Subject: Koolaids & The Accountability Project
From: M Petrelis <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 May 1998 22:08:35 EDT

Once and For All
By John Fall
www.cruisingforsex.com web site columnist
May 22, 1998

What is there left to say about AIDS, at least in relation to sex 
between men? The Food and Drug Administration process of approving 
medications has been largely reformed for the better. More effective, 
though toxic, medications are keeping people alive longer. For better or 
worse, HIV infection is increasingly perceived and treated as a chronic, 
manageable disease, like diabetes. The battlefield over HIV care has 
turned into a protracted war about healthcare (managed care is already 
on the verge of collapse - universal healthcare or chaos is next).

The epidemic, in the mainstream media and in the gay papers and 
magazines, is no longer front page news. We have medicated, processed, 
visualized and hugged the virus into normality. Banality. AIDS was a hit 
movie, a Broadway musical. Don't cry for me, Robert Gallo!

For the most part, we have learned to live with HIV. AIDS, not merely as 
a condition, or an epidemic, but as a complex, multifaceted social 
phenomenon, has become history. Fresh evidence of this transformation 
can be found between the pages of a new book titled Koolaids: The Art of 
War. Ostensibly presented as a work of fiction, Koolaids reads like a 
travelogue of the variety of psychological landscapes created by the 
entirety of HIV. For any gay man who participated in gay/queer 
communities in the late 1980's, reading Koolaids will be like 
experiencing a long, accurate and precise memory of those furious and 
painful times (details of life during the epidemic are interspersed with 
vignettes about war-era Beirut. Trust me - it works.)

Koolaids is more than a good book. It is funny, queer, smart and angry 
(Remember when people were angry? Ah, what a lark!). It is original. 
Many previous AIDS memoirs have been precious accounts of loss, sweaters 
and Paris. If you pick up the three most famous gay male memoirs about 
AIDS, you will read as much about France and good cheese and fine wine 
as you will about loss and disease. These books say more about the 
authors' sartorial and gastronomic preferences than about the epidemic 
or the times. Koolaids, on the other hand, reminds us of the existence 
and uses of anger and grief, and of what the virus did to individuals, 
families, communities and a nation. By returning the reader to a wholly 
different era, Koolaids makes history.

The other place the epidemic as a social phenomenon has gone besides 
into the past is into itself. The larger movement of positive and 
negative men seeking social justice has turned into a smaller movement 
of "patients" and "clients" seeking consumer rights. The best, and I do 
mean the best, example of this is The Accountability Project. The 
Project reveals how AIDS service organizations and fundraisers spend the 
money you give them. Apparently, some people at the project never forgot 
how to be angry and have channeled their energy into making sure 
donations go to people with HIV, not to overhead and salaries. Oh, the 
salaries. Visit the Web site and see for yourself the going rate in 
AIDS, Inc. If the facts and figures recorded here do not rekindle the 
kind of outrage depicted in Koolaids, nothing will.

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