"Later I would think of America as one vast City of Night stretching gaudily from Times Square to Hollywood Boulevard—jukebox-winking, rock-n-roll-moaning: America at night fusing its darkcities into the unmistakable shape of loneliness…Remember rock-n-roll sexmusic blasting from jukeboxes leering obscenely, blinking manycolored along the streets of America strung like a cheap necklace from 42nd Street to Market Street, San Francisco…One-night sex and cigarette smoke and rooms squashed in by loneliness..And I would remember lives lived out darkly in that vast City of Night, from all-night movies to Beverly Hills mansions."--John Rechy, opening of City of Night
John Rechy speaks of loneliness twice in the opening passage to City of Night. During the historical backdrop of City of Night (the late 1950s/early 1960s), the queer ventured into the night to forget the heteronormative lives they were forced to negotiate. Immigrants cross borders under the cover of night to escape the violence of poverty. Our desires compel us to venture into the cloak of darkness. To blunt the traumas of cultural tyranny, the night offers a temporal respite from historical traumas as well. However, loneliness pierces our psyches; it is our shadow that we forget by means of alcohol, drugs, anonymous sex, and house music. The night blankets our pain and forgetting is sometimes our only salve. How many gay men in the 1980s and early 1990s ventured into the night for anonymous sex to forget the death camps of AIDS? These men, surrounded by death and society's scorn, wanted to forget. Even if it spelled their own death, the temporal pleasure was enough to deny the reality of AIDS. The night allowed men with AIDS to fulfill their desires; Gaetan Dugas, the so-called "Patient Zero," would rely on the darkness to hide his Kaposi Sarcoma lesions from prospective sex partners. This is the historical amnesia I would like to speak of, that of the history of HIV/AIDS, particularly as it pertains to gay Chicano men. Silence surrounds the epidemic and night blankets any discourse in our culture. Horacio Roque Ramirez conducted a study of AIDS death obituaries of gay white men and gay Chicano men. The families of the gay Chicano men never disclosed the true cause of death; pneumonia or some other innocuous illness was listed. The field of Chicana/o Studies has also been complicit in this amnesia by not acknowledging the seriousness of HIV in our community. In over forty years of the publication of Aztlán, the journal has published only one article covering the topic of HIV. The mainstream gay culture has seemed to have developed amnesia regarding HIV. The Gay Latino Studies reader does not include one essay covering the topic of HIV in the gay Latino communities. HIV- gay men refer to HIV+ men as "dirty" and as having "bugs." The community, the communion, created by the deaths in the 1980s and early 1990s is gone. Groups like ACT-UP! brought HIV into the light of day but the current gay "movement" marginalize those of us negotiating the illness back into the darkest recesses of night.
John Rechy speaks of loneliness twice in the opening passage to City of Night. During the historical backdrop of City of Night (the late 1950s/early 1960s), the queer ventured into the night to forget the heteronormative lives they were forced to negotiate. Immigrants cross borders under the cover of night to escape the violence of poverty. Our desires compel us to venture into the cloak of darkness. To blunt the traumas of cultural tyranny, the night offers a temporal respite from historical traumas as well. However, loneliness pierces our psyches; it is our shadow that we forget by means of alcohol, drugs, anonymous sex, and house music. The night blankets our pain and forgetting is sometimes our only salve. How many gay men in the 1980s and early 1990s ventured into the night for anonymous sex to forget the death camps of AIDS? These men, surrounded by death and society's scorn, wanted to forget. Even if it spelled their own death, the temporal pleasure was enough to deny the reality of AIDS. The night allowed men with AIDS to fulfill their desires; Gaetan Dugas, the so-called "Patient Zero," would rely on the darkness to hide his Kaposi Sarcoma lesions from prospective sex partners. This is the historical amnesia I would like to speak of, that of the history of HIV/AIDS, particularly as it pertains to gay Chicano men. Silence surrounds the epidemic and night blankets any discourse in our culture. Horacio Roque Ramirez conducted a study of AIDS death obituaries of gay white men and gay Chicano men. The families of the gay Chicano men never disclosed the true cause of death; pneumonia or some other innocuous illness was listed. The field of Chicana/o Studies has also been complicit in this amnesia by not acknowledging the seriousness of HIV in our community. In over forty years of the publication of Aztlán, the journal has published only one article covering the topic of HIV. The mainstream gay culture has seemed to have developed amnesia regarding HIV. The Gay Latino Studies reader does not include one essay covering the topic of HIV in the gay Latino communities. HIV- gay men refer to HIV+ men as "dirty" and as having "bugs." The community, the communion, created by the deaths in the 1980s and early 1990s is gone. Groups like ACT-UP! brought HIV into the light of day but the current gay "movement" marginalize those of us negotiating the illness back into the darkest recesses of night.