Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone by David B. Feinberg

learner that I am. A Bart Simpson earring that I found at a Hallmark card-shop inspired me. Bart Simpson seems inappropriate for sex. I try to insert another earring, a tiny hoop. My sinistral ear starts bleeding.
    I take off the Band-Aid on the chin. How can anyone possibly have sex with a Band-Aid on the chin? Once again begins the flow. Two Band-Aids later I find myself still a fount of blood.
    What am I to do? Awash in a sea of infection and disaffection, mired in anxiety and despair, dropping T-cells by the minute, I sit and stare at my ghastly reflection in the mirror, pray for coagulation. Studmeister is on his way in a cab, ready for action. I’m locked in the bathroom, crying over my dowry of diseased precious bodily fluids.
    Of course, he never shows. I don’t have his number. He doesn’t call with explanations.
    Evidently, Some Higher Power is teaching me a lesson.
    Why do I even bother with the phone-sex line? I’m bound to be disappointed. Even if Mister Wrong showed up and was as appealing as he indicated, what would be the likelihood of sustaining a relationship that would last five minutes past orgasm? Surely I have experienced enough personal growth that I don’t need to rely on cheap anonymous sex for kicks. How many more nights am I destined to wait fruitlessly in my humble abode for the Falcon video equivalent of Elijah? He’ll never come. I’ll never come. What’s the point?
    Two hours later, when the bleeding has finally subsided, I dial that elusive number again. This time, I go to his place.
    I love Diseased Pariah News, a ‘zine by and for the HIV-infected that comes out of San Francisco whose motto is “No Teddy bears.” I was delighted to make it into the second issue with this piece. Black humor reigns at DPN. Whenone ofthe first editors died, Beowulf Thorne (not the name he was born with), the surviving founding editor, mixed some of his ashes into the ink. Beowulf is the creator of the comic strip “Captain Condom. In a recent issue of DPN, Captain Condom gets thrown into jail for beating up Louise Hay. Need I say more?
    I eventually had to place a block on my phone. My compulsive phone sex combined with a sticky call-waiting button was bound to lead to an embarrassing conversation with a close blood relative. Of course, I immediately found a loophole involving credit cards. But now, in my new apartment, the phone is on the desk and the bed is miles away. Phone sex is no longer ... convenient. I know, I could always get a longer cord. It just doesn’t seem worth the effort.

Direct Mail From Hell
     
    Back in the early sixties, there was an appalling show called “Queen for a Day.” Contrary to your expectations, it wasn’t the biography of Cobra Woman Maria Montez or an ongoing series on female impersonators. Four women would tell their pathetic tales of woe to the studio audience: how Hubby drank his way out of work and his mother lived upstairs in an iron lung and the house burned down when Junior tried to make a tuna-noodle casserole in the oven and neglected to light the pilot until it was too late and how it would be really nice if she could get a Maytag washer-dryer because it’s really quite arduous beating the sheets on the rock down by the stream and doing laundry for twelve. Then the audience got to vote on the patented Applause Meter who was the most pathetic. The winner was crowned with an ersatz tiara and loaned an ermine wrap and taken to her dream kitchen. The losers got cents-off coupons at Safeway.
    Well, at the end of the month when I sit at the kitchen table, sorting out the fund-raising mail I received in the past four weeks, sometimes I feel like a member of the audience of “Queen for a Day.” With stern posture I pore over plaintive pleas for checks or charge-card authorizations (“Please Do Not Send Cash in the Mail”), the director at open auditions for the bus-and-truck-company version of Death ofa Salesman. Who shall live and who shall die? Another