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From A Burning House: The HIV/AIDS Narrative
From A Burning House: The HIV/AIDS Narrative
Andrew O’Day
In the developed world, the AIDS pandemic originated in the United States among the
gay community. While we must acknowledge the impact of HIV on other groups (bisexual
men, women, drug users and haemophiliacs such as teenager Ryan White who wrote an
autobiography), this paper will concentrate on relevant prose narratives in the anthology
From a Burning House by gay men living in the United States, and published in 1996 when
HIV was still felt to be a death sentence. 1 It is beyond the scope of this essay to look at the
novel, poetry, theatre, and film and television drama, dealing with the illness, and these have
been covered quite extensively by, for instance, Steven F. Kruger, 2 David Roman3 and Patrick
R. Hart,4 especially from the 1980s and 1990s. There is also no room here for investigation of
the multitude of other non-fictional prose narratives by gay men living with HIV in the
United States but the Burning House anthology features a variety of writers dealing with a
range of pivotal themes and can be read alongside social histories. This paper will investigate
the cultural work done by the AIDS narrative in this collection, the literary techniques which
1
Irene Borger, ed, From a Burning House (Pocket Books 1996)
2
Steven F. Kruger, AIDS Narratives: Gender and Sexuality, Fiction and Science (Garland 1996)
3
David Roman, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture and AIDS (Indiana University Press 1998)
4
Patrick R. Hart, The AIDS Movie: Representing a Pandemic in Film and Television (Routledge 2000)
Many...investigations of autobiographies and life stories, particularly those that...
examine narratives of difference, add a sociocritical turn to constructivist
perspectives. Narratives that explore certain individuals and groups self-identified by
gender, race, sexuality, class, or ethnicity tend to validate the telling...in terms of how
they can be seen to respond to the dominant tales of social identity and power within
and against which they are produced.5
Jennifer Brier points out6 that a dominant tale, which is of relevance here, is that in the
Bennett, and the under secretary, Gary Bauer, distinguished between the ‘innocent victim’ of
AIDS – such as the blood transfusion recipient – and the ‘deserving person’ with AIDS who
engaged in, what one of Bauer’s aides referred to as, ‘irresponsible sexual behaviour’. This
was homosexual intercourse to which the New Right stood opposed, taking every opportunity
to reinforce the need for heterosexual marriage and conformity to traditional gender roles. It
was because of this that the Reagan government were slow to respond to the pandemic. The
disease did not come to public attention until it affected widespread society other than
homosexuals, bisexuals and drug users, and until it affected public figures such as Rock
Hudson. All this, including the initial acronym GRID which was employed (Gay-Related
Immune Deficiency) is outlined by Randy Shilts in his book And the Band Played On,7 and in
a multitude of other histories.8 Shilts argues that Patient Zero, Gaetan Dugas, was a sociopath
who spread the virus intentionally. Whether this is true, or as Richard A. McKay argues, a
5
Martin Kreiswirth, ‘Merely Telling Stories?: Narrative and Knowledge in the Human Sciences’, (2002) 2
Poetics Today 310
6
Jennifer Brier, Infectious Ideas: US Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis (University of North Carolina Press
2011)
7
Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On (St Martin’s Press 1987)
8
e.g. Perry N. Halkitis, The AIDS Generation: Stories of Survival and Resilience (Oxford University Press
2004)
fabrication,9 the book is a useful history of what Martin Kreiswirth in the above quote more
generally calls ‘dominant tales of social identity’ and ‘difference’, and what Lisa Jane Disch
calls ‘marginal stories’,10 which are also seen in writers’ pieces in From a Burning House.
