"Gentrification of the Mind" by Sarah Schulman Looking back, it was difficult for me to make the transition from AIDS infections before the invention of safe sex and HIV infections after. Emotionally, I did adjust to the reality that transmission information had not reached a lot of people. Later I felt it had reached many people, so I had some difficulty adjusting to understanding AIDS transmission in spite of this knowledge. However, I did come to internalize all of the explanations I heard. After all, I'm not a gay man and I don't know what it's like. I'm not a straight woman and I don't have to negotiate birth control either, it's outside of my experience so I had to listen and learn. I learned to accept that passion mitigates ideas about health and safety. I learned to understand that gay men's lack of self-esteem and lack of social and familial support makes it harder to take care of one's sero-status. I learned to understand about risk reduction instead of elimination. I learned about barebacking. I learned that people are responsible for protecting themselves and that it is childish to rely upon the good will of others. I first heard this last idea when Michael Callen, Robert Hilferty and I went to Germany to start Act-UP chapters. The German gay men kept saying that they were not responsible for their partners, which was very different from the acknowledged caring and mutual responsibility at the core of New York's ACT-UP culture. I attributed it to being German then. But now we've come to feel that way, too. By taking in all of these feelings and ideas, and by accepting them, I have also learned that perhaps HIV infection is inevitable. That perhaps, for some people, it has become routine and even acceptable. I learned this so well, in fact, that when I meet people who have recently seroconverted I understand what happened. It no longer surprises me. I didn't always feel that way, but I do now. I've been persuaded. What's strange though, is that looking back at events of the past, allows me to recapture the feelings of the past. I remember feeling accountable to others and responsible to intervene on their behalf. I felt this way as a person who doesn't have a family in a community of many gay people of my generation who don't have families or institutions of permanence. I felt that I needed such institutions, and I felt deeply responsible to other gay people who needed me--especially because they had no one else. Let me say it this way: I believed--and continue to believe--that a friend is someone who cares about how you are treated and someone who cares about how you treat others, and will actively intervene on both counts. I know this is a convenient way to think because I act that way, because I need other people to act that way, and because I am a product of sixties' and seventies' culture, that last gasp of consciousness in which mutual accountability and responsibility were widely-practiced beliefs. And I also believe this because I've had a hard life and have needed more help than I've received. We live in a very different time now. We have experienced a gentrification of the mind. There is no dynamic value of mutual responsibility in our culture now. It is evident in the realms of policy, social services and, most importantly, in the gated communities of Manhattan and Cyberspace. Just as socially it is very hard to find people willing to intervene on behalf of others, personally it is equally difficult. Distorted thinking about private sectors--mostly economic and emotional--prevail. Lies really. That people needing help is a "private" matter, that it is nobody's business. AIDS activism of the eighties flourished because it was a cultural moment in which there were enough sero-negative people who were willing to intervene because their friends were being treated abominably by their families, their landlords, their government. Many of the same individuals who took mutual responsibility during the AIDS-activist era, would not risk feeling uncomfortable to help another person today. This is not about blame, it's simply a cultural observation. Their lives are private. This Zeitgeist has broad implications--it's hard to be an individual within such a value system. You have to act out, in the characteralogical sense, to stand up to it. You have to beg for intervention, or you have to insist on it. And then your behavior is seen as politically- or personally inappropriate. So, I would say, that in this horrible selfish, dishonest, "private" social moment, the kind of "activism" based on an ethic that people are responsible for how others act and how they are treated is pretty much impossible. There will have to be a social transformation for that to be possible again. And there will be. Every historical moment passes. McCarthyism passed, even the Holocaust passed. If you can live long enough, there will be a more moral time again. If you can't, according to the mores of the moment, that is your personal problem. I'm glad I witnessed the gorgeousness of ACT-UP so that I know that it is right and possible to intervene on behalf of others. But I don't' expect to see a moment like that right now. The status quo on AIDS is a consequence of this moment. It will change and this change requires a different counter-culture of personal values. I beleive that it will come, and talking about something is part of making it possible--even if the timeline of change is a long one. Sarah Schulman's play, "The Child," will have a workshop production in February, 2001, at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island, which will be directed by Craig Lucas. Read Sarah Schulman's premiere publications; her play "The Child," and essay, "Through the Looking Glass" in the current Artery. The symposium "panelists'" - Richard Elovich, Gregg Bordowitz and Sarah Schulman.