Policing, Politicizing, Poeticizing the Virgin/Whore Split: Contemporary American Women's Poetry about AIDS — Page 3:
11 These writers also wrestle with a grief, perhaps guilt, of living, something that characterizes the virgins/good girls of HIV/AIDS. The witnesses to HIV/AIDS, here the caregivers, continue life. That continuance, however, is yoked to HIV/AIDS everyday. The survivors ask the pressing questions of who dies from HIV/AIDS and why? They explore social inequalities of class, race, gender, and sexual preference, seeking to demonstrate the way in which these inequalities continue to affect access to HIV/AIDS services. The task of the caregivers is to find meaning from HIV/AIDS and recreate HIV/AIDS, lest the dead be forgotten and history rewritten.
13 Lesléa Newman is the author of many books, including three with HIV/AIDS-specific content, a children's book entitled Too Far Away To Touch, an anthology of remembrances of loved ones lost to HIV/AIDS, A Loving Testimony, and Still Life With Buddy: A Novel Told In Fifty Poems (1997), a book of HIV/AIDS poetry dedicated to Newman's three "buddies," Gerard Rizza, Stan Leventhal and Victor Fane D'Lugi, who form the composite for the "fictional" Buddy in the poems. Newman's 1997 Still Life with Buddy is representative of the pre-protease poetry of HIV/AIDS, working to eulogize those lost to HIV/AIDS. The subtitle of Still Life With Buddy: A Novel Told in Fifty Poems reveals Newman's system of organization for this book. She seeks to represent not just an illness, but also an entire life as part of the HIV/AIDS narrative. This rhetorical strategy, to represent a whole life is common in HIV/AIDS narratives, extending even to the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt which represents people's lives through artifacts — photographs, clothing, loved objects, written narratives — incorporated into the Quilt. The retelling of a life takes on particular significance because it urges the reader to think beyond the stigma of "HIV/AIDS" to the ramifications of a life lost and to make connections between the specific life lost and their own.
14 Embodying the loss of HIV/AIDS, Newman's book begins with "Prophecy:"
When you get in the nineties, my grandmother said
all the people you know are already dead
In 1990 I turn thirty-five
most of my friends more dead than alive. (3)
With this epigraph-like note to the book's beginning, Newman establishes herself as a particular kind of survivor: part of the surviving and much diminished gay and lesbian community in the 1990s left to grapple with the dying and death of so many loved ones.
15 Newman's book shares similarities with Doty's My Alexandria and his other HIV/AIDS poetry as she presents HIV/AIDS in the context of the gay community, struggling to make sense of so much loss in a society which seeks to marginalize homosexuals. In "The Politics of Buddy," part one, Newman and Buddy visit Macy's to try on make-up. When sent away by the salesclerk, Buddy responds:
"Is it a crime for a boy
to wear make-up?" Buddy shouts
"Or is it a crime for a boy
to look so good in it?" (10)
Buddy, as Newman reveals here, challenges social norms in both obviously public moments as well as more private ones. This moment of societal disapproval — that boys shouldn't wear make-up — captured in the encounter between Buddy and the salesclerk, is quickly followed by part two in which Buddy and his lover, Guy, walk down the street in front of Newman. While Newman makes a point of telling the reader that "They do not touch," their physical proximity nevertheless draws a reaction from passersby who slow their car (10). Newman records the moment, stating that "Ugly faces leer/ 'Hey, faggots,' 'Hey sissy boy,'/ 'Hey, you goddamn queers'" (10). She follows these two moments of blatant homophobia with a subtler one.