S&T

The moral politics of HIV-prevention during the COVID pandemic

seen to be a hedonistic medium for immoral sex, rather than a public health-oriented prevention mechanism. Sex with condoms had been graced with such a virtuosity that its abandonment conjured the agony of the AIDS epidemic. This misplaced grief led prominent British AIDS charities to decry that PrEP as an HIV-prevention tool was in fact “dangerous” to queer communities. Quite bleakly, the homophobic revulsion towards “promiscous” gay sex during the AIDS crisis became subsumed into the sexual politics of gay men today. Just as the state weaponized these sexual moralizations to justify their lack of public health action during the AIDS epidemic, these gay men laid the groundwork for the British government to do just the same with PrEP. The NHS England seemed persuaded by these British AIDS charities. In the UK, new drugs, such as PrEP, must receive federal funding for the public to receive them at no cost. And the NHS had no intention to fund PrEP. An NHS spokesperson stated that funding PrEP would hinder the development of other treatments. Despite the fact that PrEP did not necessarily prevent the funding of any other medication specifically, the spokesperson stated that PrEP could take away funding for children’s cystic fibrosis treatment, falsely pitting the purity and innocence of children against queer communities. This spokesperson’s evocation of children sharpened the contrast of the ‘promiscuity pill’ against a sexually-pure heterosexual public. Thankfully, in 2016, a British High Court ordered that the NHS England was required to fund PrEP. In their coverage of the decision, the Daily Mail was quick to point attention to the £20 million in annual ‘taxpayer money’ that was required to make PrEP available. Nevertheless, the NHS still held their ‘uncertainties’ over how to effectively roll out PrEP, prompting them to initiate the three-year long Impact Trial, leaving queer communities further in suspense. The Impact Trial, according to the NHS England, aimed to provide quantitative research to plan for an effective distribution of the drug. The trial allowed 26,000 participants who came from groups designated to be the most “at-risk” for HIV transmission: men who have sex with men, trans people, and people whose partners live with HIV. The 26,000 figure was a mere fraction of the total populations of these communities and excluded those who were not deemed to fit within these specific risk categories, leaving thousands waiting in line or excluded altogether. All in all, the Impact Trial did not seem incredibly necessary. This was certainly the position of LGBTQ+ activists, who repeatedly advocated for an immediate end to the trial. ACT UP London held a series of protests that lead with the slogan #WeWantPrEPNow, demanding for PrEP’s public availability. According to a doctor from the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV, nine men contracted HIV while waiting to be placed on the trial by the time it ended in early 2020. F, and for these activists, was each was a transmission that could have been prevented. The Impact Trial vividly echoes Larry Kramer’s criticism of the American clinical trials during the AIDS crisis. The trials justify state public health apprehension both through their scientific rationalism and their mobilization of sexual moralism, reducing the state’s obligation to promptly respond to HIV/AIDS.

