AIDS Memoirs
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like he was on an endangered species list due to entrenched homophobia. Anger in
this memoir is not a phase—^it is an existing condition from the point of his diagnosis
to the last days of life.
In 1982, American-born anthropologist Eric Michaels went to Australia to
research the impact of television on remote aboriginal communities. Unbecoming,
published in 1990, is a brutally frank, albeit rambling account of the last year of
Michaels’ life as he became increasingly ill. Michaels’ memoir is filled with rage
not only at his plight (fevers, infections, nausea, and Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions),
but at the failure of medical and governmental institutions to come to terms with
AIDS. A rage-filled Michaels writes:
It’s getting more and more difficult to look in the mirror as the KS
begins to claim my face beyond the mask of the dreadful but unavoidable
beard. I shall not be able to visit the states; I won’t get through customs.
I won’t be able to lecture, as my condition will be too horrible and revolting.
I won’t be able to walk down the street without attracting attention. What
a nasty, nasty disease this is—^relentless in its strategies, and always a
step ahead of you.. .(49)
Along with expressing anger toward the ap athy of doctors, nurses, medical
researchers, and governmental bureaucrats, Michaels also declares his outrage at a
gay community that in the 1980s turned apohtical and sold out to capitahsm. He
asserts that mass-mediated messages have convinced many gay young people that
they are mainstream American consumers, “no different from any other upward
socially mobile business major.” Such thinking, Michaels says, lulls homosexuals
into a false sense of societal acceptance, adding: “If and when we venture out of
our lavender prisons, we may notice a world out there where a sizeable proportion
of the population thinks we are a ‘problem,’ who would like to see us all disappear,
and some of whom would like to help in that” (128).
Depression also reared its ugly head at various times during Michaels’ final
year, with the memoirist so despondent about barely being able to make it from the
bed to the bathroom that he would fantasize either suicide or his funeral
arrangements. “I’m sure death itself is the simplest thing in the world,” Michaels
writes. “The choice seems merely to be this: to arrange everything, to maintain a
morbid fantasy of control, or simply give it up and let it go. The latter looks more
and more appealing” (93).
Michaels’ acceptance of his impending death was not only forged by his
political belief that gays in intolerant America have long been marked for extinction,
but also by acknowledging that his promiscuity made him vulnerable to disease.
By 1976, in Austin, Texas, Michaels’ life was framed by “obsessive lust,” with the