After antiretroviral medications were developed in the 1990s to treat AIDS, many white gay men in New York who had so far survived that plague used the new drugs as a ticket out of the viral underclass in which they’d recently dwelled. While HIV concentrated among people who were poor, Black, and who didn’t get those drugs, a lot of the newly medicated survivors stopped caring much about AIDS. Some of these surviving gay men bought weekend hones within a couple of hours of new York City. Still alive because of loud gay activists, they started spending their weekends in sleepy hamlets, quietly turning the word “antique” into a gerund.
In September 2020, I took my first post-lockdown reporting trip to one of those towns, or so I assumed – Milford, Pennsylvania, population 1172. When I arrived and put on my KN95 mask and face shield before exiting my rental car, I realized I’d parked near an SUV with a rear window completely converted in crudely painted letters that screamed, “Wearing a Mask & Rubber Gloves While You Are Alone in Your Car Is Like Wearing a Condom to Bed While You Are Alone!!!”. Milford was the kind of place where painstakingly restored country houses owned by some of the town’s gay male couples had “TRUMP-PENCE 2020” signs on their perfectly manicured lawns. Meanwhile, seemingly straight white men openly brandished guns at the local diner.
I had traveled to interview Milford’s most famous homosexual, Sean Strub. But even though he was the town’s Democratic mayor, Sean had not become one of those white gays who had abandoned the viral underclass. Far from it. He had not only named the idea into being back in 2011, but he had also committed much of his life to the people who lived in it ever since.
Sean was the executive director of the Sero Project, a nonprofit dedicated to helping people harmed by the criminalization of HIV. Sero had organized the 2018 conference where I first heard the term viral underclass used (though, there, it had mutated a bit into a strain different from Sean’s original usage). Recently, Sero had joined organizing efforts to flatten the rising curve of COVID-19 criminalization happening around the world.
I had connected with Sean six years earlier, when I was commissioned to write about Michael Johnson. Over the years, I had noticed how Sero was unlike many civil rights organizations I had covered in my career, in one respect: it did not demand “respectability” from the people it supported publicly. From legal advocacy to organizing letter-writing campaigns to people in prison, Sero supported anyone who had been incarcerated due to HIV and asked for its help – the kinds of people ignored by almost all advocacy groups and journalists.
After I arrived, Sean and I went for a hike in the Pocono Mountains. the pandemic had kept me cooped up for months in the city by then, and I was grateful for the chance to interview someone not on Zoom, but safely outside while walking together among trees in a glorious forest.
In COVID-19 times, some people knew a bit about ACT UP, which had directed its power externally. Its targets were organizations like the Food and Drug Administration, and its success with that agency was a reason that drug trials were already happening that summer for potential COVID-19 vaccines.
But Sean had been an activist even before that – since a time when “there was no distinction between AIDS activism and a gay activism,” as he put it. “What I think of as real AIDS activism,” he told me, “really began when people with AIDS started finding each other and organizing and came out in support groups and out of anger at the gay organizations for not listening to us.” That work was internal, and could also be called a kind of mutual aid, a concept new to many in 2020.
Sean was a part of the gays who did this decades ago. when governments around the world left us to fend for ourselves in the COVID-19 pandemic, many people looked to the example of activists like Sean as they set up Google Docs to schedule regular check-ins on their elderly neighbors, shopped for groceries for immunocompromised friends, pooled resources in their communities, and learned together about viruses in teach-ins.
Why, I asked Sean, did he keep doing this work after he got the good drugs, when so many people of his standing had stopped slumming in the viral underclass?
Saying he didn’t “begrudge people who got better and went on with their lives and other things,” he told me, “It never felt like an option for me. for one, I was so wrapped up in it.” he ran a magazine about people living with HIV, and he was close to so many people harmed not just by the AIDS virus, but by the conditions that caused it. (After Lorena Borjas died of COVID-19 in the spring, the next two people I read about online in my social circle who died were both African American HIV activist friends of Sean’s – Deloris Dockrey and Ed Shaw.)
Sean wouldn’t say it about himself, but i will say it about him: unlike many people, he didn’t allow a viral divide to develop in his life, where he saw himself as deserving and those afflicted by the social vectors that cause HIV/AIDS as suddenly undeserving. He is the rare person with privilege who leverages that privilege on behalf of people with the least – and I mean the least -social standing. he doesn’t even let prison bars keep him from trying to create an intact sense of community with other people living with HIV. When the Human Rights Campaign, ACLU, and NAACP wouldn’t even take my calls about Michael Johnson in 2014, Sean had been actively building up support for him for months. And unlike many who got the drugs and ran, Sean saw that people with viruses should not be carted off to jail; they are still part of the body politic and deserve care.
