PositiveLite says. This interview first appeared on hivster.com here. We're grateful to hivster.com and Brad Crelia in particular for sharing it.
We’ve highlighted the work of hivster.com before. The site shares similar sensibilities to ours and I’ve referred to it before as PositiveLite’s hipper twin.
The Edmund White interview is, I think you’ll agree, so special that we were almost hesitant to ask Brad if he would share it. White is, afte all, one of the most influential gay writers of his time. His "A Boys Own Story" (1982) followed by "The Beautiful Room Is Empty" (1988) and "Farewell Symphony" (1997) were hugely important works that made a big impact on many of us. I remember his "States of Desire" (1991 ) too. And then of course there was "The Joy of Gay Sex "(1977) which he co-wrote with Charles Silverstein, which surely every gay men of our generation has read, however furtively.
How hivster.com managed to snag this interview we don’t know. The boys even got White to write a forward for them. What follows, though, really IS a conversation between three poz gay men - yes, White is indeed poz – and it’s a fascinating read even if you’ve never read White’s books.
By the way, hivster.com has recently got itself a sparkly new look and new content. Go visit.
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Forward By Edmund White
Nick (Lanni) and Brad (Crelia) came to visit me in my New York apartment and we had such a good time that I felt I was losing two friends when they said goodbye. First of all I fell in love with Nick—who’s so big-city sure of himself, a small guy with an appealingly strong personality. And so handsome! Then I almost instantly identified with Brad, who has suffered several tragedies in his life, which he does his best to conceal but which tinge his lively personality nonetheless, in the same way as fresh snow takes on the soft color of an early winter sunset.
Although a half century separated us in age I never felt excluded or misunderstood by them. When there is so much shared sympathy, what’s a little thing like fifty years? It was a relief as well to be with two men who are HIV-positive. I’ve lived with the knowledge that I’m positive since 1985 and it has marked every day if not every moment of those years. Most of the men of my generation who found out early on that they were positive are long since dead. Only handfuls were slow progressors like me and are still hanging on. Those of us who have survived have nothing to complain about. We were and are the lucky ones; we were allowed to live on and to make our full contribution (no matter how small) to society. But we are lonely in some deep way, since the central fact of our adult lives is something that almost no one else knows about.
That’s another reason it was so exhilarating to meet Nick and Brad. They might not have sat beside a hundred beds as friends died nor examined their arms and tongues every morning for signs of a new opportunistic disease. But they knew everything about the current state of AIDS and were living it out in their daily lives.
Like me they understood that gay life is a class system in which the lower class is comprised of the HIV-positive. All you have to do is go on a cruising site and see all the profiles that announce the lucky guy is negative and UB2! I’m negative and plan to stay that way! Be honest about your status! If you’ve left any boxes empty I will block you! Be safe and clean like me! Safe sex only!
I’m sure that if a cure were discovered tomorrow the gay upper class (those who are so proudly negative) wouldn’t accept it. They’d question it and doubt it—for how else could they cling to their precious advantage over so many other men? Of course as Nick and Brad and I already understood, positive people who’d been under treatment for at least six months, had no other STDs and had zero-detectable levels of the virus WERE NOT CONTAGIOUS. Nick and Brad and I were not contagious. No matter if the condom broke or got forgotten in a moment of passion, there would be no harm done. We were incapable of infecting anyone. Major studies in Switzerland, France and the States involving hundreds of sero-discordant couples had proven this and the findings had been available for several years already, but the information wasn’t widely broadcast in America. The stigma of being positive remained in full force.
For two hours I shared the relaxing warmth and the thrilling complicity of being with these two intelligent, attractive men who were living with the stigma of being positive. How could I resist giving them an interview, since they were battling this prejudice in the most personal, proactive way imaginable?
