By Timothy DuWhite
HIV could’ve saved lives. That is the only truth I am interested in. Experts on the news keep offering me bodies and data to mourn, but won’t admit the fact to my face. Won’t fess up. So, until they do, I’ll continue to mind my own damn business. I’ll do an hour run in the morning, drink black seed oil in the afternoon, and have raunchy gay sex at night. I’ll read Harry Potter, smoke a blunt and conduct a Zoom party for my niggas in the living room. As a form of self-care, I’m not fucking with anyone who is not fucking with me—and currently that is most of the world. And by currently, I mean always. And by always, I mean I have been “dirty” for a long time. It is in my blood—in more ways than one.
Today we are being told to stay at home—to remain socially distant. This morning my mother called me crying, saying she dreamt of being held and awoke once again to an empty apartment. My mother has been single and living alone for the last fifteen years of her life.
The process of weaning one’s self off the dependency to an addictive substance is oftentimes referred to as “getting clean.” Her tears were not a result of quarantine, but rather what happens when you can’t help being filthy. When your inconsistent sobriety inflates you to the point where you’re the only person able to fit inside of your home.
So yeah, “cleanliness” is cool I guess. Wiping down your groceries before placing them in your cabinets could be a vibe. But when my mother calls and tells me her rehab stay has been cut days short due to COVID-19 caution restrictions, I can’t help but think that “clean” is a white woman always appearing to be innocent—always presumed to have the best intentions.
I mean, everyone can objectively agree that “clean” is the most desirable state of being, right? I mean, it’s not prejudice, it’s just a point of fact. I mean, if given the choice wouldn’t you want your children to be clean, and safe, and out of harm’s way?
If only my mother could be a dependable sort of “clean,” a stark bleach that would settle in the skin, then she wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not the rehabs will keep her. The fear of how dirty she was wouldn’t be the reason that she, and her fellow addicts, were let go early from the very place that was supposed to cleanse them.
But, thanks to Rona, now everyone is in the same boat. Everyone knows what it means to be presumed filthy. Everyone who is alone is suddenly lonely. We are all in this together, right? Until you are the one targeted for blame.
It’s a silly thing to think that the individual hygienic habits of a group of people would be solely enough to end a pandemic. I say “silly” instead of “violent” because I know where saying what I really feel leads me. I know that if I were to suggest, for a moment, shifting our focus away from which neighbor is sitting at the park to which racist is sitting in congress, I would be told I am missing the point. That it is our responsibility as citizens to abide by the government’s regulations to keep us all safe, otherwise we’ll be no better than murderers.
I want to say that no widespread disease in recorded history has ever been quelled simply by the determination of individual community members—absent access to necessary resources. I want to say that those necessary resources have never and will never reach the poor, the Black, the unclean. I want to say I know this, because I live this. But again, I know where that sort of talk will lead me. During this difficult time, we’re all going through the same hardships—except for those of us who say and think and do the things that are most easily scapegoated.
I’m not trying to sound bitter; in fact, I’m not aiming to sound like anything at all when I say some of us have been solitary and the rest of y’all are just now visiting. And yes, I am bringing up my blood again, because I’m obsessed. All I do is sit in my house and think about how one time a white doctor declared me “unsafe,” and I’ve been taking a pill-a-day ever since.
When you are first diagnosed with HIV, you are warned that your duty from now until eternity is to protect everyone against what’s inside of your body. The word “disclosure” becomes a silver hook gnarling the soft skin inside your cheek, like a fish who is caught only to be thrown back into the pond—now injured and less trusting. It’s a secluding thing to have to tell someone that you may not be healthy for them. To delete the message thread and stay home, though all you want is to lay inside someone else’s bed. Yet now, eureka! Praise the Gods of reference because we all have a point of entry. Today, we all understand.
The funny thing about the order to stay “six feet” apart from one another is that folks like me can’t be too sure if the orderer is suggesting the distance we should be standing, or the distance we should be buried. When it comes to HIV, the easiest answer has historically been our death. Easy in the way that God’s word makes everything easy.
