Eighty-Sixed in Queereaders

Jan 20, 2008 David rated it it was amazing

When I had my recent physical, HIV testing was offered as an optional addition to the regular hematology panel, so I went ahead and got the test. It was reassuringly negative, but what struck me was the difference between getting tested in 2010 and the first time I was tested back in 1985. Back then, the probability of testing positive was distinctly higher (I was a gay man in my twenties, living across the river from downtown Manhattan, and several of my friends had tested positive). Back then, When I had my recent physical, HIV testing was offered as an optional addition to the regular hematology panel, so I went ahead and got the test. It was reassuringly negative, but what struck me was the difference between getting tested in 2010 and the first time I was tested back in 1985. Back then, the probability of testing positive was distinctly higher (I was a gay man in my twenties, living across the river from downtown Manhattan, and several of my friends had tested positive). Back then, a positive test was also a death sentence. For the three days before the test result came back I was climbing the walls.

It's hard to remember now just how terrible a time that was. Even though I was negative, several of my friends were not as lucky. Throughout the New York area, young men in their twenties and thirties were dying way before their time, struck down by opportunistic infections nobody had ever heard of; many were isolated and stigmatized, while Reagan could barely bring himself to say the name of the disease that was killing them.

In response to the epidemic, gay writing sprouted a new branch overnight. Reading back over much of what was written at the height of the epidemic is, for the most part, a fairly grim exercise. Most of it is heartbreaking, but not very good. People were understandably angry, frightened and confused, but not always able to channel their feelings into a coherent shape.

There was, however, one magnificent exception. Out of all the chaos and pain, as first his friends, and then he himself, were getting sick and dying, David Feinberg wrote two 'plague diaries' that capture the times perfectly with unflinching honesty. Eighty-Sixed is the first of the pair (the other is Spontaneous Combustion). It's raw, visceral, confused, angry, satirical, and one of the funniest books you will ever read in your life. The second book is just as affecting, and just as funny.

Feinberg was not about to go gently into that good night - throughout both books he rails constantly against the disease that was ravaging his world, as well as at the institutionalized stupidity, hypocrisy and inefficiency that was characteristic of the early response to the disease.

Don't get me wrong. These books are hilarious, but they will break your heart. Feinberg did not live to experience the discovery of the treatments that stopped an AIDS diagnosis from being a death sentence. He did, however, leave behind these two extraordinary books, which are truly the canonical accounts of a particularly dark time. Much of the material written about the epidemic doesn't hold up over time - Feinberg's account is the honorable, unforgettable, exception - one which still holds extraordinary power. ...more

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Mar 13, 2009 Larry-bob Roberts rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: queer

Here's the one-line review that appeared in the first issue of my zine Holy Titclamps in May 1989: "If you can afford it, get this book. Gallows humor. AIDS and the 80's. Just plain essential."

David Feinberg should be canonical for angry queers, just as David Wojnarowicz is, but seems to have somehow seems to have slipped through the cracks. Is it because he's more middle-class? Or just that he alienated too many people at the end, and those who survived don't talk up his legacy?

Feinberg burned ...more

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