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The Secret Life of This Life Now is the backstory of This Life Now, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry (so I have the distinction of saying I lost to Danez Smith). It’s a belated tenth-anniversary gift to the book that put me on some tiny corner of the poetry map. It’s also the story of how we can suffer as much when we succeed as when we fail.
In each Secret Life, I share a bit of my journey and give you a peek at the sequentially next poem in This Life Now. This is post #10 in the series, and the tenth poem in the book is “Words and Things.”
Once we had shared—
razors, toothbrush, a blanket,
like sea and air share the horizon,
reflecting, penetrating each other,
each better suited to any given thing,
like air to birds, sea to fish,
yet both hospitable to rainstorms,
and each with something unique
to offer sunsets.Life goes on! “Words and Things” was inspired by my breakup with a guy I meant on a business trip to San Francisco in 1994, although he lived right near me in New York’s East Village! We met at Eros, a fabulous gay sex club on Market Street in the Castro (since relocated to Turk Street in the Tenderloin). Kind of like how Shirley Devore fell for Norm Saperstein on the beach in Dubrovnik and it turned out he lived next door to her at 5 Riverside Drive (in the Kander and Ebb song “Ring Them Bells” writtten for Liza Minelli’s 1972 TV special Liza with a “Z”).
So that trip to SF was to produce a continuing pharmacy education video—Activities like that for pharmacists were accredited by the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education, and as with physician education or any other allied healthcare professional education, our activities were certified for credit by reputable pharmacy schools, and funded by educational grants from GlaxoSmithKline (formerly Glaxo Wellcome, and formerly to that, Burroughs Wellcome).
I guess this is an appropriate place to nerd out for a few hundred words about the HIV/AIDS pharma scene in the early 1990s. Not so much the drugs themselves, but the commercial environment, which has a lot to do with why medical communications lost its charm for me in the later 90s.
The first AIDS drug approved by the FDA and marketed for use was Retrovir, commonly called AZT (short for azidothymidine, which was an early generic name, not be confused—who am I kidding? This is all totally confusing!—with the drug’s chemical name, which was, is, and always will be 3’-azido-3’-deoxythymidine. Don’t say I never taught you anything).
AZT was developed and marketed by Burroughs Wellcome, a venerable old pharmaceutical company based in London. AZT was approved for marketing in 1987. It was much derided—“hated” would not be too strong a term—by those who took it, as well as by the friends and lovers who watched the suffering suffer. But in fact, it’s not a bad drug. It’s actually a pretty damn good drug. But research clinicians and frontline physicians alike were largely shooting from the hip in terms of dosing, and patients were receiving unnecessarily high daily doses when lower doses would have done just as well with fewer side effects and safety risks.
Nevertheless, it was the only game in town, making Burroughs Welcome the only players in town. With that being the case, they could afford to invest heavily in medical education rather than advertising in medical journals and so forth. Indeed, it was greatly to their advantage to do so, because the only way they were going to sell this drug was if they assumed responsibility for teaching medical providers how to use it. That’s where medical communications comes in. That’s why I had a job. And a very satisfying job at that. As a person who never felt comfortable in the activist trenches, this was my way of making a difference and playing my part in my community’s response to the AIDS epidemic.
But AZT was not the only game in town for long. From 1991 to 1994, the FDA approved three more drugs in the same class as AZT. These were manufactured and marketed by Bristol-Myers Squibb (didanosine or ddI and stavudine or d4T) and Hoffmann-La Roche (zalcitabine or ddC). You might think, with four competitors sharing the field, that Wellcome, BMS, and Roche would have started advertising aggressively. But they did not. Why not? You know, I’ve never seen a discussion of this precise question; but I’d say it was because these drugs weren’t doing so hot. They all worked, but not for long. After several weeks of exposure to any one drug, HIV would start developing drug-resistant mutations. Patients that appeared to be getting better got sicker again, then died. Not a great marketing message for a drug company to promote in advertisements.
In fact, that is precisely what the pharmacy education activity that took me to SF in 1994 was about—these four then-available AIDS drugs, what they were, how they worked, and how they all ultimately failed in the face of viral resistance. Indeed, the work I did in those days was largely about telling very sad stories. Each of these new drugs raised such high hopes. And those hopes were dashed every time, again and again and again.
The story eventually has a relatively happy ending. In fact, things in the AIDS treatment arena were already looking up by the time I broke up with the guy the speaker is talking about in “Words and Things.” That was 1997. We’ll get there sometime in the next few installments of The Secret Life of This Life Now. But you know I prefer the quick exit, at least when it comes to Substack posts. So I will stop here. À la prochaine.
But one quick note before I leave. In the last two TSLTLNs, I mentioned my interest in writing a memoir of these years and calling it But Oh, How the Cool Sand Calls. Writing above, however, about the unnamed newly-minted–MSW boyfriend, I remembered that I already had a title for that memoir: If You’re Dead, I’m Using Your Real Name. Feel free to tell me in the comments which title you prefer. Don’t pull any punches; the loser can always be used as a chapter title. Or as the title of a fictional memoir being written by a character in one of the short stories or novels I hope to write before I die.
Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fireside-sale price of $10.00 includes SHIPPING in the US. If you are elsewhere, I will probably need to reach out and ask you for some additional funds for shipping.
Scheduling Note: I am going to publish posts in this series on Mondays and Thursdays at about noon eastern time. Second Coming posts seven days a week at 6:45am eastern time. Other new sections of Beachcomber Mike may be starting soon. I’ll keep you posted.
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If You're Dead... is a great memoir title, IMO.