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1
I'm catching up with a friend who asks if I've had the monkeypox (mpox) vaccine. He and I know each other through the particular lineage of queer writers obsessing over AIDS. We have different generational and embodied experiences of queer plagues, and we've both been profoundly shaped by them. He tells me about his new job and the hetero coworkers who were confused by his easy decision to get the vaccine. We laugh together about the assumptions of heteronormativity, that a domestic partner equals monogamy. I haven't gotten the mpox vaccine, I answer him. There is still a vaccine shortage, and in the current shape of my life, I'm not at risk.
This wouldn't always have been true. In the ACT UP years of a still-unfolding and catastrophic HIV crisis, I was, at times, at significant risk of contracting HIV. Not just because of who and how I fucked but because of who and how I loved. In the early nineties, we insisted on not letting anyone slip beyond the boundaries of touch. Nights spent crawling into hospital beds with friends and lovers to wipe sweat from their bodies, rub lotion into cracked and bleeding skin, and nap mouth-to-mouth in the tiny bed. Co-regulation in hospital time is breath and it is also skin.
One of the biggest challenges to my enactment of queerness during COVID is my decision to shift my psychotherapy practice entirely to telehealth, removing my body from proximity to my clients' bodies. I told myself this is to keep them safe from me, safe from one another. In order to keep my still-immunecompromised loved ones safe from the worlds that enter into my work so that I can fully inhabit all my worlds.
And yet the fantasy that we can keep each other safe is as faulty as the fantasy that in psychotherapy we can keep from being touched by each other. Isn't it?
2
In the first few weeks of the mpox vaccine rollout, one of my clients started our Zoom session angry and teary. “I can get the vaccine,” she says. “I have time to wait in line, the job security