Policing, Politicizing, Poeticizing the Virgin/Whore Split: Contemporary American Women's Poetry about AIDS — Page 5:
21 Her collection establishes several levels of complexity. First, it is a collection about coming of age, a female Bildungsroman, which emphasizes sexuality. This sexuality is almost always violent, unwanted attention from either the neighborhood boys or the father figure in the book. Later in the text, Howe's "I" narrator discusses her adult sexuality, which is a powerful counterpoint to her younger sexual experiences. Sexuality, then, becomes both ominous and celebratory, depending upon the parameters in which it is enacted, a powerful commentary on sex in the age of HIV/AIDS. As Howe explores her brother's process of death and dying from HIV/AIDS-related complications, however, it becomes clear that she links her own sexuality to that of her brother's to demonstrate the way in which heterosexuality is complicit in so many gay, HIV/AIDS-related deaths. As Howe immerses her readers in a sensual language of sexuality, she signals her desire, like Newman, to transgress the social norms required of her as a straight woman. She willingly becomes the bad girl of her own text, seeking to reclaim sexuality — both for herself and her brother — and turn what was previously taboo into something beautiful.
22 "Sixth Grade" marks the beginning of the sexual poems. Howe writes of "The afternoon the neighborhood boys tied me and Mary Lou Mahar/ to Donny Ralph's father's garage doors, spread-eagled" (16). Howe and Mary Lou, out-of-sight of parental intervention, have to rely on Charlie, Howe's brother's friend to stop the boys as "Donny got the deer's leg severed from the buck his dad had killed// the year before, dried up and still fur-covered, and sort of/ poked it at us" (16). This entryway to the sexual differences between young men and women, with women literally held up as sexual spectacles, bears an eerie similarity to a porno movie in which women are splayed out to be poked and prodded.
23 If "Sixth Grade" represents one side of Howe's sexuality, "Practicing" presents another. "I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,/ a song for what we did on the floor in the basement," writes Howe (23). Here, she offers the reader an episode in sexual curiosity. She writes of the experience of exploring sexuality at a slumber party with "maybe six or eight girls," and thus establishes powerfully, and poetically, a link to her brother's world (23). In "Practicing," Howe's only lament is the shame the girls felt after kissing. The girls don't discuss "Practicing" outside of the basement. In her poem, however, Howe acknowledges the possibility of desire for someone of the same gender. This poem, the hinge between her world and her brother's, marks the collection's two distinct halves: Marie's and Johnny's. "Practicing" is a love poem for the girls the "I" narrator kissed, but also for her brother. Importantly, in a society filled with stigma, Howe sets down her ground rules for What the Living Do: they love and understand and live.
24 Howe's ease in connecting her own culpability presents readers with a challenge to connect their own lives to HIV/AIDS in a palpable way. Howe is both chronicler and participant in the HIV/AIDS pandemic. She does not separate herself as "other" from HIV/AIDS but rather as a ready, though unwilling participant (because shouldn't we all be unwilling to participate in HIV/AIDS?).
25 Howe doesn't run from the difficult moments; as a participant in her brother's death, she chronicles the poignant and the disturbing. Howe exposes the community between herself, her brother and his lover, Joe in "A Certain Light." The confident voice of the poet names the new vocabulary of the medications, the system of keeping them straight, the physical repercussions of the medicine on the body in an attempt to establish how intimate this community is; to participate in someone's death is the ultimate act of love.