This means that narrative does not just tell official stories, replicating societal norms, as some
To give more of a context, From a Burning House is a volume of mostly prose, but
also some poetry and drama, written by gay men participating in The AIDS Project Los
Angeles Writers Workshop, led by Irene Borger, and was not originally intended for
publication. By contrast with the Names Memorial Quilt, where panels were woven by the
loved ones of the deceased as memorials, this collection is ‘a tapestry of writings’ (see back
cover) by those with HIV/AIDS, revealing theirs, and others, predicament. The tapestry is an
image associated with textuality, found in Greek mythology where a raped Philomela has her
tongue cut out but weaves her tragic narrative into cloth. The pieces hence differ from case
notes by doctors and, because of the nature of the illness, are first-person ‘narratives of
difference’ responding to ‘dominant tales of social identity and power’. They are examples of
pathography, being trauma narratives concerning experience rather than just diagnosis and
9
Richard A. McKay, ‘Patient Zero: The Absence of a Patient’s View of the Early North American AIDS
Epidemic’ (2014)
<https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/bulletin_of_the_history_of_medicine/future_publications/pre_print_content
10
Kreiswirth (n 5) 311 quoting Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Cornell
University Press 1994)
11
Kreiswirth (n 5) 310-312
observation from the outside,12 therefore differing from Rafael Campo’s The Poetry of
‘Narratives of difference’ can be seen in the Burning House collection where writers
deal with the issue of growing-up gay such as in Alan Erenberg’s ‘The Humming Story’, and
Ezra Litwak’s ‘A Pair of Figure Skates’. For example, in Erenberg’s piece, his father would
make a humming sound every time his son did something ‘queer acting’. 14 Meanwhile,
Litwak remarks that he felt like a ‘sissy’ in the pants his mother had bought him and how he
disliked his non-hockey skates.15 He states ‘I was different from the other boys. I would never
be like them, swaggering with their easy macho, flirting with all the girls’. 16 However,
‘narratives of difference’ can also be more medical, including how the virus was caught.
gay sex and attraction. These pieces are in stark contrast to Panos Christi’s ‘My Day in
Abanoz’ where it is stated that ‘the real thing’, that one’s ‘first “real” fuck’ would be with a
female prostitute.17 They include Litwak’s ‘Christopher Street’, and Donald Colby’s
‘Bathhouse’. Colby’s piece concerns the narrative progression from being HIV-Negative to
12
Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography (Purdue University Press 1999) 1,
3, 12
13
Arthur W. Frank, ‘Illness and Autobiographical Work: Dialogue as Narrative Destabilization’, (2000) 23
Qualitative Sociology 143-149
14
From this point on, I use the authors’ names rather than the term ‘narrator’. We can only assume that the
accounts mentioned in this essay are reliable, although this is not necessarily always the case of
‘autobiographical prose’.
15
Borger (n 1) 20
16
ibid 21
17
ibid 39
being HIV-Positive and celebrates in a forthright manner the sexual encounter which led to
this. Colby writes of a man who ‘wrapped his body around’ him ‘like a huge fist’ and who
‘ordered’ Colby ‘in a coarse whisper to grab hold of’ his ‘ankles’ and ‘went at’ him ‘forever’
while Colby was high on drugs. Colby remarks that ‘Something had changed’ and that
‘something horrible had been planted in’ him.18 There is therefore a sequence of events,
characteristic of narrative.
Similarly, in ‘A Letter’, Tony Gramaglia details promiscuous gay sex which led to his
catching HIV in a ‘narrative of difference’. He recalls fantasising years later about the sex he
had with a man but, while Gramaglia remembers ‘[c]alling’ the man ‘into’ his body and
‘feeling’ him ‘ooze out’, Gramaglia does not remember his name, what he was actually
called, meaning the letter begins ‘Dear ...’. 19 Although Gramaglia thinks that their encounter
was the ‘source of’ his ‘dying’ he does not blame the unnamed partner since this was in 1982
before anyone really knew about HIV.20 Rather, Gramaglia blames the heterosexual county
prosecutor of Cincinnati, who ‘closed down the radio station while a gay man was on the air
talking about some new disease and instructing about what he thought might be safe
sex...condoms...Because this man said it was obscene’.21 Gramaglia states that had he known
then ‘[m]aybe...things could have turned out differently’. 22 The county prosecutor, therefore,
brings about a certain narrative progression (how things turn out) and Gramaglia’s piece
18
ibid 95
19
ibid 102
20
ibid
21
ibid 103
22
ibid
The volume does not only include pieces which deal with promiscuous gay sex but
also contains pieces which concern gay relationships and AIDS in contrast to the dominant
heterosexist society. Some narratives of concern here are Litwak’s ‘Meeting Barry’, 23 John
Mulkeen’s ‘Court’,24 and Steve Maher’s ‘Laurent’,25 among others set in a hospital. Droze
Kern’s ‘The Kern Brothers’26 differs, dealing with gay brothers who were always able to
confide in each other except for the silence surrounding one’s death from AIDS.