COVID became a rife cultural moment for the belief that viral transmission oughtis to be blamed on each other. New videos and images of large maskless gatherings seemed to go viral on social media each week, met with indignant responses at the perceived irresponsibility and recklessness of those not following proper public health guidelines. Anti-maskers and COVID-deniers became the premier source of condemnation for the hundreds of thousands of deaths to the virus, not the lackluster state public health response. Similarly for HIV, the transfer of state public health responsibilities to its people can be reflected today in the criminalization of individuals that do not disclose their HIV status to sexual partners. In some ways, this criminalization is the most insidious outcome of the state’s abdication of public health accountability—why are individuals transmitting the virus the criminals and not the government that fails to take necessary efforts to prevent transmission? At the beginning of the COVID pandemic in May 2020, the 56 Dean Street sexual health clinic in London (—England’s most prominent gay health organization) —proclaimed in a Guardian article that the pandemic raised their hopes at the possibility of an “end to transmission of HIV.” Implicit in their claims is the fantasy that people were going to stop hooking up with strangers during lockdown, leading to a decrease in HIV transmission rates. However, one could have easily logged -in to Grindr to realize this was not the case. But this excitement about a public that does not have sex with strangers in order to prevent HIV and COVID reflects a specific ideology that the prevention of viral transmission is somehow a completely individual responsibility. 56 Dean Street never mentions PrEP as a manner to lower HIV transmission rates, even though PrEP poses a more convincing possibility forof an ‘end’ to HIV. In this way, the British government is readily able to evade responsibility for public HIV-prevention when the blame is placed upon sexual deviants or lockdown-defiers. Around the end of 2020, thean Instagram account named @GaysOverCovid rose to prominence through its name-and-shame style exposé of gay men engaging in parties or other large social gatherings. The account accrued such a following that it received a feature on Good Morning America, to a national heterosexual public. @GaysOverCovid was a hit because its moral project was sound: it internalized homophobic tropes of gay men as ultimately selfish in a never-ending quest to experience socially-transgressive pleasure, in other words, as moral antagonists to heterosexual society. In other words, @GaysOverCovid extendedtook the same set of morals that were used to demonize gay men during the AIDS epidemic and extended them to gay social and sexual behavior under COVID. A most gruesome but illustrative example of this moral history was displayed in the (now-deleted) Boston offshoot of @GaysOverCovid, whichwho publicly disclosed the HIV-positive status of a gay male partier. If it was not clear in their constant celebration of cops shutting down gay parties, @GaysOverCovid was fully-aligned with the state’s project of blame game-as-deflection of responsibility. As such, the same moral politics were at play during the AIDS crisis and are most likely behind NHS England’s PrEP rollout delays, as these discourses are fertile grounds to evade state accountability. If individuals are responsible for preventing HIV, the state does not have to. If gay men’s sexual and social practices are not always in-line with the state’s preventative mandates, they become antagonistic to the state. If individuals are supposedly defying the state’s public health response, the state “no longer” has to help them (when truly, they were never helped in the first place). NHS England could take the expense of delaying the PrEP rollout through the Impact Trial because they framed PrEP users as socially-irresponsible and not warranting preventative assistance from the state. NHS England could further delay the PrEP rollout during COVID because it was gay men’s interpersonal responsibility to abide by lockdown orders and not have sex with one another. Furthermore, NHS England participated in a larger phenomenon of casting queer people as immoral, socially-antagonistic others: they are supposedly separate from the “children” that need cystic fibrosis treatment and the, they are separate from “taxpayers” that are burdened in their funding of PrEP. As if all of these categories were mutually exclusive—--but homophobic moral projects need not make sense to be effective.

What we can and must learn from the AIDS epidemic is that moral discourses of blame and shame will always trickle down to society’’s most marginalized. People, regardless of sexual orientation, have ‘risky’ sex practices that go against public health guildelines of ‘safe’ sex. But the danger arrives when when sex becomes moralized around these binaries of risky vs. responsible, safe vs. unsafe: the sex practices that were made visible by the AIDS epidemic served to culturally associate gay men’s entire personhood with immoral, abberant sexuality. These moral legacies haunt the HIV-prevention efforts of today, where gay men still have not succesfuly eliminated HIV-stigma from the discourse of gay sexuality to the extent that a tranformative pill like PrEP could be uncontroversial. As COVID continues to disproportionately affect working-class communities of color, our shamings and call-outs do no good to vulnerable people, if not at times direct harm. They merely serve to further a state project of violence. Public health responses must be compassionate, just as we must be compassionate towards one another during epidemics and pandemics.

EVAN LINCOLN B’21 thinks it’s time for you to unfollow @GaysOverCovid.

IMAGINED INTIMACIES

Visions of queer cinema in Your Name Engraved Herein

content warning: article includes discussions of homophobia.

你不觉得在电影里面比人生好玩的多吗？ Don’t you think things inside films are more fun than in real life?

