12 newyork| march30–april12, 2020
Like wars, plagues can makAnd this will change us. It must. Allplagues change society and culture, revers-
ing some trends while accelerating others,
shifting consciousness far and wide, with
consequences we won’t discover for years
or decades. The one thing we know about
epidemics is that at some point, they will
end. The one thing we don’t know is who
we will be then.
I know that I was a different man at theend of the plague stage of aids than I was at
the beginning, just as so many gay men and
countless others were. You come face-to-
face with mortality and the randomness of
fate, and you are changed. You have a choice:
to submit to fear and go under, or to live with
the virus and do what you can. And the liv-
ing with it, while fighting it, is what changes
you over time; it requires more than a little
nerve and more than a little steel. Plague liv-
ing dispenses with the unnecessary, lays
bare whom you can trust and whom you
can’t, and also reveals what matters.
I know also that the aids epidemic, morethan any other single factor, transformed
the self-understanding of gay men and les-
bians, opened the eyes of our itizens,
and revolutionized the world ghts. It
showed us, with blinding clarity, what we
had hitherto not seen: the ubiquity and
humanity and dignity of homosexuals. And,
having seen this, we were all changed.
Within a couple of decades, out of the ashes,
we had marriage equality, a new world of
visibility and toleration.
Plagues destroy so much—but through
the devastation, they can also rebuild
and renew.
In the movie 1917, there’s a scene in
which the protagonist, a British soldier, is
trying to navigate a vacated, devastated
town in no-man’s-land at night. He makes
his way through the shattered urban
wasteland, where German soldiers are still
hiding, but from time to time, a flare goes
up, light suddenly floods the scene, and
there is no hiding. Everything is clear for a
moment—clearer than it was in daylight.
Every cranny in the ruins and every quiver-
ing rat appears suddenly in sharp contrast
and then disappears again as the flare falls
from the sky. But for an instant, you see the
whole vista, and you orient yourself. You
see where you are.
Like wars, plagues can make us see where
we are, shake us into a new understanding
of the world, reshape our priorities, and help
us judge what really matters and what actu-
ally doesn’t. Testing kits matter. Twitter not
so much. Politically, who knows? Much willdepend on the skills of the politicians grasp-
ing this moment for their various ends. But
a lot is at stake, and I suspect that those who
think covid-19 all but kills Donald Trump’s
reelection prospects are being, as usual, opti-
mistic. National crises, even when handled
with this level of incompetence and deceit,
can, over time, galvanize public support for
a national leader. As Trump instinctually
finds a way to identify the virus as “foreign,”
he will draw on these lizard-brain impulses
and, in a time of fear, offer the balm of cer-
tainty to his cult and beyond. It’s the final
bonding: blind support for the leader even
at the risk of your own sickness and death.
And in emergencies, quibbling, persistent
political opposition is always on the defense
and often unpopular. It requires pointing
out bad news in desperate times, and that,
though essential, is rarely popular.
For the weeks and months ahead, we’ll be
spending much, much more time at home
or communicating entirely virtually. There
will abruptly be less work to do, and less