There are also pieces that deal with the physical plight of those living with AIDS in
wider dominant society. It is Joe Hogan’s ‘Warts and All’ which concerns the need to measure
up to society’s image-consciousness. The piece moves from Hogan examining the appearance
of a wart in his bathroom mirror27 to him in his place of work at a department store looking in
the dressing-room mirror and seeing more and more warts on his face as time progresses. 28
We are told that the floor manager, Mr. Sheridan, ‘was always talking about image
consciousness and how important first impressions are in making a sale’. 29 Mr. Sheridan
demands a doctor’s letter that Hogan is fit to return to work but Hogan tells him ‘matter-of-
factly’ that he would be returning to work ‘warts and all’. 30 This piece differs from Ricky
23
ibid 80-81
24
ibid 236-239
25
ibid 240-252
26
ibid 253-257
27
ibid 120
28
ibid 121, 122
29
ibid 121
30
ibid 128
Hoyt’s ‘The Vanishing’31 where we are told of someone who at first tried to conceal his body,
Moreover, homosexuals with AIDS were seen as an abomination before God by many
heterosexuals and not holding religious values and the narratives in the book are ones of
which Mulkeen does not ‘think Court had been to...in ten years’ and, although Court had his
head in his hands, nothing happened. 32 Meanwhile, in Maher’s ‘Laurent’, the title figure ‘had
lost faith in God’ as a result of being a bastard child, banished, with his brothers, to the back
of the church.33 These prose narratives differ from various others dealing with religion and
struggling with one’s faith and AIDS and being in church with AIDS.34
Some of the prose pieces in the Burning House volume are meta-narratives about the
act of narration and reception. The narratives in the volume were at first orally delivered in
the Writer’s Workshop and received by listeners, which makes them rather distinctive, but
through the act of publication are, for us, written narratives. Narratives were originally
delivered for a community that stands apart from heterosexist society and is ‘different’.
Arthur W. Frank points out that ‘Stories call individuals into groups, and they call on groups
to assert common identities’35 but Frank was not thinking of a workshop of writers. In ‘The
31
ibid 314-318
32
ibid 238-239
33
ibid 250
34
Terry Boyd, Living with AIDS: One Christian’s Struggle (C.S.S. Pub 1990); William E. Amos, When AIDS
35
Arthur W. Frank, Letting Stories Breathe (University of Chicago Press 2010)
First Day’ Gramaglia states ‘Why are we here? Why am I here? To write stories. To tell
stories. To be voices that are heard’.36 He continues ‘Our camaraderie in this room transcends
this disease. We are connected by our willingness to create stories and our need to be heard’. 37
In another piece, ‘Okay, So I’m In This Bed’ Gramaglia is witness to all the suffering at the
hospital.38 In ‘Pilgrim’ Brent Bellon remarks that ‘There is no shame among’ the writers since
they ‘all share a similar story’,39 and this idea of storytelling also surfaces in Jimmy
Drinkovich’s ‘The Westbound Train’.40 In ‘J’ the author Colby and J only share their sexuality
and a common interest in writing where J’s ‘work was...an interesting snapshot of life as a
gay Latino man with AIDS’.41 Meanwhile, Colby writes in ‘Memorial’ that those with AIDS
are all ‘witnesses for one another’42 but that in telling the story of someone who has died
‘nothing will come’43 so there is the issue of silence. In ‘The Lost’ Steve Smith curses his loss
of memory since he was ‘intended to bear witness...to all those men’ who had died. 44
Additionally, the desire to tell stories about relationships comes across in Christopher
36
Borger (n 1) 220
37
ibid
38
ibid 196-197
39
ibid 187
40
ibid 296-297
41
ibid 214
42
ibid 217
43
ibid 216
44
ibid 307
45
ibid 268
46
ibid 228
People with HIV/AIDS are also stigmatised and there is a silence surrounding the
disease. In ‘The First Day’ Gramaglia says that he will tell his story in ‘bookstores and at
auditoriums, in publications and on the radio’, 47 thereby reaching wider society. Gramaglia’s
‘The Photograph’ concerns the silence involved in someone’s passing: ‘I am still waiting for
the minister to say something about AIDS at this service. Some acknowledgment of what
killed my friend. But there is none’, 48 ‘I think they are brave, his mother and father...They
haven’t told anyone. Never mentioned the fact that their son died of AIDS’, 49 ‘Hold this
picture. I tell his younger brother...He wants to know if his brother had AIDS. I know he
already knows...Yes, I say. I am not able to lie about this. I don’t want to. I want to tell
everyone here that he died of AIDS’.50 This is what is being done in this volume.