When we discussed this, it was a spectacularly sunny day, and our hike took us up a bluff high above the expanse of the Delaware Valley, to look down upon a bend in the mighty, muddy Delaware River. It’s the same river George Washington crossed on Christmas night in 1776, mythologized by Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 oil painting Washington Crossing the Delaware (which includes an enslaved Black man, Prince Whipple, whom Washington owned). But on that day, it reminded me of the mighty, muddy Missouri River, which snaked downhill from the jail in St. Charles where I would visit Michael Johnson. Unlike when I’d interview Michael, though, Sean and I were free to talk under the sun and enjoy the bounty of natural beauty around us.
Though his work had begun around viruses, his journey, Sean told me, had led him ‘deeper into understanding the systemic flaws in our society and our system. And the most satisfying work that we do is the prison work. That is, in some ways, where I feel we are being least effective at changing anything systemically, but most effective at influencing individual lives.”
Some of the people the Sero Project corresponds with (imprisoned for failing to disclose that they have a virus thirty million people live with) may never get out of prison, and there’s nothing they can do about it. While the one person I covered who was imprisoned for transmitting HIV got out – albeit, after Herculean efforts over six years – i, too, write about and work with people who will likely never escape being in the underclass, viral or otherwise.
How did Sean cope with this?
You start, he told me, by “simply acknowledging it, letting them know somebody heard them and sympathized. That’s all you can do. You need to do that. You can’t just ignore it.”
Even if it feels like there is no way to solve their crisis, “if all you can do is witness, you need to be doing that. And not to diminish the value of that.”
The novel coronavirus has made millions, if not billions, of humans consider for the first time how living with a common virus can make a person feel like a pariah.
I did not acquire SARS-CoV-2 prior to being vaccinated. And yet, before I got jabbed, even though I would never lob such a stigmatizing label at others, I deeply feared being a vector myself – even though I preach that it is societal structures and not people that are vectors. I so feared infecting others that I even had suicidal ideation, under the warped logic of thinking that if someone has to die, it might as well be me before i am a vector and accidentally kill others.
Some of this was a familiar sensation for me. As a single, gay Black man, I’ve long internalized a fear of being an undiagnosed “one in two” who could unwittingly transmit HIV to someone else; I fear this more than becoming HIV-positive myself. And as I began to overhear straight white people discussing community positively rates, trying to understand viral testing windows, and even asking each other questions like “So, when did you last get tested?” – things gay men have talked about for decades – I could tell that many people in the pandemic were suddenly struggling to process the kinds of fears that have long plagued queer folks like me.
There is tremendous power in how, for the first time in human history, all humans on the planet have been going through some version of the same thing, at nearly the same time, with the ability to communicate globally about it. “Some of us have lived here for years: that place to which others confine you when you are a ‘disease vector.’ (Even when you are not.) It’s a place where people don’t touch you or talk to you,” anthropologist and HIV activist Thomas Strong has observed. Now that billions may be having this sensation, Thomas has asked, “Will the ‘general public’ now experience this form of abjection, and therefore reject it? How will we come to terms with this? A fantasy of immunity? More walls? or careful, reflexive dialogue about the fact that we are all already polluted by each other, our bodies connected and permeable, energised and endangered by the life (vitality, livingness, flourishing, decay, dehiscence) that that connection engenders?”
What is SARS-CoV-2 finally allows us to drop “patient zero” scapegoat narratives? To release the morality plays of “Tiger Mandingo” and “COVID parties” that the extracnews media has foisted upon us? To let go of the languages of “superspreaders,” “personal responsibility,: and declaring “war” on everything? And to finally embrace notions of communal responsibility and collective care?
COVID-19 demanded that we pause and reconsider why we saw ourselves as different beings in the first place, and to ask ourselves different questions without that assumption.
Perhaps then, the most fundamental question viruses probe us to ask ourselves is: Why am I “me’ and you are “you”? if we believe that “you” and “I” are not separate, but that we face common challenges, then our hierarchies might melt away.
Racism would be gone.
Ableism would cease to exist.
Sexism, homeophobia, and cisgender superiority would all perish.
American exceptionalism wouldn’t need to exist, either, in its modern, jingoistic sennor as the insult Joseph Stalin originally meant it to mean – because the U.S. empire would be irrelevant.
The hoarding of resources through capitalism? Totally unnecessary; austerity would be replaced by anarchy and abundance.
If we accepted, as Alice Wong put it, that the world is “one big petri dish,” even speciesism would disappear, granting us perhaps our greatest chance of success at addressing the climate crisis.
In encouraging me to learn and unlearn these lessons, despite all the trauma they have caused, viruses have been among my greatest teachers. Or, rather they have the possibility to be our greatest teachers. And they offer us perhaps the best possibility of a new ethic of care – one not steeped in me getting mine first, but in us taking care of one another and of our very planet.
In this way, viruses have the potential to help us make a world predicated upon love and mutual respect for all living things, not just in the here and now, but across time and space.
