A Quilt for David - Softcover

Reigns, Steven

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872868818 ISBN 13: 9780872868816

Verlag: City Lights Publishers, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

The hidden history of a vulnerable gay man whose life and death were turned into tabloid fodder.

In the early 1990s, eight people living in a small conservative Florida town alleged that Dr. David Acer, their dentist, infected them with HIV. David's gayness, along with his sickly appearance from his own AIDS-related illness, made him the perfect scapegoat and victim of mob mentality. In these early years of the AIDS epidemic, when transmission was little understood, and homophobia rampant, people like David were villainized. Accuser Kimberly Bergalis landed a People magazine cover story, while others went on talk shows and made front page news.

With a poet's eulogistic and psychological intensity, Steven Reigns recovers the life and death of this man who also stands in for so many lives destroyed not only by HIV, but a diseased society that used stigma against the most vulnerable. It's impossible not to make connections between this story and how the twenty-first century pandemic has also been defined by medical misinformation and cultural bias.

Inspired by years of investigative research into the lives of David and those who denounced him, Reigns has stitched together a hauntingly poetic narrative that retraces an American history, questioning the fervor of his accusers, and recuperating a gay life previously shrouded in secrecy and shame.

"Much too long, suffering has been part of our collective queer legacy. We weather the storm of insult to character and seemingly irreconcilable injustice in tandem with the hope that the arc of time will bend towards justice; our time is now. A Quilt for David is a posthumous journal of vindication."—Brontez Purnell, author of 100 Boyfriends

"A stunning homage to people with AIDS."—Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993

"I found this an incredibly moving book. Reigns deals in hard truths, revisioning one man's life and death, and our collective queer history."—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals

"A Quilt for David is amazing and so powerful, filled with anger and frustration . . . It's an unforgettable book."—Marie Cloutier, Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY

"Told in short, occasionally haiku-like entries, Reigns has done what literature should: put the reader into the mind, the suffering, of another human being."—Andrew Holleran, author of Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited

"Steven Reigns lifts David Acer thirty years after his death to show the naked cost of violent, unexamined public opinion around the catastrophe of AIDS. This poetry masterfully documents the tangle of hatred and lies haunting a generation of survivors. I am often grateful for what poems give to me, most especially the ones in this book."—CAConrad, author of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration

"This writing is energetic, alive, and uncensored. Through poetry and prose we glean a deep understanding of a life misunderstood and mischaracterized. Reigns goes to the mat to find out what really happened, and with his expert pacing we're right there with him."—Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones

"One of the most important roles a poet can assume is that of emotional historian. Reigns certainly understands that notion in this necessary and genre-bending book."—Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of How to Love a Country

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steven Reigns, Los Angeles poet and educator, was appointed the first Poet Laureate of West Hollywood. He has two previous collections, Inheritance and Your Dead Body is My Welcome Mat, and over a dozen chapbooks. Reigns edited My Life is Poetry, showcasing his students’ work from the first-ever autobiographical poetry workshop for LGBTQ seniors. Reigns has lectured and taught writing workshops around the country to LGBTQ youth and people living with HIV. He worked for a decade as an HIV test counselor in Florida and Los Angeles. Currently he is touring The Gay Rub, an exhibition of rubbings from LGBTQ landmarks around the world, and has a private practice as a psychotherapist. He lives in West Hollywood, CA.

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In 1990 a young HIV-positive woman in Florida claimed she was a virgin and that her infection came from her gay, dying dentist. The media believed her, seven others came forward, and a monster was born.

PREFACE

From 2000 to 2013 I provided HIV testing, education, and counseling to people living in Florida and California. I personally tested over 9,000 people. One day, an anxious young woman came in after a dental procedure, fearful that she could have contracted HIV. I gave her my standard educational talk, using colloquial language, explaining that HIV is transmitted through five fluids: cum, pre-cum, vaginal fluid, blood, and breast milk. I told her how HIV needed a window into the body like a cut or sore. It turned out that her results were negative, which didn’t surprise me.

But her fear reminded me of a story I saw when I was in the eighth grade. A young woman appeared on A Current Affair and Inside Edition. She said she was a virgin and that she got HIV from her dentist. Another woman, much older, made the same accusation.

I was certified by health departments in Florida and California; I gave presentations at national conferences and was trained by some of the best educators in the country. I couldn’t imagine how HIV would be transmitted from a dentist to a patient. Even if the dentist didn’t wear gloves, passing on the virus seemed virtually impossible. HIV is a very weak virus outside of the body and dies quickly. Being exposed to HIV doesn’t always mean infection. So I wondered, how did those two women get it? Did a psychopathic dentist purposefully infect his patients? I thought of the dentist in Little Shop of Horrors, victimizing his patients, blood splattering everywhere.