We saw that in ‘Bathhouse’, there was a celebration of gay sex and that there was a
meanwhile, explicitly revealed that gay sex was contrary to mainstream heterosexist society’s
ideology, which affected the way things turned out for someone. As Shlomith Rimmon-
Kenan, amongst others, has pointed out,51 narratives involve events in a sequence with a
beginning, a middle and an end. Kreisworth, meanwhile, points out that there is a ‘bivalency
of narrative’ where there is the time of the told (past events) and the time of its telling. 52 For
example, it was not known at the time of ‘Bathhouse’ and ‘A Letter’ that events would lead to
a person becoming HIV-Positive. Litwak’s ‘Used To Be’, meanwhile, at first celebrates the
47
ibid 220
48
ibid 298
49
ibid
50
ibid 299
51
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, ‘Concepts of Narrative’ (2006) Collegium
52
Kreisworth (n 5) 303, 308-309
past from the perspective of the present. He states: ‘I used to be healthy. I used to be
stronger...There is a terrible yearning for the past when the future is so frightening. There is
an anger at the present for making me let go of what used to be...I don’t want to be sick. I
don’t want to die. Not yet’.53 Litwak remarks that there is a ‘judgment’ in this. These people
are apprehensive about the future (and find it ‘so frightening’) because there is a long wait for
HIV to develop into AIDS; no one is sure if, or when, this will occur. Litwak does conclude,
however, by suggesting that the past is idealised and is ‘not how it really used to be’. 54 For
example, as seen, writers, including Litwak in ‘A Pair of Figure Skates’, have pointed to the
II
We now turn to look at some of the literary techniques employed in the AIDS
narrative. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that we use metaphors unconsciously all
the time in speech and writing.55 Susan Sontag argues against metaphoric thinking about
illness56 but concedes that we ‘cannot think without metaphors’. 57 Sontag expresses that there
are two main metaphors used for AIDS. One means by which HIV/AIDS is understood is as a
plague. Sontag writes that plagues are not simply diseases that are fatal but ones which
transform the body into something alienating like leprosy and syphilis 58 and also that plague
53
Borger (n 1) 148
54
ibid 149
55
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press 2003)
56
Hawkins (n 12) 22-23
57
ibid 23
58
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor & Aids and its Metaphors (Penguin 2002) 131
tends to originate from somewhere else, somewhere foreign,59 and is a species of invasion
often carried by soldiers.60 Sontag details the way in which accounts of HIV/AIDS see it as
having started in the Third World ‘dark continent’ of Africa. 61 The plague is thought to be
inescapable62 and is not only a judgment on certain groups but becomes everybody’s
problem.63 The second metaphor, related to the first, is of AIDS as war. Sontag states that
‘The virus invades the body’ and that ‘the disease (or...fear of the disease) is described as
invading the whole society’.64 Sontag writes that before the advent of AIDS ‘Medicine had
been viewed as an age-old military campaign now nearing its final phase, leading to victory. 65
‘The advent of AIDS’, continues Sontag, ‘made it clear that the infectious diseases are far
from conquered’. However, Sontag ends the book with a punch by pointing to the problems
with the AIDS as war metaphor stating that we are not being invaded, and that the ill are
neither unavoidable casualties nor the enemy.66 While it is harmful to see the ill as an enemy
invading the whole of society with a virus, as long as we accept that and do not take the
metaphor too far the AIDS as war metaphor can be acceptable. Also worth mentioning is that
unlike in her discussion of tuberculosis, Sontag does not give many examples of AIDS as
plague and as a war. There are also other metaphors for HIV/AIDS which add to Sontag’s.
59
ibid 133
60
ibid 134
61
ibid 137
62
ibid 139
63
ibid 150
64
ibid 151
65
ibid 158
66
ibid 180
Metaphors and similes can be found in social histories of the AIDS crisis such as
Shilts’ And the Band Played On. There is a focus on HIV/AIDS as war when a simile is used
that ‘The epidemic would cleave lives in two, the way a great war or depression presents a
commonly understood point of reference around which an entire society defines itself’. 67 The
epidemic is set against the fight for gay rights,68 and cuts short the victories gays were
achieving. There is mention of how gays were shielded from a backlash 69 but also that AIDS
was seen as God’s judgement by some. AIDS was seen as a new ‘gay cancer’ or ‘plague’,
especially by the gay community, but also, as noted earlier, by the government, but becomes a
more general plague with an epigram of the Biblical Fourth Horseman at the start of a section
of Shilts’ book. There are also other metaphors. There is personification when Shilts remarks
that ‘To be sure, Death was already elbowing its way through the crowds’ of a gay parade. 70
We are told that the ‘spectre haunted’ people.71 Gay men are also seen as participating in a
‘lottery of death’72 and another metaphor is introduced when a doctor says early on, ‘We’re
seeing only the tip of the iceberg’...in what would become the all-encompassing metaphor for
the AIDS epidemic for years to come’. 73 This is a reference to the Titanic disaster like the
book’s title where the band stoically played on as the ship sunk. It is alongside social histories
like this one that we can see writers employing metaphor in their accounts in From a Burning
House.
