(Gus Cairns says: Positive Nation hardly ever publishes fiction. But how else do you capture gay sex in all its abandon, intimacy and danger? When this story about passion overcoming HIV came through, we knew we had to publish it)
 Illustration: John Clarkson |
I never meet men in bars or at dance parties, though I've met hundreds of men who do. Finally, I break my never.
A dance party in Sydney, a yearly fundraiser for the state Aids organisation. There, chemically flying on ecstasy bumped up with acid, I wandered through the crowd aimlessly, wearing a halo of lights in the fog of vibration from the dance track.
Did you see me first? Did I see you? All I know is that I stopped. I joined in your swaying: unusual movements, your shoulders mostly up around your ears as if your whole body could disappear, melt, and be sucked into a hole in the middle of you.
"Well, aren't you cute?" Your voice was somehow clear above the music. You touched my arms above the elbows gently. A studded collar around your neck with spikes of fake danger, bare torso, shiny black pants matching dark pupils. You lean in to kiss me, and I fall and fall and fall.
When I come to, we're in another place in the dance hall.
"I'd like to take you home with me." Your voice has laughter in it. Nodding is all I do.
"But I want to tell you something first. I'm HIV positive. Have been for 10 years, never been sick. I just wanted to make sure you're OK with that. Some people have a problem."
Positive, I think. "No problem." My blood is negative. My mind is positive. Yes. Yes. Yes. "Take me home."
We make love for hours, moving between massage and long kisses and my mouth on your cock and yours on my anus. I want to do the same to you, but you say, no, it's dangerous. Neither of us can come with the drugs still coursing through our systems. But in the end, side by side, my head on your chest, hands on that astonishing skin, we come to a natural finish.
"It was amazing."
"I wanted to make sure that you felt you could do anything, and that we didn't have to fuck if you didn't want to."
"Well, maybe next time."
You look at me with a glint in your eyes.
Positive. Words repeat in my mind. Yes. Yes. Yes.
You become all of the positive lovers I have ever had and will ever have. What is unique to you, I eroticise. I know it is perverse to do this. But isn't the possibility of moving beyond borders, normality, the usual, where our potential lies?
Though I remain negative, I am becoming positive all the time - not in the cells of my blood or the hidden recesses of my brain, but in the way magnets change each other.
I saw a photo of your younger self and the face was round, like a boy's. Now the drugs have made your face gaunt, your cheekbones have risen like mornings, and your cheeks have strong lines carved into them. You look like a man. Your profile is strong like seaside cliffs that weather wind and salt night and day. I fit perfectly into those crevices.
For a time, the drugs cause your stomach to protrude, and I know this makes you shy in public. Ignore the wondering eyes. I see a yin to the yang: the roundness here softens the angle in your face. Your belly, protruding, gives birth to new forms. I run my hands over it and it is the shape a belly should be, a shallow overturned bowl of the finest cracked porcelain, a dark shade of ivory, coveted by the museum that guards it.
When you changed your therapy, the drugs wasted your muscles. Now, you worry how thin you have become, about taking on skeletal form. Fat flies off of you. It hurts you to sit down for long periods on the sharp bones in your buttocks. But look again in the mirror: your flesh unencumbered is elegant; you have the body of dancers you have admired, without the practising of a hundred painful jetés. Listen: If you were heavier, I would not have you.
I love you for your vulnerability. When you are ill, when the drugs make you unable to hold in liquid or food, when you expel a river that can't stop, I project a cradle around you to rock you into sleep, since I know you don't like to be touched when you feel like this. Sometimes, it is when you are weak that you are the hardest. Like the shell of an egg. We marvel at it, how thin yet tough, the sandpaper finish, how gently it carries its secret sun within. I would lift you into my jaw and carry you to a safe place. But you would not let me. Instead you are as hard and sharp as that shell.
Everyone fantasises. Gay men are the best at it. As children, as a way to escape to some place else, as adolescents, as a way to lose oneself en route to orgasm, as adults, as a habit.