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The Interview
Nick and I buzzed Edmund’s New York City apartment, took the elevator up to his place, both nervous as hell . Edmund’s apartment was exactly how I pictured it in my head. The similarity was uncanny. Books everywhere, paintings of ex-lovers, a Mapplethorpe self-portrait, a picture of Edmund with Capote – museum quality stuff. The sun came through the windows brightening the apartment just enough to warm my back as I sat in his beautiful, worn, wood and tan leather arm chair and our afternoon began.
We introduced ourselves and effortlessly our afternoon went from a from an interview to a chat with a friend.
Edmund started the conversation,
“I had a Swiss boyfriend at the time who had a ex-lover that was positive and died fairly early on and so, he was quite freaked out about the whole thing and I think he thought that because I one of the founders of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis that I must be negative, for some reason. I mean in other words, he was a wonderful man but had one trait he shared with a lot of people, especially back then he was very moralistic about AIDS, so he sort of thought if I was a gay leader I’d be responsible, therefore I wouldn’t get AIDS. Then I think he began to read my book and figure out how promiscuous I was so, that freaked him out and then he said,
‘Well let’s go to this hospital in Zurich.’
We went to this hospital and did the blood test and in those days it took thirty days to get the results back. They had to send the blood samples to America and have them sent back to you and this Swiss doctor refused to give us the findings over the phone, so I had to make another trip. We were walking up the stairs to the hospital in Zurich and my friend said,
“Let’s not go.”
And I said “What?! You have to know what scientifically is happening.”
The results were positive; Edmund White was diagnosed with HIV in 1985.
He goes on to say,
“And I’m a good enough novelist to know that I’ll be positive and you’ll be negative and you’ll be very nice about it and a year later you’ll break up with me, and it happened exactly as I predicted and I was very upset, not because I was positive but because I thought I lost him. But I was fairly, generally depressed.”
The conversation changed and we moved onto lighter topics.
The tea pot was empty: Edmund went to make another pot and I headed to the restroom. I noticed first a Robert Mapplethorpe of Edmund smiling then a picture of him and Capote follow by another Mapplethorpe of him screaming. It was unbelievable. After I pissed, I returned to hear Edmund and Nick talking about ‘Frasier’ of all things.
Edmund White: I think that kind of witty dialogue was really a way of sneaking the gay life and the gay sensibility into everyday life. And all the writers were gay on that show.
Brad Crelia: When I had cable with my ex and I couldn’t sleep, it’d be on.
Nick Lanni: You’re right it’s on late at night!
EW: David Hyde Pierce’s nephew is a gay guy who is a very good friend of mine and is a playwright; we see each other about once a week.
NL: You live in a gay culture now and it has been dumbed down into internet hookups and then sitcoms and we have very few gay writers who are writing anything relevant.
EW: I mean there are some very good gay writers but it’s almost impossible for them to get published and if they do get published it’s almost impossible for them to sell more than 500 copies. So I would say there is a gay culture going on but very valiantly. But in the very margins (sic) but that is also true of straight, very serious writing. I mean we live in a culture which is pretty dumbed down with a few literary best sellers but not more than 10, even with straight people and 3 to 4 for gay people, there is very few. Michael Cunningham might be one.
NL: Right.
EW: And, I think that all that you are saying is true, but you have to make the distinction between the audience of art and the producers of art and I haven’t seen this interview with Fran Leibowitz, this feature film interview that was done and apparently she says “No, no you don’t understand it’s not that I am mourning the death of gay artists, I am mourning the death of gay audiences.” That there used to be these incredibly clever audiences that were demanding, who were very cultured and caught all the references, who demanded really great work. And they're gone. AIDS killed them. I mean because it was a very urban group and also I would say this and I don’t have any statistics to back it up, my feeling is that the really “hit” people in the ‘70’s were flip fucking. Which made them very vulnerable to AIDS and that it was considered kind of square to just be a top or just be a bottom and if you were uptight and couldn’t get fucked that was considered very bad. But of course that made people extremely vulnerable to the AIDS virus.
