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144 Disclosure UtteringAIDS Sociological studies of HIV disclosure in the United States reveal how difficult this act remains for many people living with the virus. And how complex a process. The authors of one such study were surprised to hear a New York man working “in an AIDS service agency” admit that, in sexual contexts,“I tell the truth only half the time.”And they add,“Other men and women as well, in discussing the experience of being infected with HIV, repeatedly said that one of the hardest decisions they faced was whether to reveal the truth, to lie, or to speak in code to sexual partners and others in their lives.” What I find particularly striking in this observation is that HIV disclosure doesn’t appear to fall into a clean binary—­ either to tell the truth or not—­but, instead, along a far more nuanced gradation of possibilities .As one would expect, the complexity of disclosure extends to the many different ways in which it is received. Responses to disclosure can be coded too. For example, “Not a problem” usually means “Oh, man, I really need to think about this,” and “I need to think about it” means “No.” When the authors of the study ask,“Why is disclosure, for many, among the most difficult aspects of being HIV positive?” the answer has to do with the availability of effective treatments. If you are lucky enough not to have to worry primarily about health care issues, the social is almost all that’s left. That is always a messy affair, and disclosure triggers it all. If coming out is always performative, coming out with HIV today often doesn’t appear to perform anything, at least not anything that may be delineated with much clarity. The element that once made coming out both socially difficult and politically useful but that is now missing is of course death, the all-­ but-­ certain end point, until recently, of the AIDS narratives and the purveyor of their meanings.What, in the absence of imminent danger and violent social exclusion, could warrant the urgency of a disclosure? “I have something very important to tell you: I have to take a pill every night before going to bed.” Lacks a little something, doesn’t it? I don’t mean to oversimplify the matter, let alone to ignore the fact that, for many, things have not become all that easy. Even I, from my privileged position as an academic in a liberal college town, have witnessed firsthand the punch an HIV disclosure can pack. For one thing, not all the people I disclose to are peers. This is especially true of sexual partners. (But who are the peers of an HIV-­positive person,when familiar social identifiers no longer provide reliable predictors of people’s reactions?) And even in the glob- Disclosure 145 al North and a few other regions that have successfully made treatments available to many and reduced AIDS-­related deaths in significant numbers, personal circumstances vary enough to make for very different experiences of HIV disclosure—­ or nondisclosure, or the many statements in between. And by“personal circumstances” I mean a person’s situation as it relates to matters of class, economics, religious, or other community standards, and so on. In many contexts, to disclose remains fraught with tremendous risks and endowed with great performative power indeed. I may live in prosperous Ann Arbor, but Ann Arbor sits a mere forty-­ five minutes from Detroit, in many ways a different world. Even in what, for short, I call “the gay community,” to be or to become HIV positive today is implicitly perceived as a hindrance to the progress of what, for short, I call “gay rights.” It’s easy to understand why. If gay rights testify to our full membership in the general public that had invented itself as an AIDS-­ free entity, political integration can be achieved only by severing our ties to HIV and AIDS. Interestingly, political claims that had gained much traction as a result of the epidemic and its devastation are understood separately from AIDS, now that homosexuality has become more and more normalized.The crisis, its tragic toll and the courage gay people showed against devastation and injustice,played a crucial role in legitimizing the gay community as a mature political actor, but AIDS turned out to have been a bit like growing pains. As rights-­ oriented gay politics turns toward the future, living traces of the...

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