Gay men often fantasise about danger. Policemen, rough trade, construction workers, men who are powerful, who could overpower. Highway workers who hold up fluorescent yellow signs that say: Hazardous, warning, harmful materials, slow down, stop.
Why not flirt with what is really dangerous? The disease. That which has destroyed, taken lives, ravaged nations. So strong and powerful. Sexier because we cannot see it, and must picture it in our minds. Everyone is talking about it these days. The ads on internet chat lines: 'barebacking,' 'skin on skin flesh,' 'no protection.'
So the ultimate turn-on is not skin and sweat and symmetry. The ultimate turn-on is that this is the place where you don't care. Where you do something that might kill you because the moment, or your imagination, or your just-fuck-it philosophy takes over. Sweet indifference to consequence.
'Suicidal tendencies', say the books. Growing up in a disapproving society gives you low self-esteem, they say, so you think you're not worthy enough to protect yourself. Play with fire, get burned. Have the most passionate of fuck-sessions, but then feel wrong. So much unreconciled. Repression stokes heat, which explodes into passion.
There's the religious books here too, the ones that say joy must be paid for by penalty. How many of us negotiate disaster because we feel we deserve it? Put an end to our pale, dreary lives? Gay men have always had a flair for drama.
Then there are the books that talk about sacrifice. The ultimate proof of love. "I will do anything for you." There is nothing more powerful than for us to become each other, for me to be inside you, for you to be inside me. Conjoined twins reunited, not opposites attracting. I love you so much, I want you so much, I want to be you.
Listen, when it comes down to it, I desire you because you are dying. Men are taught to be protectors. No matter how much I have bucked the trends of what masculinity is supposed to be, I still picture myself on the white horse, I gallop past and sweep you into my arms, and yet you are no maiden, no lithe willow, but another man. Fairy-tale sex, tragic romance, trashy movies about people dying of terminal illnesses, and I'm the star, I'm the one left behind. But before the big death scene, the passion is incredible - everyone in the movie-house is crying out of every gland, they look like they're upset, but when they reach out for the tissues, it's not just tears they're wiping away. Our sex is cinematic; violins rise, fabrics billow, they've lit us so that the room is dark but you can see each part of our excited bodies. Close-ups: a gasping, open mouth, a hand on a nipple; the crack of an ass, a collarbone, a back that looks like wings. The music gets louder and louder - the woman who wrote it will win an Oscar. We're approaching climax and in this film, the cameras don't pan away...
But. No I lie.
I don't desire you because you're dying. It's because you cheat death. Because you are stronger than me. Is this just some romance about those who have survived near-fatalities, not-so-terminal illnesses? No. It is fact. These days, the drugs are working, the T-cell count is fine, thank-you-very-much, and the viral load is dropping, if you can count it at all.
 Andy Quan |
It's because you returned from that place, and when I catch you sometimes, and you don't know I'm watching, you have this expression on your face that says you know a hell of a lot more than I do. You've seen your own mortality, and the eyes that saw are lined, sometimes with dark patches beneath. You have plumbed depths I can only guess at. You have prepared a true farewell speech, not the tragic teenager imagining "what would they do without me if...?"
I am in awe of this, that you didn't turn to salt and ash, or that if you did, you became flesh again, pulled a few proteins and DNA out of thin air, and the blood started to flow once again. I desire you because you are surviving, you are proud, you are living with it and me, it's a ménage à trois that works...
No, I lie again. When it comes down to it, it is because of you, dangerous and beautiful, swelling to fill my mouth, pushing out against soft pink membranes and yellow-white enamel, the tiny slit at the end of your cock like an eye searching its way down my throat to my core.
The full version of "Positive" appeared in Best Gay Erotica 2002 - Selected by Neal Drinnan, Edited by Richard Labonté. (Cleis Press)
Andy Quan works in International Policy for the Australian Federation of Aids Organisations. He is the author of a collection of short fiction, Calendar Boy, and of poetry, Slant, and can be visited at www.andyquan.com
