Losing self, facing others

In 2009, I came to Kenya to write poetry, having received a partial grant to attend Summer Literary Seminars, a writing workshop sponsored by Concordia University in Canada. I was trying to remake myself, trying to transition from literary critic to creative writer. The location of the seminar seemed ‘exotic’ – I had friends in Nairobi, a sister in Tanzania – but my main focus was craft, finding my voice. What transpired during my stay was entirely unanticipated for a 50-something gay professor from Montana who was quietly managing his HIV. In the process of discovering myself as a writer, I confronted the core of my identity through a face-to-face encounter with the other, with the otherness of HIV in Nairobi – an engagement, an intersection with the melancholy and vulnerability of other long-term HIV survivors (HIVLTS) whose stories were deeply uncanny, both shared and unknown. Through recounting their stories, through losing myself in relating the narratives of a heterosexual ex-sex worker from East Africa and others, I realised how my sexuality produced an unlikely tie to the other.

While it is impossible to ascribe my extraordinary contact with AIDS in East Africa specifically to the pleasure of self-loss or the relinquishment of ego, there remains a dynamic in the process of understanding (that is, standing under) another – some intimacy in the pleasure of telling another’s story – that corresponds deeply to the trajectory of death and life of an HIVLTS. My receptivity to the gestalt of understanding is arguably ascribable in part to the position of the gay HIV subject, who often has experienced the surrender of ego in the process of sexuality. Many years ago, Leo Bersani’s famous polemic declared that sex between men – and particularly that passive anal intercourse that frequently transmitted HIV – was not a springboard for a queer cultural revolution but, on the contrary, a reminder that sex at its core involves a disintegration, ‘a losing sight of the self ‘ in jouissance. For Bersani, the AIDS pandemic and its killing of sexual subjects around the world illustrates that sex between men often partakes of the invaluable experience of powerlessness, loss of ego, relinquishment of dominance (1987, p 222).