this. Even before my own diagnosis, the guilt that I felt at having possibly hurt him (or not, I’ll never know) has stayed with me as the trace of our failed encounter. ...