What made herpes more terrifying was its incurability. There’s nothing they can do for you except give you pills that may or may not reduce the number and severity of the outbreaks you experience. They’ll swab your open sores and run tests to verify what you’ve got. If you’re lucky, it’s syphilis. Get a shot of penicillin and you’re fixed. And maybe it is syphilis. It does seem as if it’s in a perpetual cycle of resurgence. But if you’re unlucky, it’s herpes, and you’re going to have it until you die, barring the unlikely discovery of a cure.
Of course, herpes wasn’t my only fear. I also dreaded and agonized over crabs, the effects of which were equally easy to produce psychosomatically. Particularly when I visited my parents or other family members overnight, I compulsively recalled my most recent sexual encounters and wondered if I had crabs that had yet to fully gestate, or were only then reaching the phase of their existence in which they begin to cause itching. For days after every weekend jaunt, I would find myself itching. I imagined calling and explaining to my parents that they should be careful handling the sheets from my room. Or apologizing that, because we all sat on the same sofa, I thought the odds were pretty good that I transmitted a genital parasite to them.
HIV seemed unlikely because I wasn’t bottoming for anyone, and I always wore a condom when it came to anal sex. But the fact that it was unlikely didn’t stop me from being terrified. Sometimes men would cancel whatever trysting plans we had made because of my ever-escalating hysteria, confirming and reconfirming their HIV statuses. I didn’t mind when they canceled. I imagined I was weeding out guys who had something to hide, who were worried I was the type to trace it back to its source and come for revenge, like Jennifer Hills, the gang rape victim protagonist of the 1978 film, I Spit On Your Grave, who, after regaining her strength, terrorizes and murders her attackers, castrating one of them and leaving him to bleed out in a warm bath. Maybe they were right. I don’t know what I might have done.
There were years, literal years, when I would return from a sexual encounter and check myself over and over again, convinced that every mark or blemish or spot of any kind — even if it was essentially nonexistent — was an early symptom of something horrible happening within my body.
The friend who volunteered at the AIDS hospice told me about patients with immune systems so suppressed that their genitals and anuses were completely covered in open herpes sores. He talked about their agony in trying to wipe their behinds or having their behinds wiped for them. I felt as though he was describing my future. I had seen all the medical photographs of men with genitals horribly mutilated by STIs, and the images were forever flashing through my mind, partly because I was constantly searching for them in service of my always-incorrect self-diagnoses. Eventually, they were as familiar to me as the set of 1987 Topps baseball cards I had owned and obsessed over as a nine-year-old, the ones with the faux wood grain borders.
When you’re as worried about these things as I have been, you’re not content merely checking yourself for signs of disease. Each time you get naked with another man, you look and look and look, scrutinizing every part of his lower half. Everything becomes a trigger for concern. You begin to grasp the maddening irregularity of human skin. It can be mottled or red-spotted. It can be irritated for no clear reason. It gets moles and tags and bumps connected to no known cause. How often I was told, “That’s always been there.”
“Really?” I’d say.
“Yeah,” the guy always said, “for as long as I can remember. Promise.”
“Really?” I’d repeat.
It’s a testament to the power of something — a tremendous sex drive or an obsessive nature — that I could worry so much over STIs and still be able to say, “I did it anyway.” Although it should also be said that those fears did prevent me from doing more than I did. And the anxiety-filled weeks following my time with the leather and denim couple taught me to be more up-front from the beginning. After that, when I entered a booth with someone, I’d always whisper, “I don’t do much out here” to give them a chance to leave if they were looking for something kinky or even merely penetrative. Some guys actually said, “Me neither. This place is full of freaks.” They were my favorites, and I often found myself going further with them than I would with the others. If it was a ruse, it was an effective one.
Some of the guys were content to play even if it meant that not much was going to happen. The rest would leave right away. But it always felt like the right thing to do, letting people know what they could expect from me. Sometimes they didn’t seem to know what I meant, but I never elaborated. Besides, I didn’t know myself what it meant when I said I didn’t do much out there. I knew I wasn’t going to have sex. Honestly, I never intended even to let anyone touch me. But that happened with growing regularity. Then I knew for a fact that I would never let anyone go down on me. But then that happened a few times. Of course, it was a given that I would never go down on anyone else. No fucking way. Then that happened. But I always started out by saying “I don’t do much out here” to manage their expectations. I never anticipated that things would escalate, but the fact that they sometimes did made it all the more exciting.
There were men who after a few minutes of casual touching and film watching would get on their knees in front of me and beg to be permitted to go further. More than once, I literally held a man back with my palm flat against his forehead.
By that time I had said the other thing I always said when I got into a booth with someone. I asked, “Are you clean?”
Most of the guys said, “Yes, are you?”
Or, “My ass? Yeah.”
Or, “As far as I know, I am.”
I got the feeling it wasn’t a question that got asked out there a lot. The way men reacted made me think I was breaking an unspoken rule. It took a couple of seconds for them to process. When they said “Yes,” I always followed up with, “Are you sure?”
I regretted resorting to the word “clean.” I tried to think of another word that would be equally concise but less offensive to those unfortunate enough to be burdened with some kind of disease. I considered “neg,” which most gay guys would know, but the mostly-straight guys who frequented the place probably wouldn’t. And, besides, it didn’t cover the variety of infections I was even more paranoid about than HIV.
The question of “cleanliness” brought to mind a scene from the Spike Lee biopic Malcolm X, in which Denzel Washington, as Mr. X, discovers the way he is being oppressed, not merely by the citizenry of the US or the world, but by the English language itself. He looks up the word “black” in the dictionary and sees how it’s used to suggest evil and ruin, while “white” is used as a stand-in for purity and goodness.
I wanted to have a better word than clean, whose opposite is dirty, but I never found one.
16
STALKING THE COP AND THE KID HADN’T BEEN MY PLAN PER se, but obsession had always been my go-to mode, even for relatively inconsequential upsets. And given that my relationship with the cop was the exact opposite of inconsequential, I was completely swept up before I had any sense of how it might be avoided.