Four schoolboys stand stiffly at attention in front of two parallel rows of bunk beds as their housemaster and disciplinarian walks through the thin space between them, conducting a nighttime room inspection. Unbeknownst to him, though, a fifth figure who does not belong here has silently slipped into the room, stealthily following behind him. This truant boy invisibly slips amongst the other boys as the face of authority turns to scan the room once more before leaving. The other boys shove the newcomer angrily—are you trying to get us all in trouble? He ignores them and sidles up to one boy, who’s been staring at him the whole time. “Birdy?” the other boy asks. Birdy flashes a grin at him—at A-Han, the boy he’s come to see. This image: of the invisible, rule-breaking boy, hiding behind authority’s back to see the boy he loves, will accumulate enormous symbolic weight in 刻在你心底的名字, or Your Name Engraved Herein (dir. Patrick Kuang-Hui Liu). The film tells the story of Birdy and A-Han, two boys who meet in a strict Christian high school and fall for each other. But they can never openly express their love, which lingers unspoken in the air between them. It will never fully materialize; it is slowly suffocated by the schoolmates who bully and harass queer boys and the teachers who punish and scold students into conformity. Too many stories of queer love end on a similar note of tragedy, in which relationships irreparably fall apart and lovers tearfully part ways. When repeated ad nauseam, they become a trope—more than that, a trap, in which tragedy seems like an inevitable fate that awaits queer love, precluding the possibility of happiness and of alternative ways of queer relation and being.

But in Your Name Engraved Herein, there are certain moments when the film reaches outside of the confines of itself toward a glimmer of something beautiful, pushing through the very surface of the cinema screen to grasp at a vision of what could be. In these moments of rupture, when the fourth wall falls, the film examines its place in a lineage of films that represent queer love and lives. It challenges the same stereotypes and tropes of queer stories that it also reproduces, and resists the same old tired tragic endings that are imposed upon queer love by cisheteronormativity. It taps into that innate power of stories—the power to imagine—and imagines a different relationship between film and life, between desire and reality.

Half an hour into the film, A-Han and Birdy, in a spurt of mischievous teenage fun, trespass into a dusty storage backroom in a cinema, cluttered with old film reels lining shelves along the walls and stacked along the floor. In the middle, a few rows of wooden chairs are arranged before a screen. Birdy turns on the projector, flooding the screen with a blank white rectangle of flickering light. The only sound you can hear is the quiet whirring of the film gate and shutter. Birdy wanders wondrously right in front of the screen, spinning in a circle with his hands outstretched, basking in the glow. Still standing next to the projector, A-Han stretches a curious hand, index finger outstretched, before the projector lens, casting a shadow-puppet-hand on the screen, where Birdy stands. With the index finger, he playfully beckons Birdy over to his hand, and his shadow-finger scratches Birdy’s head. They are standing across the room from one another, but in the eye of the camera, with A-Han in the foreground and Birdy in the background, they appear superimposed, flattened against the screen into a single plane. Caught up in the theatrical playfulness of this moment, of being before and on a screen, Birdy turns to the left, throws out a melodramatic arm, his face contorted in faux-anguish, and proclaims seriously: 直到现在，我没有忘记你当时的样子。Even until now, I haven’t forgotten the way you looked back then. A-Han stares at Birdy, suddenly enraptured. We cut back to Birdy as he continues—still speaking, to the left, to a person we can’t see, 不要跟我玩捉 迷藏了。你简直...你简直就是在虐待我嘛。Stop playing hide-and-seek with me. You’re practically… practically abusing me. He spins, with a flourish, so that he’s now acting as the other, henceforth invisible character, his face now one of hesitant concern, his voice a wavering, higher pitch. 你...你什么意思？What...what do you mean? Another spin, arm extended once more. 只有 傻瓜才不知道我的意思。Only a fool wouldn’t know what I mean. We see A-Han, his head tilted to a side, his eyes fixed on Birdy, but gazing far away. Birdy forces his eyelids shut and puckers his lips into a silver screen kiss, and suddenly, A-Han’s shadow-hand is there, fingers pursed into a makeshift mouth, brushing against Birdy’s lips on the white screen, and we see A-Han, in his seat, leaning forward, his lips forming a kiss to match Birdy’s. The kiss breaks, and Birdy spins around as if he’s felt something, a surprised smile spreading across his face, his eyes meeting A-Han’s. A-Han and Birdy are separated by the length of the room, but on the cinematic screen, for a brief moment, they meet, if only in a split-second of shadow and skin. Through performance, puppetry, and play, the boys stumble into feelings that they haven’t been allowed to feel yet. As one shot cut to the other, their bodies were stitched together on the screen, and in that glowing rectangle of fantasy they found a space where their unspoken queerness could be played out, played with. Afterward, Birdy tells A-Han that he wants to make strange films because they’re more fun than real life. As he speaks, his face is aglow, lit by the projector’s light, insistently living in that world of play-pretend where he can be as strange, as queer, as he wants. After all, Birdy belongs to film, not the real world. Birdy is a nickname taken from the eponymous character of the 1984 film Birdy, which portrays the intimate friendship between two men (played by Michael Modine and Nicolas Cage) as they seek to escape their own traumatic experiences of war. His name marks Your Name Engraved Herein’s intertextual connections to other films, and to the genre of queer cinema. By reincarnating the friendship of Birdy in the love of A-Han and Birdy, Your Name Engraved Herein unearths a queer reading of that film, as the two Birdy’s become mirror images of one another—in the insanity of Michael Modine’s character, our Birdy sees himself, and the way that his queerness is perceived as aberrant by those around him. And so he escapes into the solace of his fictional namesake, stretching out his arms on the back of A-Han’s motorcycle, screaming into the wind, imagining flight, imagining an escape. But this escape will remain an image, a fantasy, unable to materialize into life. For, when A-Han and Birdy grow closer and more affectionate, A-Han’s friends, who have growing suspicions that Birdy is trying to seduce their allegedly straight friend, corner him on the upper floors of a school building to give him a beating. A-Han hears a sudden commotion and rushes upstairs to see Birdy squirm free of his attackers and clamber up on a ledge. The last feature on his face is a wild grin. Then he turns, and flapping his wings wildly like Michael Modine, leaps off the edge. Shouting in horror, A-Han rushes to the ledge and peers over. But, much like in the ending of Birdy, he looks down to see Birdy alive and unscathed, getting to his feet on the ground. At first, it seems as if Birdy has truly survived, that his fantasies have bled over into the real world and enabled him to defy the laws and norms of the world and escape death. But, as the film progresses and Birdy grows colder and colder toward A-Han and enters into a heterosexual relationship, it becomes clear that the Birdy who lived in the movies, and not real life, the queer, strange, crazy Birdy, did not walk away from the fall. The cost of surviving that fall was the death of Birdy’s queerness. After A-Han graduates, before he leaves for college, he calls Birdy one last time, and plays him a love song that he wrote for him—the theme song of the film, which shares its title. They clutch the receivers tightly in their hands, as if they could imagine they were holding one another—but in the end, the fantasy dissolves, and all they have is that—a disembodied voice, a song, on the other end of the telephone.

