Chewing the Fat about AIDS - Arts Today with Eileen Myles When I think about the permutations in AIDS art since its beginnings, I'd say we've gone from invisibility to invisibility. Certainly the first well-known artists to die of AIDS weren't writing about it in a direct way. Charles Ludlam or Cookie Mueller didn't make art "about" AIDS, but instead became virtual symbols of the plague. Ludlam's name became synonymous with the campy art culture that vanished as the theater community was decimated by the disease. As for Cookie, she became more famous as a writer once she'd died. The expectations for the terrific novel that she wanted to write ceased to be an issue and the several collections of her writing that did or would later exist became fetish objects as much as literary objects. Then her own deceased image--as a literal corpse, I mean--became canonized by Nan Goldin's photograph. In a way the images of these artists themselves were the original AIDS art. Then David Wojnarowicz--the center of the next wave--converted his own immense artistic project into a living political symbol. It's impossible now to encounter David's work without feeling infused with his sense of impending doom and his rage at the immovable fact of his own, approaching death. And me? Eileen Myles, HIV-negative lesbian, a poet and a critic who has shared a vivid and close-knit way of life since the late-70s with a large number of dykes and fags, mostly artists. For me, the plague was never anything but the most intimate kind of tragedy. The most shocking thing--until the new drugs came into use and people who everyone thought would die, didn't--was that we were in a large loud vacuum with our crisis. I could go home and attend my 85 year-old uncle's funeral the same week as Cookie Mueller's and no one in my family understood or wanted to understand, the intensity of it. Which became a fresh reason to make that reality my home. I felt bonded to my world by crisis. These were also the years when a lot of people, myself included, stopping using drugs and alcohol. So a partying community gradually became a mourning one. In poems, at least, the stories of this conversion were being told. Tim Dlugos, who died in 1990, wrote a long poem called "G7," which tells in lines of detailed and deceptively free, poetic speech the facts of his final stay at Roosevelt Hospital. And that was the end of a certain queer literary tradition. Tim was a direct, poetic descendant of Frank O'Hara and Tim used that New York School immediacy to allow his own demise to be translucent. In retrospect, other writers seem way more attuned to the crisis than they did at the time. Dennis Cooper, a poet turned novelist with many of the same aesthetic roots as Tim, kept churning out ever more violent and poetic and gorgeous narratives about sex and murder. I don't know if Dennis has ever acknowledged AIDS in his work, but who could miss the political significance of his own, seemingly cavalier, literary-body-count? Isn't death simply death? And wasn't it always? Jane DeLynn wrote harsh and offensive, funny and true novels about lesbian and gay lives during the worst arc of the plague. Her resistance to being responsive to anything other than her own sense of annihilation and distress, was also, like Cooper's, in keeping with the zeitgeist--but in the "wrong" way. Instead of AIDS, they were representing carnality and frustration--and there is a relationship, to be sure. Not too long after this, in the late-80s, the non-fiction moment arrived. Writers, but particularly novelist and poets, began to publish detailed, "true" narratives about incest, recovery, compulsive sexuality, storms at sea, you name it. AIDS narratives, which began as soon as people began dying, were always at the prow of this. You could look at 80s performance art as being related to, or even predicting this cavalcade of truth-telling. Karen Finley is not entirely unrelated to Kathryn Harrison. And neither is Bruce Chatwin--one of our greatest travel writers who died of AIDS, but never said so. There's a difference today in how one writes about AIDS--everyone's "seen it" so that can't be the story now. Sentiment can't be the story, even outpourings of rage. We're numb. Yet the deaths go on. I just finished Amy Hoffman's "Hospital Time" (1997), which flirts with hagiography, but of a cranky sort. Her friend, activist Michael Riegle, is nearly dead at the beginning of the book and we approach the near-spectacle of his death wondering, along with her, why she was chosen to be his executor. Instead we get Michael's difficult life and death and a quietly visceral pleasure in Amy's fearlessness. She expresses her own doubt and cowardice and inability to cope, supported by a sure sense that she did cope extraordinarily--or that's the myth of the book."Hospital Time" enlarges our understanding of the kinds of human love. As well as offering a beautiful little exegesis of that anti-love known as friendship. When Maureen Dowd recently complained in the "Times" that her generation lacked a war, a war like her dad's generation had, I felt again the crushing force of the realization that AIDS was still "ours" alone. And so the sainthood of homosexuality gets ritualized. Joe Westmoreland's recently completed novel, "Tramps Like Us," is a sort of buddy movie that ends with AIDS. The narrator, Joe, hitchhikes around America with a shifting group of friends with whom he inhabits the punk rock clubs and gay bars of the late-70s and 80s. Joe is handsome and sweet and oddly unworldly and his more adventurous sidekick, Qualbee, dies in the arms of the reader. And then another buddy, Jose, dies, and by the end you know that Joe is sick, too. Westmoreland is a writer who--because of the "blessing" of the new drugs is more than just living with AIDS--is puzzled and elated by his unexpected and ongoing life. He's now shopping "Tramps" in a mainstream literary marketplace that's "over" AIDS and bad-boy narratives, especially gay ones. So his search for a publisher will be a litmus test for what AIDS literature is today. The censorship of the marketplace is a huge force for writers to contend with. If avant-garde art still has something to do with the necessity of the audience completing the work, then these AIDS narratives that need me to read them and that I need to read, are what Duchamp had in mind. The strangest book of poetry of 1993 has yet to find its audience. Tory Dent's heterosexual account of living with AIDS, "What Silence Equals," is unreconciled and quietly rageful, so solitary and fanatically independent. It won no awards that I'm aware of and continues to circulate among a thousand hands, awaiting readers who can stomach another elegant account of the loneliness of the 20th century and its most shameful disease: desire. Eileen Myles is a poet and critic whose books include "Chelsea Girls," "School of Fish," Maxfield Parrish" and "Not Me." She has just completed a novel "Cool for You." The symposium "panelists'" - Chris Dohse, Stephen Holden, Eileen Myles, and Nancy Princenthal.