All this discussion of plagues, sympathy, and the ethical question of how and when to laugh at death is bringing me back to very vivid personal and painful memories from the height of the AIDS crisis. So, a thread here.

(and before I go any further, I know that AIDS is not "over" and many people all over the world face this situation down and have to live and die within the complex chessboard of who has access to what healthcare, what treatment options, what the matrix of life chances affords)

I was 18 and my first boyfriend Doug was HIV positive and so were many of our friends. We had safe sex, tried to keep track of what was permitted and what was risky and what was forbidden. We tried our best to negotiate a fucked up and scary situation.

I remember riding BART to go visit our friend Mitch who was dying of AIDS in a hospital, already on morphine, fading in and out. I overheard some people laughing and joking on the BART train, talking about their marriage problems, the ups and downs of being together. And then..

One turned to the other and said "At least we don't have to worry about AIDS!" and they laughed and laughed and laughed, deep belly laughs of smug, complacent heterosexual distance and indifference from the pain and suffering of all the dirty queers and junkies "out there".

It was a punch to my guts. I wanted to scream at them but I trembled, grit my teeth. I said nothing. This was the laughter of bad certainty. These were the people with nothing to fear, the people above it all, the people who could afford to laugh from their place of safety.

This laughter on the BART train was the mockery of sickness from a stupid standpoint of precipitous self-certainty about health, a smug belief that one will never tumble into the pit one's self. That one will always be able to keep one's head above the floodwaters.

And that laughter on the BART train has been deeply familiar to me as I have watched Donald Trump mock other people's suffering, other people's sickness, other people's troubles. Trump and those strangers on BART have, from my perspective, that smug cruelty in common.

So when people laugh at Trump's sufferings now, people such as myself, we are *not* laughing from a place of smug safety. We are not laughing as if it couldn't be us, gasping for life. We are laughing because someone who thought he would never suffer has joined the rest of us.

That might sound specious. The subject here is who can laugh about death, and when. But for me, a great deal depends upon where you are standing and the implied relationship you draw between yourself and the object of laughter.

The AIDS crisis was, for me, a direct lesson in this question. My boyfriend Doug loved a humor zine made by and for PWAs (People With AIDS) called "Diseased Pariah News" that was full of jokes and centerfold photoshoots and recipes and exceedingly bleak but deeply funny writing.

We would read issues to each other. He found it funny and so did I, but he was progressing from being asymptomatic HIV+ to developing symptoms. I wasn't positive, and the laughter for me felt like the edge of a threshold- was it my place to laugh with him at these jokes?

We are all mortal, so we are all people who are in bodies that will break, will suffer, and will die. That is non-negotiable and there is no escape. This is the only sanction we need to be able to laugh at death. Our laughter can be our way of working with and working through it.

But when a condition is stigmatized by a culture, rendered thematic and metaphorical, saddled with associations and rhetorics of shame, as AIDS was, then the question of who can laugh at an AIDS joke becomes deeply loaded and very much a matter of who you are and where you are.

With respect to COVID, race & class obviously stratify who is dying & how quickly, who has what kind of care, who is held up as "innocent" and who is held up as "facing the consequences of their own actions." So, we're all potentially exposed to it, but we're not all "the same."

Fwiw, I see laughing at Donald Trump's suffering as a laughter of the powerless at the collapse of a powerful person's pretension and folly. He mocked those who took precautions, concealed urgently needed information, and so thousands died on his watch.

My boyfriend Doug died of AIDS, and so did Mitch, and so did Billie, and so did Jerome, and so did Diet, and so did Kitty, and so did so many more, and they're not here to speak for themselves about what happened the last time a "plague" swept through this country. They're gone.

ok sorry for ranting here, and thanks for reading me traverse that BART train memory and loop back to today. (tl;dr: "laughing at death" is neither inherently always bad nor necessarily good, but depends upon how, when, and in what spirit you do it) R.I.P. to those we've lost.