Illuminating Gender II

46     In this poem as well Huston cleverly defines her terms, presuming an audience unfamiliar with her vocabulary. She writes "I didn't share my works/(works — needle paraphernalia that lowlife junkie scum use to/get high with)" (23). In two lines she both tells readers about "works" and what they are while also, again, presenting the cultural implications/associations/judgments that accompany "street" vocabulary. The activism of Huston's poetry here is the constant motion between education and implication. She seems to say to the reader, "if I'm implicated in this, so too are you..." Perhaps the implication, as I said earlier, is using the very vocabulary Huston exposes. Huston turns the poem a third time, from "those people" to the speaker as "those people" to what the reader might not (Huston again deconstructs readers' expectations as they read the poem) expect of "those people." "Did I tell you I graduated from college?" she asks (24).

47     The "I" of the poem, one of the "those people" becomes, presumably, one of the readers as well; the speaker invokes a class-specific lifestyle, from college to writing books, suggesting a very different lifestyle than the one lived by "those people." This connection between reader and poet creates a moment of interruption in the cultural perception of HIV/AIDS. Huston continues:

I advocate for women's rights to the treatment of their choice I volunteer at prisons, and drug rehabilitation centers and I cry at night and now in the morning in a hotel room somewhere in Michigan I cry for them, the other those people I cry for myself. (24)

At work in all of Huston's poems are moments like these, where she creates a connection between poet and reader which challenges many of the ideas people hold about those living with HIV/AIDS. The ending lines of this poem, with the poet in tears for "those people" who are ultimately herself, and the readers' other selves, confront readers with the ugly realities of prejudice and discrimination and the very attitudes that create the silence surrounding HIV/AIDS.

48     "101 Ways to Die Without Doing It" calls on many of the same poetic and emotional devices. Many of Huston's poems are conversational, something informed by her wide use of poetry in performances; early on in her poetry career she used to give out copies of the poems she had read in plastic baggies with condoms. She believes that all poetry should be exciting and interesting; her own work is always emotionally charged and accessible. Even more than these characteristics, however, Huston's work is brave as she opens her life through confessional poetry to expose the social stigma of HIV/AIDS.

49     "101" plays on the rhetoric of HIV/AIDS; one common talk that HIV/AIDS educators are often asked to give is "AIDS 101" (now a course offered by the Red Cross in which one can receive an official certification for giving HIV/AIDS education talks). Huston makes a catalogue in this poem of the "ways to die without doing it." One of the most horrific moments in the poem is revealed early on as Huston tells readers one of the ways is to:

Stand in front of two-thousand first-year college students
have them laugh
when I tell them about the time
the doctor tried to break through the anterior surface of my ilium
and told me
it would be easier if my ass wasn't
so fat. (11)

Here, Huston as poet is exposed, revealing to the reader the difficulties of disclosing public intimacies in the age of HIV/AIDS; students are corralled into an auditorium to hear a speaker when they see no connection between her life and theirs. Huston's other suggestions for "101" include: "Make friends with someone with one T-cell left" and "Be told that I am vulgar/for saying the words vagina, vaginal secretions, oral sex,/anal intercourse" (11-12). This poem also puts the rhetoric of "101" in conflict with society; "anal intercourse" and "vagina" are "forbidden" words, yet part of Huston's own regular vocabulary in giving lectures. Likewise, Huston presents the difficulties of negotiating people who believe they share a vocabulary with Huston, but do not have the emotional intimacy to invoke it. One of the other "101" ways is "When I am asked if I want my name on the Quilt" (12). Huston points out the conflict between the questioner's focus on death and Huston's focus on life; this tension makes conversation difficult, impossible. Like Huston's other poems, the power of "101" lies in her ability to simultaneously share her own personal experience, use the language invoked against HIV/AIDS in order to expose it, affect the reader emotionally, and work poetically to create vivid images and clear, concise language.

50     Both Dent's and Huston's work establishes a potent activist voice by writing to revise the perceptions of women living with HIV. Significantly, their work fills in the gaps of a story often untold story; here are the stories telling the story opposed to the stereotype, the poems written out of frustration and anger at presumption and prejudice. In a literary tradition filled with poems that speak of an experience so different than that of women living with HIV, Dent and Huston redefine issues of equality and access, pain and desire. Characterized by society as the bad girls of HIV/AIDS, their counterpoetics embody a desire to ask how they are different than any other woman in society. In essence, they become all women and as such, they reject the social categorization of whore. Moreover, in demonstrating how common their experiences are, what it means to live and die, and to challenge the prejudices of society, they suggest that perhaps the entire equation of good girl/bad girl, whore/virgin is a misconceived social construction.