Following that final phone call, the film abruptly jumps forward in time. A-Han, now a middle-aged man, finds himself in Canada to pay his respects to Father Oliver, a priest who mentored both him and Birdy in their high school days. He visits Niagara Falls alone. As the thunderous cascade of water fill the frame, Your Name Engraved Herein once more moves itself into relation to another piece of queer cinema—this time, the 1997 film Happy Together (dir. Wong Kar Wai), considered one of the seminal queer works of its decade.

In Happy Together, the Iguazu Falls represent an unachievable ideal of the relationship between the two protagonists, a destination they were never able to reach together. They share a cramped room in which a table lamp, on which an image of the falls is painted, quietly fills the background. The lamp is a motion lamp, a magical mechanical wonder dating back to the 1950s in which rotating sheets of metal stencils cause the image on the lamp to appear to be moving, the water falling gently and silently, as if it’s a film screen. In this lamp, Happy Together, like Your Name Engraved Herein, steps into metacinematic commentary, and suggests that the realm of cinema corresponds to fictional ideals and fantasies that offer reprieve from the mundane struggles of material life. When one of Happy Together’s protagonists finally journeys to the falls alone, the camera cuts to a birds’-eye view shot that circles around the falls from above in a spiralling motion, mimicking the spinning circular motion of the lamp. The omniscient, floating perspective of the shot makes it clear that this isn’t an embodied, realistic vision of the falls, but rather a beautifully heightened visualization of the same yearning fantasy of the lamp. But you can feel the trembling shudder of the pounding water, feel the cool wash of disintegrated water droplets flung skyward into your face. That’s the beauty of the moving image—it temptingly approximates the