NOW IT'S AIDS INC.

By PAUL RUDNICK

Here's what I find most shocking about AIDS: it has become comprehensible. Friends have been dead for 15 years. Worthy organizations like the American Foundation for AIDS Research and Gay Men's Health Crisis (G.M.H.C.) own buildings with serenity gardens, and the red ribbon symbolizing AIDS awareness appears on mugs, Christmas-tree ornaments and beach towels while remaining a fashion challenge for Oscar-night actresses in strapless gowns. Elizabeth Taylor and Sharon Stone impressively share the fund-raising crown; Sharon was barely a B-movie starlet when the epidemic began. AIDS awareness has become ubiquitous, and the possible new breakthrough in protease cocktails has somehow become a component of the AIDS industry--perhaps a miracle or maybe just another item on the boardroom agenda.

This matter-of-factness was inevitable: the sheer passage of time dilutes horror. The earliest AIDS deaths were accompanied by roaring panic. My friend Eric, a stage manager and haberdashery salesclerk, died in '86. His extreme weight loss and hollow-cheeked pallor gave him a look of near theatrical decay, and his paranoia and memory loss were not then recognized as symptoms of dementia. He was surprisingly granted a luxurious room in a Manhattan hospital, with a uniformed guard at the door; we later discovered that the staff was being extra cautious because another AIDS patient had jumped from the roof a day earlier. All visitors were required to wear surgical masks, but almost no one did; we didn't want Eric's last moments to be accompanied by a circle of fearful Michael Jacksons.

During those first years, AIDS was unspeakable. Media coverage was nonexistent, and denial ruled. The founding members of G.M.H.C. tried to hand out flyers regarding the new disease on the dock at Fire Island, and no one would take them. Rumors abounded--that the virus was spread through poppers, that it was deliberate government genocide, that it was carried in swine flu; I remember thinking that the ultimate gay plague would be contracted over the phone. Soon, however, compassion and terror galvanized the gay community. Anxious mobs attended Larry Kramer's landmark AIDS drama, The Normal Heart, in which medical statistics were painted on the walls of the set and constantly updated. Theater suddenly performed an unheard-of function: at its opening in 1985, The Normal Heart was one of the few sources of data on the epidemic anywhere.

The war years began. My first ACT UP meeting was, like most feverishly political events, thrilling, necessary and endless. A downtown hall was packed to the rafters, with everyone from tattooed, sleeveless East Village hunks to Mount Sinai surgeons. The process was unbearably democratic. Everyone was allowed to speak, even the woman demanding funding for safe-sex dental dams for the lesbians of El Salvador. Whatever its excesses, or because of them, ACT UP radically changed the process of American medical research, demanding speedier trials to get, as the T shirts read, "drugs into bodies." Since ACT UP was primarily a gay organization, those T-shirt graphics were crucial, and committees of artists and advertising professionals signed on. From the SILENCE=DEATH logo to the late Keith Haring's cartoons of friendly condoms, AIDS has been a stylish blight. A community long accustomed to providing the trumpet lilies, striped tents and name entertainment for social events turned its gifts to fund raising. It was soon possible to attend the Ringling Brothers circus, a Jessye Norman recital and the Mr. Leather New York contest, all with checkbook in hand. I remember grabbing seats for the first preview of Nick and Nora, an ill-fated musical of 1991; the preview was partly an AIDS benefit, and ribbons were distributed. One civilian theatergoer, a middle-aged matron, needed the ribbons' significance explained to her. "Oh," she commented, "I thought they were just because it was the first preview." Sometimes when I watch the Oscars I still think, Oh, look, Susan Sarandon saw Nick and Nora.

AIDS art boomed, producing masterworks like Tony Kushner's Pulitzer-winning Angels in America and any number of painfully well-intended, short-lived off-Broadway musicals in which the characters packed up dead lovers' cd collections while warbling ballads about the rainbow. There was a novel about a female teenage gymnast who contracted the disease through a transfusion; activists regarded such innocent-victim scenarios as evasive and insulting. Ferocious voices were preferred, from Kramer to journalist Randy Shilts to comic essayist David Feinberg, whose final collection, Queer and Loathing, included a detailed description of his AIDS-related diarrhea. Shilts and Feinberg are dead, along with Michael Bennett and Liberace and Robert Mapplethorpe and enough stars to fill a shelf of salacious biographies. Celebrity deaths served a grim purpose, because the press paid attention.

Today I am stunned only when a gay death is not caused by AIDS. When a gay man dies of a non-AIDS-related brain tumor or heart attack, I feel oddly hopeful. Diabetes--good for him! Andrew Sullivan wrote a provocative cover story for the New York Times magazine exploring the possible end of AIDS. The reaction to this piece among gay people has been mixed, a combination of admiration and suspicion. Hopes have been raised far too many times, by everything from blood washing to macrobiotic menus to Compound Q. Does anyone remember Compound Q, a tentative eureka from a few years back, synthesized from Chinese cucumbers? It is now possible to have failed-drug nostalgia.

It all comes down to the AIDS quilt, that collection of nearly 50,000 squares of fabric devoted to the dead. Gays have always been divided on this display. While some find the quilt a touching memorial and a useful political tool, others consider it a cemetery designed by the Ladies' Home Journal. I joined the landmark gay march on Washington in 1993, as a snob who had tended to avoid such gung-ho events, wary of all that coerced hugging. But that year everyone went. Too many people had died, and solidarity was no longer merely a buzzword. The quilt was unfolded. As I walked among the panels and the marchers, it was not the handiwork but the racking sobs of the bereaved that proved unforgettable. AIDS grief has to be rationed, or the tears can become infinite; those quiltgoers had allowed themselves to remember. The sorrow was undercut only by a leather couple I saw under some nearby elms, two fellows in full bondage gear. The stern master lightly flogged his willingly shackled slave with a riding crop. "Oh, just stop," the slave complained. It had been a very long day.

The quilt was displayed again this year in Washington, to considerable crowds. Organizers announced that this might be the last time a space could be found large enough to contain the majority of the panels. I didn't go, out of laziness and some vile sense of been-there-seen-that. I can't imagine a world without AIDS. Gay people have been marked, although I disagree with neo-con gay activists who claim that AIDS has taught gay people responsibility, as if, prior to the plague, homos were all shiftless and madcap. What AIDS has done is to make gay death terrifyingly ordinary. And yes, I know that the vast majority of people with AIDS are not gay, but I so rarely get invited to their memorials or their fund raisers honoring Angela Lansbury. I am also aware that equally or more devastating cancers and famines abound, all worthy of dollars and galas; one of the more darkly satiric aspects of the AIDS crisis has been periodic outbursts of competitive suffering.

AIDS has increased gay visibility and even gay acceptance; AIDS is the Chorus Line of epidemics. The new drug treatments and those still in the pipeline are tremendously promising, although the catchphrase "reduced viral load" somehow sounds like a favorite band of Beavis and Butt-head. A generation has been all but erased. AIDS has paradoxically proved that gay lives matter, that the days when President Reagan refused even to say "AIDS" in public are past. Perhaps the post-plague years will soon begin and all those quilt panels and ribbons and T shirts will become relics or even flea-market collectibles. There was a debate recently over destroying some last sample of smallpox, contained in a laboratory. I wish I could visit the final AIDS molecule, cornered and shivering in some barren government crypt. No mercy.

PAUL RUDNICK, a playwright and screenwriter, is the author of the play and film Jeffrey and the film Addams Family Values.