There is shrewd and graceful mystery in AIDS. We’ve all fallen hard for it allures. In another time they would’ve blamed the hair-streaming comet overhead. But AIDS has come now as if particularly to chastise scientific arrogance: protean, vicious, macabre, and high-tech. A disease that is no-health rather than infection: that will subcontract death out to other, lesser illnesses. It has cut in on our social touch dance: it can calumniate while killing. It infects, a plague of snideness, the moral, racial, and political constitution far more than the physical. So, while you fear, admire. AIDS is a scintillating metaphor, in fact, for the modern, nihilistic sickness at heart. We have no spiritual immune system left: anything can fester in us. And AIDS may well be the most influential plague of all human time. Nature still has resilience and, apparently, some spite. The earth, seen as vulnerable or moribund, is trying to throw off that chronic disorder, us.
AIDS, of course, can only be updated by minute and half-minute. It will metastasize, change vector for vector, mutate over and over again in a magazine writer’s lead time. Still, historically, we have some consensus. As Howard Welsh, from Gay Men’s Health Crisis (a commendable and overspent organization), explains, much can be attributed to brothel cultures—societies in which the prostitution of at least one household member is commonplace and acceptable. Though no precise epidemiology will ever come out, the Big A spread from Africa (Zaire maybe) through Haiti and thence to Bleecker Street via male prostitution. (There are famous state-franchised bordellos in Haiti, as there were in pre-Castro Cuba.) Tourism was a carrier: travelers to or from Africa dosed the whore population. A triangular trade, sort of. If you were prospecting for significance, you might call it the slaves’ revenge.
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