NL: Michael Musto has pointed out, where have all the bottoms gone? And his whole thing is talking about signing on to manhunt and everyone is a VERS/TOP and my whole opinion of vers men is that you are boring or everyone is a top because you are too masculine to take it. He made some very brilliant points about it. But flip fucking makes you vulnerable to a whole gamut of diseases not just HIV. STDS in general.
EW: But those at least were curable. But the wild card in this whole game was AIDS. It came out of nowhere and nobody was prepared for it. You know I wrote "The Joy Of Gay Sex" in 1977, ‘76 or ’77 and people actually later had the nerve to criticize me for encouraging promiscuous behavior and flip fucking, let’s say and because they said “You are directly responsible for AIDS.” And I said “Well how can you be responsible for something morally about something you didn’t even know about, that didn’t even exist yet.”
BC: Something you wrote 6 years before…
NL: That sounds a lot like anger.
BC: Yes, trying to place blame on something…
NL: Right, when you were only talking about what people were doing at the time.
EW: Well, you know we may have been encouraging people to be flexible sexually but there was no reason not to at the time. You can’t retrospectively …
BC: And I think that probably happened because there was a need to place blame on someone and they put it on you, which is unfortunate.
EW: It never bothered me because it seemed so irrational.
NL: You said in “My Lives” that someone said to you while living in Paris, that fisting was the only thing the 20th century brought to sex.
EW: Well, new…but as far as I can tell, it seems like everything else, anal fucking and rimming, have been going on for a long time. But fisting I don’t think you run into it as a concept before the 20th century.
NL: It just seems very medical. Not in the sense of the sex act but having a whole hand in there seems like a pretty medical procedure. The only accounts I can figure out are medical.
EW: Well you’d hope the person was medically alert.
NL: What are you reading now? If anything?
EW: Oh I am always reading something. But not something that would probably interest you. I am a judge of a literary contest in Italy. So I am reading what is to be chosen as the best book written, internationally, that has been translated into Italian this year, so I had to read all the candidates, which is about 40 of them. And we did a long list and a short list but I don’t think any of them were gay writers.
NL: I saw a video where you mentioned you were reading a Dennis Cooper novel. Have you ever read “The Sluts”, it centers around these internet posts reviewing a particular trick, and these men who are obsessed with him, and whether it is a hoax or not, and Brad and I were discussing earlier about these teenage internet phenomenon’s who create buzz around themselves about absolutely nothing.
EW: A phenomenon you may not know, Patient X?
BC: The first guy to have AIDS.
EW: Yes, he was supposedly this very attractive flight attendant who traveled the world and gave people AIDS…
We took another break, so Nick could use the bathroom, while pissing, Edmund shows me a picture on his computer of the Royal Family getting dressed for the Wedding of Prince William, I got a kiss and a compliment and when Nick returned we continued on,
EW: I have a novel coming out in January and it only incidentally has nothing to do with AIDS, it takes place in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, and it ends in sort of an epilogue that is set in the ‘80’s, it’s called “Jack Holmes and his Friend” and it’s about a straight man and a gay man who are best friends, which is phenomenal, you see it all the time in real life but I’ve never seen it in fiction. Nobody has ever written about it, that I know of. It’s the most common one in the world. My best friend in high school was straight and I have a lot of friends now who are writers and are straight. And we are all very chummy and gay…well you know happy. For instance my sister runs an adoption agency for kids who are HIV positive. And she gets these kids mostly from Africa and Haiti and she herself has adopted 9 HIV positive children. Anyway, she suddenly had to raise, she has a very small not very rich agency, she had to raise 55,000 dollars to satisfy the Hague, because America had signed the Hague Convention, which governs all international adoption. It is quite a good thing but it is very expensive because you have to have all this money in escrow to protect the parents who have already advanced money hoping to get children, if your agency folded or something this would make sure they got reimbursed, so she lives on food stamps, so how would she come up with the money for this, so I did a benefit for her with two straight friends of mine, John Irving, you know who wrote “The World According to Garp” and Peter Carey who is the only person who has won the Booker Prize twice. We had a reading near here and we raised 55,000 dollars! Not just at the reading but the rich people who came to it and wrote big checks, because my sister was there and she talked and everybody applauded and cheered. She is kind of a saint, she’s gay but she is kind of non-practicing, she doesn’t have much sex because she is so busy with these babies.
