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By Root 786 0

Although I don’t recall feeling it from Bill, I sometimes feel a rage coming from gay men his age or older. I think it akin to that directed by Vietnam vets toward Gulf War vets—We fight for years and people spit on us. You fight for weeks and people throw you a parade. That difference in experience is in part made up by the AIDS epidemic. Bill lived in the center of the plague in a way that, a decade later, I could choose not to do. That was true when we had the conversation in 1994, and it remains true today. To my knowledge, no friend or even acquaintance of mine has died of AIDS, or aged ten years in a few months, or been ravaged by pneumonia or an intestinal parasite, or been covered with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions, or killed himself to hasten an inevitable end. This is what protease inhibitors and privilege mean now.

Nonetheless, AIDS has made its mordant claim on me. I have watched men’s faces flinch and set as they tell me they are positive. I have had scares where I have read the virus in my every sweat or twinge. I have realized the bloodiness of blood in getting my own tests, and have watched the white stick for the red line that will mean my life has changed forever. I have felt the guilty grace of my negative results. And I have marveled at how all my gay male friends have wrestled with the fear of dying young.

AIDS galvanized the gay community. Passing is often associated with death, as in the racial context, where to pass as white has been to die a social death in one’s community of origin. For gay men, AIDS transformed the figurative equivalence between “passing” and “passing away” into a literal one. Literal death was met with silence—in 1986, when AIDS had caused the deaths of more than sixteen thousand Americans, only a handful of obituaries identified the deaths as AIDS-related. Silence, in turn, has caused literal death, as in the lethal state censorship of AIDS education.

As AIDS closets became coffins in the 1980s and 90s, the felt costs of the gay closet, particularly for men, increased. While not identical, the AIDS closet and the gay closet interlock. AIDS has caused gay individuals to come out as gay to combat state and social indifference to the epidemic. The AIDS-inspired slogans “SILENCE=DEATH” and “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” have come to testify more broadly to the gay experience. The AIDS closet has also undermined the gay closet because it is a less stable structure. The syndrome has left marks—perhaps most commonly the Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion—that have outed its victims as AIDS sufferers and, associatively, as gay.

Radicalized by AIDS, many gays sought to revise the social contract of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” In the early 1990s, their activism took the form of outing—exposing people as gay against their will. Long viewed as taboo, outing finally found a pope in AIDS activist Michelangelo Signorile. The pulpit was the gay magazine OutWeek, which published a series of his articles outing public figures like tycoon Malcolm Forbes.

Public outing had a short career. For many gays, outing seemed uncomfortably close to the forced acknowledgment exacted by homophobes, like the police tactics used during bar raids. The mainstream press proved even more hostile. OutWeek closed its doors in 1991, allegedly because advertisers had withdrawn from the magazine. The norm moved back to one in which only active homophobia by a closeted homosexual could warrant outing—as Representative Barney Frank put it, “There is a right to privacy but not to hypocrisy.” It’s remarkable how little debate outing engenders today.

Like the gay community, passing has survived AIDS. When one converts, it is assumed one has converted to all audiences. With passing, there are as many closets as individuals in one’s audience. This makes coming out a Sisyphean enterprise, at both the individual and collective levels. This is why, a dozen years after coming out to my parents, I still find myself passing in some contexts today. And it is why, thirty-seven years after Stonewall, passing is still a major issue for