I also wondered if those two women told the truth. I can’t count how many clients I counseled who got infected while cheating on their spouses, infected them, and then feigned ignorance about what happened. I comforted many of those spouses, bound to secrecy by HIPAA confidentiality. There was also a young man, just eighteen years old, who infected his pregnant girlfriend. His own transmission came from a rape at a detention center, which he disclosed only to me, fearing ridicule if he told anyone else. There are lots of reasons to hold onto a secret; sometimes, in keeping that secret, someone gets blamed for something they didn’t do, and a history gets written.

In 2008, I started searching for the name of the dentist, Dr. David Johnson Acer, and the women who accused him of giving them HIV: Kimberly Ann Bergalis, who claimed to be a virgin, and a grandmother, Barbara Webb. I was amazed to find such a trove of tributes, articles, artwork, photos, a play, and references to books dedicated to Kimberly Bergalis. There were statues of her, a beach bearing her name, and a cover story in People maga- zine. Very little was written about David Acer, the dentist.

Our knowledge of HIV transmission has progressed over the course of the epidemic, and yet the story of the dentist victimizing his patients with AIDS in 1990 seemed immutable.

I found only one photo of David. I couldn’t find quotes from him or his family. Who were these people and what really happened? I wanted to find out, and I wanted to tell that story.

I flew to Florida, where I went through courthouse  documents and researched at public and university libraries. I wanted to talk with David’s family, friends, coworkers, and patients. In 2012, I ran an ad in a local paper with that one photo of David, and said I was interested in talking with people who knew him. My phone rang often. Many called never having met him but wanted to give me their opinions or ask me why I was curious about a murderer. I received kinder calls from patients who reported benign memories of him being quiet and generous, giving discounts on dental work, or giving away extra theater tickets. I talked with employees who worked for him,  and  asked about the cleanliness of the office, the dentist’s disposition, and his patients. I met with neighbors, good friends, acquaintances, and eventually I found a man who had sex with David.

The only words I encountered that came directly from David were in a public letter written from his hospice bed, days before his death:

It is with great sorrow and some surprise that I read that I am accused of transmitting the HIV virus. I am a gentle man, and I would have never intentionally exposed anyone to this disease. I have cared for people all my life, and to infect anyone with this disease would be contrary to everything I have stood for.

David sounded kind, and his office didn’t sound like a little shop of horrors. But the story about him was horrific.

A high-powered lawyer, who represented college student Kimberly, was clearly aware of the potential for settlement money in the part of Florida known as The Treasure Coast. There was a $3 million malpractice insurance to be considered, and whatever could be extracted from the health insurance company that referred clients to David’s now-closed practice. Eventually, checks were written for $999,999 to Kimberly, Barbara, and another accuser Richard. These checks were followed by an undisclosed sum of money, rumored to be $1.5 million, from the insurance company. But the crusades of the Rolls-Royce driving lawyer and "I did nothing wrong" Kimberly persisted. They wanted to mandate that every HIV positive healthcare worker disclose their status to patients. Even though, aside from their allegations, there were no other reported cases of dental transmission of HIV.

The stigmatizing amendment, offered by Senator Jesse Helms, mandated $10,000 fines and a ten-year minimum prison sentence for healthcare workers who failed to disclose their HIV status. Kimberly, weighing seventy pounds, traveled eighteen hours on an Amtrak train, three months after having a priest give her last rites, and spoke on the Congressional House floor. Her testimony was twenty seconds and fifty-seven words. The decision could jeopardize the livelihood of HIV positive healthcare workers, some of them accidentally infected while doing their job. The mandate did not go through. Years after Kimberly’s death, her parents only go to a dentist with a posted sign saying he’s HIV negative, they get tested before visits.

While articles, essays, and books have been dedicated to the theory that David Acer is a killer, the facts don’t bear that out. The more I discovered about this story, the more it appeared that Kimberly, Barbara, and the six others who blamed  David  for their infection could have been like so many of my patients who didn’t disclose their own full stories of HIV infection. Each one of them—Richard Driskill, an unidentified man, Michael Buckley, Sherry Johnson, Lisa Shoemaker, and John Yecs, Jr.— had their own circumstances and motivations to blame outside risk factors, to blame David Acer. Those facts, details, and data were overlooked, and an unquestioned narrative became historical record.

I decided to tell David’s story as a way to counter the treachery of his end of life. Poetry wasn’t just my beloved form of writing; it felt the best way to assemble the sparse information that existed without adding speculative details. The discrediting facts about the dental infection story were overridden by public emotions elicited by Kimberly’s narrative. Poetry and poetic language compel our emotions. What if, through poetry, I could offer an equally empathic and compassionate view of David? These poems also serve as a way to memorialize him and what his story tells us about humanity, homophobia, and our history.

David Acer and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: City Lights Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0872868818
• ISBN 13: 9780872868816
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 128
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: BOOM ENTERTAINMENT; https://harpercollins.co.uk/; ; The News Building\n 1 London Bridge Street,; London; SE1 9GF; Vereinigtes Königreich
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