So I’m thinking about all the shtick some gay men got for not having taken up condoms back in the day, for behaving “recklessly” just so, we were told, they could continue indulging in self-destructive pleasures. 1/

Now many of the people who would have signed up to those claims are doing the conga for the nation during a pandemic whose infectious agent is spread by droplets of respiratory fluids. And it is their god-given right, they say, because it is, to them, how they come together..2/

Even if closeness can kill them, they know that closeness is also what makes them who they are and what ensures the reproduction of their social relations and of the nation they they feel addressed by. 3/

An infamous pornographer I interviewed for my research in San Francisco last year firmly believed that it was gay men who went through the AIDS crisis having sex without condoms and managed to survive, that have been responsible for the survival of a pre-AIDS sexual subculture 4/

that is now being taken up by many of us living in the antiretroviral age. To him, such a “risky” behaviour was, in fact, less about an eroticisation of death and more about a commitment to life and survival, if not of those men themselves, then certainly of their own culture. 5/

Obviously a lot has been written about how, historically, immunity rhetorics have been deployed (in medicine, political theory, warfare) to contain the threatening dimensions of community as that which ultimately undoes the self and, by extension, the body of the nation. 6/

And yet, whilst in the first case we had a fragile subculture cumming together in the name of its own survival vis-à-vis a state that wanted it extinct, in the second example the self-obliterating nature of community is being deployed in the name of the nation-state, 7/

that most modern of institutions created, policed & reproduced through immunity practices (public health, border controls, citizenship, etc.). Both instantiate a political crossroads: do we become immune and lose one another or do we give ourselves to one another at the risk 8/

of losing ourselves in the name of the collective we want to survive. there are certainly differences here, but similar ethical choices: in the name of what or whom are we willing to undo ourselves? And what may be the worlds that will be brought up through our undoing? 9/

Will they be more capacious, more caring, more open to alterity or will they be ossified hegemonic structures of oppression, of self-sameness, of despise for the strange and the foreign? These are the questions I’m left with and apologies if this all sounds like rambling.