We chit chat about some Irrelevant stuff and I [Brad] explain that I was born in Oklahoma. And Edmund takes the reins and keep the conversation going,
EW: Have you ever heard of an artist called Joe Brainard?
Both: No.
EW: He wrote a book called “I Remember”, he died of AIDS and he was an amazing painter and writer but he was from Oklahoma.
BC: We don’t really have any more questions but would you like to keep chatting?
BC: Like I said in one of the emails, my mom gave me “A Boy’s Own Story” and…
EW: Oh, is that right? You both seem to have very nice mothers.
BC: (smile in your voice) Yes, I had a great mom. She gave it to me and it was very…it was a good time for me to have it.
EW: what did your mother die of?
BC: This disease called hereditary coproporphyria.
EW: Is that what George III had?
BC: Yes, they made a movie called “The Madness of King George”. I have it as well.
EW: Do you go mad as well?
BC: I do off medication, yeah.
EW: Is it a enzyme or something?
BC: Yes, when your body produces red blood cells it produces a neurotoxin and I am missing the enzyme to kill the neurotoxin off, so body is toxic.
EW: So how come it would come in waves for George III?
BC: It just does, it is an acute disease where it has stressors that trigger it. Like physical stress, mental stress, emotional stress. There are certain medications and drugs; there are different ways to trigger an attack.
EW: What kind of medication do you take for it?
BC: There is no cure really or treatment. They treat symptoms, so there is pain medication.
EW: There is no way for them to replace the enzyme?
BC: Not really, there is a medicine called Hematin, and it is very expensive and it helps sometimes but not always. So they’ll give it to me in an attack.
EW: So does your tongue go blue?
BC: No, it’s the urine that changes color. Mine goes usually a pink or purplish kind of color.
EW: And that’s what killed your mother. Do you think it will kill you eventually?
BC: Um, yeah I think so. I think that will probably kill me before HIV.
EW: Wow, well maybe they will find a cure for it.
BC: Well, the thing is it’s very rare. There isn’t a lot of research or money put into it. But I deal with it fairly well.
EW: You seem to be doing very well about everything.
BC: Yeah I’ve had it for about ten years.
EW: And do you have another job to support yourself?
BC: No, I don’t.
EW: So this is it? That’s good! Do you have a backer?
BC: Not currently, we just have formed as a company, so we are accepting donations and stuff. I live off disability and have been spending my disability money on certain costs. We have some really good people working for us, volunteers, Nick here, and some people back in Seattle. It’s been a good experience so far.
EW: So do you have a boyfriend?
BC: I did, we were together for awhile and then he kind of gave me an ultimatum, work or him. I have been having trouble since I tested positive, being intimate. That was kind of a problem for him. He didn’t feel like I was attracted to him and he just didn’t understand that it was the virus.
EW: Was he negative?
BC: Yeah.
EW: It is hard, I mean…
BC: They are always worried that you could infect them…
EW: Although, do you have zero detectable virus?
BC: Yeah.
EW: Well, then you’re not contagious.
BC: I know.
EW: It’s just that we can’t get that through our little heads.
BC: It’s also that I have been working really hard for the site. I had priorities and he didn’t feel he was at the top.
NL: Why is that? We just can’t get it through our heads.
EW: I don’t know. For instance after I became positive, I don’t think I topped anybody for at least six months after. I was always more of a bottom anyway. I used to go back and forth a bit. I used to have sex with women too, so it was no more topping and no more women. It just felt so much easier to control the safe sex as a bottom.
Click here For Nick's thoughts on this story
Click here for Brad's thoughts on this story.
You can buy Edmund White’s work by clicking here.