The old saying goes, “cleanliness is next to Godliness.” I think about this saying often when praying with my mother. Christianity called HIV God’s reckoning for the transgressions of the sexually deviant. It was deemed that our deaths were our own fault—that God was cleansing the world of demons. So basically, the story went, one afternoon a man decided to light himself on fire, the world called him a faggot and God slipped an ill omen into his blood. Easy. Today, though, we realize God’s work is never done.
Sometimes, I wonder where mine and my mother’s prayers even go. The bond between a son and a mother who are both labeled “unclean” is as tight as a clenched jaw mistaken for a grin. Her addiction and my blood makes us both a cautionary pair.
But here we are, in the year of 2020, contemplating what it means for the liquor stores to remain more accessible than rehab. Even while my mother is trying to “get clean,” she is denied, told that it is too late, that she waited too long. And maybe Colored People’s Time, Black folk’s proclivity for being tardy, has something to do with the disproportionate rates of COVID-19 cases in the Black community. Maybe we all just waited too long? To be rich. To be financially secure. To be housing stable. To be a color not despised by the melanin deficit. To be white. Maybe we all just waited too long to be white. A pristine, porcelain ceramic figurine proven to be even lighter than it looks. Clean.
When I say HIV could’ve saved lives, what I mean is that those of us with blood like mine have been about this shit. As state after state employs law enforcement to carry out social distancing orders, it is us, the sullied blooded, who remind the world about history. Remind everyone that a bullet has never killed an epidemic no matter how American the shooter. How throwing people in cages only helps to exacerbate disease, not halt it.
It is us, yes, doing that dirty work, despite our own triggers. Despite how traumatizing it is to be re-diagnosed as a possible danger to our community. It is us, and the rest of our unclean siblings (the alcoholics, the drug addicts, the diseased), teaching the entire world what to do with all the sudden quiet in their bodies.
This isn’t my attempt at soliciting an apology, it is me trying to gain clarity on exactly what you are asking of me when you ask me to be “clean.” Because what I hear is you want the “filth” that is me and my mother to disappear.
Years ago, while entering a semi-vacant Brooklyn bound 2 train, my then-boyfriend and I took our seats across from a man I presumed to be homeless. He had his things sprawled out the length of his bench. I do not remember every detail of that day, where we were coming from or going, I just remember smelling this man and feeling personally offended. As if his stench was an attack on my comfort. I immediately screwed up my face, and, in a huff, demanded my partner follow me onto the next cart.
Once relocated, I noticed my partner was upset.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“Who do you think you are?” he replied with annoyance. “Who are you to be so delicate? Who are you to be so above the odor of someone managing to survive without a home?”
I was first stunned—then angry, defensive.
I mean, it was no knock against him, I just have a right to not have to smell that if I don’t want to. I mean, I do advocacy for the homeless in the city, this is not about that. I mean, everyone can objectively agree that “clean” is the most desirable state of being, right? I mean, it’s not prejudice, it’s just a point of fact.
There is a politic to senses. Entire countries have been built around the ruling class’s needs as they relate to touch, taste, smell, sound and sight. The implied agency that the more wealthy (often white) have over their senses and their bodies is what makes Governor Cuomo’s comments on how disgusting the homeless are making subways for essential workers seem reasonable. We have no time for the unclean right now—for the poor, for the Black. The rich build entire gated communities so that their vision will never be impaired by the sight of those lesser than them.
Today we are saying “six feet,” but just yesterday it was “six blocks,” or “allowed entrance only with a membership card,” or “who do you know that lives inside this building?”
Yesterday, it was HIV and my mother’s alcoholism, and it will be the same tomorrow if we keep hanging onto these carceral ideas of dirtiness/cleanliness. But until then, I will continue to answer these mo(u)rning calls. I will remind my mother that she is loved, even while alone. I will sing her her favorite love song as I wince at the heat with which I have chosen to wash my now scalded hands. I will assure her that this is not how our world ends. And for a moment, I will force myself to believe it too.
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