Illuminating Gender II

41     Dent's disease is painful and presents itself with many different symptoms and iterations of AIDS related complications. After waiting for an entire year, Dent is eligible to try a new drug and within a week it fails her. For the first time, the physical pain of the body overtakes Dent's language. What in HIV, Mon Amour was a connection to sensuality and sexuality here becomes useless. She can't describe her pain and she's "almost glad" that words fail her.

42     Dent also uses her poetry to subvert the heteropatriarchal expectations of her place in society. Dent lays blame for HIV/AIDS at the doorstep of a government that ignored the virus in the early years. And so, Dent explains her own illness in the limited terms she believes exist to define women's lives experiences and lives. She says,

I was laboring — for survival is like having a baby,
my legs spread apart, my head thrown back — I was laboring but it was not
optimistic, a stillborn birthing in which death is forced out
from deep inside you, forced out with an effort excruciating and formidable,
your dead body that threatens soon to become you. (18)

The act of survival is an every day laboring where, Dent graphically records, she must force out death. So, with her legs splayed, she works at survival, a "stillborn birthing" where the dead fetus is death itself, momentarily displaced from the body.

43     Dent, in these three collections, provides the most comprehensive and poetically aggressive presentation of women and HIV/AIDS. In her work, we find the confrontation and then acceptance of the idea of sexual transgression. By embodying sexuality and disease in her poems, Dent challenges readers to consider who isn't a whore/bad girl of society. In her poetic narrative, she suggests that she is, in essence, every woman. In the social construction of HIV/AIDS, she should be writing the poems Newman and Howe write; instead, her counterpoetics embody the living of a disease, the confrontation with the mystery of illness, and a serious challenge to the heteronormative and patriarchal expectations of her. It is an oeuvre that fully encapsulates the complexities of life with HIV/AIDS while also immersing the reader in the sensuality and desire of language.

44     Like Tory Dent, River Huston's work speaks out of the silence created for women living with HIV. Huston, as I have mentioned in previous chapters, is dedicated to women's issues and HIV through her two poetry collections, Jesus Never Lived Here (1993) and The Bones of Susan (1995); her column on women's issues in POZ; public lecturing at HIV/AIDS conferences; educational lectures in schools; and projects like Living with HIV: A Book of Questions and A Positive Life. Huston confronts the stereotypes about women and HIV/AIDS by incorporating and deconstructing vernacular language in common usage.

45    In "Those People," Huston responds to an article about HIV/AIDS. She writes:

An article lies on the dresser
about an upcoming lecture
the writer quotes the lecturer
"Those people" (Meaning homosexuals and intravenous drug-users,
meaning faggot, queers, homos, junkie, parasite, scumbags,
meaning lowlife disposable garbage
less than human types
those people.) (Bones 22)

Huston's poetic dialogue is created often in response to something written or said; she writes poems as moments of repose and response. Like Dent's "another one of those silhouetted figures," Huston seeks to reconcile "those people" with herself. Implicit in the stanza quoted above is Huston's reappropriation of a vocabulary used to label, dismiss, and disempower those it describes. Huston's poetic move is to use the very same language as the basis of the vocabulary for the poem as she reveals:

I am that upcoming lecturer
since I said "Those people"
the way I always do
in a sarcastic way
in an angry way
not a cut and pasted way
to crucify
justify
my publicly perceived innocence
in black and white
in a local paper in Michigan. (22)

Huston embodies the terms she uses in the poem by claiming them as an extension of her self-identification, in contrast to "my publicly perceived innocence." She tells the reader:

for the record
I was a prostitute
an intravenous drug user
I was homeless
ate out of garbage cans
I asked you for money
in Washington Square Park
I took that money
and bought quarts of
Colt 45 drank it from a brown paper bag
I robbed homes
went to prison
I danced naked for strangers and money
I slept with women
I slept with men
slept with both of them at the same time
I have trained men to bark like dogs
and dance in high heels
wearing pink tu-tus. (22-23)

Huston's embodiment of "those people" creates a symbiotic relationship between the reader and poet. Casual comments used to distinguish "us" from "them" become here, in Huston's verse, a means of defining "us" as "them." The reader is implicated on several levels from the "you" who gave money in Washington Square Park to those who so misunderstand HIV/AIDS and those it affects that they might invoke some of the language Huston deconstructs. Huston separates "those people" from a casual news headline or a CDC report by giving those people an "I" who shares in their lives, their pain. The "I," who takes on the identity of "those people" moves the reader from casual observation, the perennial postmodern move from "eye" to "I," to implication.