Thread by @thrasherxy

As a Black gay man, HIV is always a part of every sexual encounter. Even if an intimate partner or I don't believe we have it, HIV is still like a phantom lover in a threeway with us

Similarly, COVID is a part of everyone's intimate lives, like a phantom—and must be tended to.

This is a sentence/metaphor I am trying to perfect for my book. I am trying to think with better metaphors about viruses. HIV can be like a baby, welcomed by a doula, as @TheodoreKerr1 & his fellow WWHIVDD artists put it.

I really dislike thinking in war metaphors. We are not at "war" with viruses, at least I am not. I really love how @SFdirewolf told me how she respects viruses, because we're all in "the same soup" together--and if we can't share a planet w them, how can we survive?

So in thinking about how present HIV is in every sexual encounter I've had prior to COVID, I am not thinking of it as an enemy or a threat, but like a phantom lover -- an ethereal presence, something to be tended to and cared for. This makes it less scary, and it makes the ways

of tending to it (practicing safe sex, wearing condoms, etc.) available for not being based simply in fear, but based in pleasure, based in kink, based in joy.

Before I get to what this has to do with COVID, a brief throwback to the opera AKHNATEN (stay with me). Remember when I wrote about Glass cutting all the violins for space?

https://twitter.com/thrasherxy/status/1327821015838314497

Well, cutting the violins wasn't a loss. It made for all this other beauty, including the joy of the 1st violist who got to be concert master (and as a trombone player, I'm all about when low-scale instruments get to shine).

"Limitations" can lead to an abundance...

So, back to COVID. If we take seriously the ways HIV isn't only alienating for gays but--in navigating our relationship with this phantom lover safely--that it can be connective, intimate & hot, society more broadly can think of navigating COVID not merely w a sense of loss...

...but with a sense of abundance.

COVID has taken a lot away from us.

But, in its limitations, it gives us all these ways to foster intimacy creatively.

It takes away futurity and forces us to be present.

We cannot take forms of connection for granted.

If we are at "war" w any virus, we cannot be intimate with it, and we like will lose other forms of intimacy with the ensuing collateral damage.

But if we acknowledge we share a planet with pathogens who vastly outnumber humans--as ppl have w AIDS--we can navigate intimacy.