The Hope Thing

Veterans of the AIDS generation (and there are many who have double my time in that category) will tell you that every couple of years we prick up our ears at the sound of something almost too good to be true: Hope. I woke up to my in-box with my bi-annual dose waiting for me.

Hope is a dicey thing. Unless it's the Hope Diamond. That's a sure thing. All other hope is, by definition, a crap shoot. Today's dose came courtesy of the Mormons, or whatever they're calling themselves nowadays. Call me jaded or just plain suspicious, but the last time the Mormons had a "really good idea" it turned out to be really bad news for women. I'm taking today's revelation with a pillar of salt.

"Researchers, including a BYU scientist, believe they have found a new compound that could finally kill the HIV/AIDS virus, not just slow it down as current treatments do." (Bob Mims, Salt Lake Tribune. 2/6/06)

Forgive us if we don't take to the streets over this one. When you've been around The Plague since its inception, you don't start dancing until the band actually starts playing. It sounds hopeful, that's for sure. It trumps a jillion times over the AZT and Protease Inhibitors doses of Hope. If form holds, Hope usually dies in a test tube or a lab rat or a nasty revelation about bad science mixed with good publicity. But Hope, by its nature, dangles just enough out there for you to watch with one eye while you do your best to just keep going.

Like our friends' successes can sometimes highlight our own failures, Hope realized too late is bittersweet. What would The Cure feel like? After the initial street dances and AIDS Is Dead Circuit Parties (one in each color), wouldn't we necessarily grieve for those who didn't or couldn't hang on long enough? Is there guilt in a cure? Why Me Part Deux? Would it birth The New Narcissism? (If I can beat this, I may, in fact, be invincible.)

What happens when those of us who have retired to our recliners and our beds and our regimens suddenly are freed from all three? Does the workplace welcome us home as conquering kings, anxious to reap all we once had to offer? Or are we too late to the party, laden with outdated skills, with too much time on our backs to be worth much on our feet? And once you've spent years dancing at the edge of your doom, do you just step merrily away and waltz on as though it never happened?

Does the dating pool make way for the former lepers? Do preachers who pronounced God's Wrath shrivel up and die of either embarrassment or bad karma? Do we who were once nearly dead live different lives? Should we? Could we? Are the politics of sexual distinction such that we'd be compelled to live the way that nearly killed us? With The Plague averted, would we pick up where bell bottoms and Gloria Gaynor left us, throw a kiss to those who died too young and embrace abandon like we never knew any better? God, I hope so.

So much of Who We Are has died. Without AIDS, there is no platform of fear from which to launch Gay Republicans, Gay Celibates, and all of the other fear-laden, self-loathing, inherently contradictory demographics. Without AIDS, Larry Kramer is writing potty-mouthed musicals, Ryan White is just a kid who made it through school like the rest of us, and a chick who dies after seeing the dentist is just a girl who dies with good teeth.

Hope is nice. I have hope for a lot of things: cures, love, the lottery. But when hope comes calling, it's important to look behind it and see from whence it came. This time is no different. Today's AIDS revelation didn't show up on the front page, in the sports section, or in the comics. It didn't show up in the Health section, either.

Notably - and this is important - the article appeared in the Business Section. That's enough to put a hitch in your hope.