Baby’s Got the Red Ribbon
Blues
by Jim Pickett
It’s the end of March,
and I am enjoying a glass of mellow red wine on the patio
of an enormous convention hotel located in downtown Los Angeles,
with all the smokers. You can’t smoke inside anywhere
in that silly town. Getting a breath of fresh air usually
means stepping into a cloud of Newport, but, truth be told,
I’d search out the smokers anyhow. They’re usually
cooler, despite their toxic tastes and stinky fingers.
I’m “doing”
LA (hey, isn’t that the restaurant from “Pulp Fiction”?)
thanks to the Chicago Department of Public Health, which has
graciously sent me, and more than twenty others from Chicago’s
HIV Prevention Planning Group, to a national leadership summit
on HIV prevention. It feels like the big time, and it is,
more than 1,000 participants, all the heavy hitters, big wigs
from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), everybody who’s
anybody on the national HIV prevention scene.
And me. Just soaking in it.
Tres glam.
All day long for five days
a packed schedule of (mostly) dynamic sessions focused on
the important and exciting work of prevention—workshops,
round tables, institutes, plenaries—and after all of
that, each day I’d meet up with the gang and whoever
on the patio just as enthused as can be. I’d want to
share what I had learned—about implementing interventions
on the Internet from a couple of guys from the health department
in Lexington, Kentucky (of all places), about the development
of microbicides (which is really where it’s at), products
similar to spermicides but designed to kill HIV and other
microbes that cause sexually transmitted diseases, about the
targeting of HIV positive people for prevention initiatives,
which made all the sense in the world to me—every new
infection requires one, after all. Everybody else would talk
about their knowledge gains, too.
Interesting stuff to be sure,
but as it happens at these things, a lot goes on outside the
realm of workshops and speakers and “affinity sessions”
that is also very informative and mind expanding. I met a
fascinating woman from upstate Washington, for instance, who
does prevention work in small, rural towns. I met Sister MaryMae
Himm, one of the famed Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, which
is a group of gay men from San Francisco who wear nun drag
to spice up their advocacy and fundraising work. I imbibed
expensive hotel drinks with wonks from the CDC, with fellow
Chicagoans I’d never met ‘til I flew a couple thousand
miles away, with people whose names I didn’t catch but
who made for good conversation.
Was it all fascinating? All
friendly? Did everyone I meet find me irresistibly provocative
and charming?
Believe it or not, no.
So it’s one of those
late afternoons, early evenings on the patio in LA. We’re
all sitting around, talking shop, drinking expensive hotel
drinks, when this guy breathlessly relates how his state has
just made it so you can get a red ribbon stamped on your license
plate. “Isn’t that fabulous, isn’t that wonderful?”
And, “What a great thing!”
I was like, “What’s
the big deal?”
There was a kind of hush.
All the twitterings, silenced. All eyes, deering out in the
headlights of my loud, obnoxious voice. Hating a vacuum, I
filled the void.
“Yeah, I mean, who really
even sees the red ribbon anymore? What does it mean? Nothing!
It means nothing, it’s vapid. Its grotesque ubiquitousness
has rendered it utterly meaningless,” I said. Or something
like that. Dissed it but good. “There’s a ribbon
for everything now. Who cares?”
The guy tried to break in,
but like a train out of the station I could not stop and kept
going, picking up speed. “Putting a fleckin’ red
ribbon on the license plate of somebody’s Duster is not
going to stop someone from getting HIV.” So there! And
for my finale, I pronounced something along the lines of,
“Like the pink triangle and the rainbow flag, the red
ribbon has just turned into something really, really stupid.”
Well, not only had I offended
the license plate aficionado, I also managed to piss off a
couple of my compatriots, one of whom wears a red ribbon pin
on his jacket, and has for years. He takes it seriously and
thinks of it as a way to honor those who have passed, and
those who still suffer. Which I failed to remember when I
was embarking on my dismal harangue.
But do you see my point? I’m
not big on symbols that have long since outworn their usefulness.
For me, slapping a red ribbon on something or someone has
lost all relevance, it has become disconnected from its original
significance—just as one does not think of all the homosexuals
persecuted by Nazis when placing their cosmopolitan on a pink
triangle beverage coaster, just as one does not think of the
beautiful diversity of our gay brothers and sisters when they
see a factory-crafted rainbow votive display on sale in the
local crap shop. What they see—okay, what I see—is
just a bunch of tacky shit.
And tacky shit does not enlighten,
nor does it save lives. Tacky shit, even if it is diamond
encrusted, even if it is made from the finest silks, is simply
tacky shit. What that state should be putting on their license
plates is the image of a condom. Or a sterile syringe. Or
the phone number of an AIDS hot line.
Call me cranky and antagonistic,
but I was also unimpressed, and practically just as red-ribbon-annoyed,
at the free slinkies given to all conference attendees in
our big bag of goodies. They were made from blue plastic and
had the brand “Viracept” stamped on them. Very weird.
Does that mean taking Viracept is like a “wonderful toy,”
“fun for a girl and a boy?” No one else found this
twisted or deeply disturbing. But I did.
Yet, I still have mine. Just
to keep me in touch with my exasperation, and besides, it
is fun to play with.
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