67
Shilts (n 7) 12
68
ibid 27, 32
69
ibid 284
70
ibid 12
71
ibid 20
72
ibid 262
73
ibid 90
In her Introduction, Irene Borger writes about how she encouraged psyche (spirit) and
techne (craft).74 In From a Burning House there is also the metaphor of AIDS as war. In
‘What I Have’, Marc Wagenheim notes that his ‘temperature soars and the chills invade’ his
body.75 In ‘Chemical Man’, Robbie Hilyard uses the metaphor of another individual being ‘no
longer...human’ but the first of ‘a new race...Homo pharmaceuticus’ 76 and of pills as both
smothering, and shielding, him.77 In ‘Nothing’ Michael Martin personifies AIDS stating ‘In
the world I live in AIDS is always the villain’ 78 and AIDS is also personified, albeit in a poem
‘Group Photo’, as The Grim Reaper, killing this community. 79 This recalls the personification
of AIDS as Death in Shilts’ And the Band Played On. Gramaglia’s ‘Notes While Waiting’,
meanwhile, sees Gramaglia sitting with a friend who is awaiting the result of his HIV test.
Gramaglia has already tested HIV-Positive and describes the room as a ‘holding cell’ in
which he is ‘trapped’ with a ‘wall...at least fifteen feet high’ and ‘a row of narrow windows at
the top...covered with blinds’.80 He says that he cannot use the door to escape. 81 Doug
Bender’s ‘Dishes’ concerns time. Bender states that one does not know how much time one
has left and also that others peek into the unknown like at a horror movie. 82 This is while one
74
Borger (n 1) xxvii
75
ibid 116
76
ibid 168
77
ibid 167
78
ibid 109
79
ibid 212-213
80
ibid 110
81
ibid
82
ibid 206-211
An example of the two levels of psyche and techne at work can also be seen in
another way in Hilyard’s ‘Chemical Man’. At the level of what is being said, we see how the
person being described – with AIDS – relies on medication, and at the level of techne,83 this is
revealed through non-ending run-on sentences where the word ‘pills’ is used repeatedly, e.g.
‘There are pills to help him breathe, pills to make him cough things up, pills to smother his
coughing so he can sleep at night, pills to make him sleep when it isn’t the coughing keeping
him up, pills to mask the itchiness when the combination of other pills causes his skin to
erupt in nasty-looking red bumps that no one can identify...’ etc. etc. 84 Therefore, the
sentence construction mirrors the comment that ‘The line of pills is like a rope by which he
From a Burning House also contains different forms including, what Carolyn Forche
finds in her investigation of poetry written in times of crisis: the fragment. This is noted by
Borger.86 The reason for the fragment is that either the writers were busy caring for sick ones
or did not have chance to finish their pieces as the disease took its toll.
Conclusion
83
Kreiswirth (n 5 302) notes the distinction between what is told and how it is told (whether labelled logos and
mythos, fabula and sjuzhet, historie and discours or story and discourse) from Aristotle, to the Russian
Formalists to the French Structuralists, to the present.
84
Borger (n 1) 167
85
ibid 170
86
ibid xxv
HIV/AIDS prose, then, fits into the disciplines of Literature and Cultural Studies.
There is more work to do; for instance, it is worth speaking with gay men who are HIV-
Positive and, in a reader-response manner raised by Rita Charon, 87 finding out their views
about the collection as well as determining whether they would find such a Writer’s
Workshop useful. It is also important to broaden our study of AIDS prose narratives, looking
for one at more work by ethnic minorities like black gay men. It is moreover worth
examining not only film and television widely and more recently where, for example, the
soap opera, as a continuous narrative, is equipped to tell an ongoing story of a gay character
with HIV, but also film projects devoted to those living with HIV such as The HIV Story
Project from the US, as well as web blogs written by people who have HIV.
Bibliography
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87
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<https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/bulletin_of_the_history_of_medicine/future_publication
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