Longing for Dick and Laughing at Death: The Story of Diseased Pariah News
All right, Tumblr, gather round. This is not my usual style here, and I have missed World AIDS Day by a number of days, but I searched for āDiseased Pariah Newsā on this nonsense site and got all of two coherent hits, and that does not sit right with me. So let me tell yāall a story of black humor, porn, a pre-venture-capital-overrun Bay Area, lovingly photographed penises, recipe testing, friendship, and death. Itās all true but I wasnāt there; sources are linked throughout and compiled at the end.
Cover of Issue #3. This and all illustrations courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society and Calisphere, the online archives of the University of California. Support your librarians and archivists, kids!
āItās My Party and Iāll Die If I Want Toā
The short version of the story is: Diseased Pariah News was a zine that ran for eleven issues, all published between 1990 and 1999. It was edited almost completely by, and addressed pretty much exclusively to, PWAs, or People With AIDS.
To remind you whippersnappers: to know you were HIV positive in 1990 was to know that you were going to die a lot sooner than average, and probably not peacefully. As Jonathan Kauffman wrote in āGet Fat, Donāt Die,ā a 2020 Hazlitt essay on DPN: āSo many of the narratives of the time circled around two themes: memorializing the terror and adulterated sweetness of being alive as everyone they knew was dying, and shearing through the cordon of dehumanizing indifference that the public had erected around plague-struck communities. The experience of daily diarrhea or constant nausea may have been too visceral, too private, or simply too grinding to fit into the arc of a plot.ā The diarrhea could go on for months, by the way. And that was separate from debilitating fatigue, potential blindness (from CMV retinitis), or constant prickly pain in your hands and feet (from peripheral neuropathy).
This was years before the development of protease inhibitors and āthe cocktailā could prevent HIV-positive patients from developing full-blown AIDS; AZT could slow things down, but it came with nasty side effects. AIDS was not like the tuberculosis, or rather like the romantic conception of tuberculosis, in which oneās dying status could be signaled by paleness and the occasional discreet cough. AIDS was painful, and complicated.
So somebody had to have a sense of humor about all this.
Co-founder, original Serene Editor, and the guy who gets the credit for having the idea in the first place, Tom Shearer
Tom Shearer was a computer hardware engineer living in San Francisco, running a zine on the side called GAWK (it stood for Gay Artists and Writers Kollective) when a reader named Beowulf Thorne (more on him later) complained that GAWK looked terrible. Shearer challenged Thorne to do better; Thorne rose to the challenge; one thing led to another and the pair ended up collaborating on a whole new zine, this one focused on the experience of dealing with AIDS. Shearer got the title from an Advocate comic in which a flight attendant asked a passenger: āWould you like the smoking, non-smoking, or diseased pariah section?ā (This was during a time when airlines not only had smoking sections but were occasionally refusing outright to transport PWAs.)
From the very beginning, Diseased Pariah News was meant to be funny, helpful, and obsessed with dick. Page 3 of the first issue lists a number of practical steps PWAs can take (āCall Pac Bell for low income phone ratesā). There was also a Resources page, dedicated to advocacy groups, support groups, even mail-order pharmacies easy to work with, anyone whom the editors judged would treat PWAs fairly and not waste their time. In between those two was the debut of the column, āGet Fat, Donāt Die!,ā dedicated to high-calorie recipes specifically designed to combat wasting disease, illustrated by a naked man in a come-hither pose; the debut of the column āPorn Potato,ā which reviewed porn videos while keeping a much better sense of narrative than its subjects; a short-short story titled āI Fisted Jesse Helmsā; and a contest to guess Shearerās T-cell count. (Not included yet was the centerfold feature, which would include the modelās history of infections and T-cell count alongside his full-frontal glory; that would come in later issues.)
Shearer died in April 1991, as the second issue of DPN was going to press. (āThanks to Mike for guessing optimistically high,ā ran the conclusion to the T-cell count contest.) Issue #3 starts with Thorne recounting the aftermath of his death, including a visit to āAkbar and Jeffās Cremation Hut,ā and then, contemplating taking over DPN by himself, allowing himself a rare show of mourning:
Seriously though, the reality of Tommyās death isnāt funny. But then, neither is it funny that the first President to preside over the age of AIDS couldnāt make himself say the name of the syndrome. Or that a septuagenarian senator would obstruct prevention programs because he would rather see his nationās children die than āpromote deviant sexual behaviorā (all the while forcing us to endure tobacco subsidies and its retinue of smoking related deaths). Orā¦well, you know enough about this yourself, you fill in the blanks. What can I say about this situation? You can either laugh or cry, but crying gives you crowās feet.
Fortunately Thorne wasnāt alone for the rest of the ride: as āCranky Editor,ā he was joined by Tom Ace, christened āHumpy Editor,ā and Michael Botkin, who already had a reputation around the Bay Area as a suffering-no-fools journalist and critic, as āSleazy Editor.ā DPN had found an eager audience to begin withāShearer and Thorne had to double back to the printer when the first print run of the first issue sold outābut at its peak it had a circulation of 5,000 and could be bought in dozens of bookstores across multiple countries. The guys were dedicated and passionate without being self-important, and it showed.
Left to right: Sleazy, Cranky, and Humpy, in an undated photo (1994?), for a DPN Christmas card.
All eleven issues have been archived and can be read in PDF form courtesy of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society and the University of Californiaās online archiving efforts. Highlights include āAIDS Barbie,ā in #8; an interview with playwright and ACT UP co-founder Larry Kramer in #9; Thorneās evisceration of And the Band Played On author Randy Shilts (who had himself just died of AIDS) also in #9; and the Opportunistic Infection Merit Badges (OIMBs), introduced by Botkin in #10:
The outcome will be an array of badges and ribbons which tell the educated viewer, at a glance, just how progressed your HIV disease is. It will be particularly useful for health care providers, who instead of taking lengthy histories will instead be able to briefly study a PWAās array of service ribbons, badges, etcā¦. a careful study of my OIMBs would quickly reveal my obscenely low T-cell count (17 at last testing), the fact that Iāve had PCP, peripheral neuropathy, MAC, wasting syndrome, cryptococcal meningitis, and herpes, and that Iāve taken every nucleoside analogue known to man. This would allow those who want to fawn over or avoid me to act accordingly, and avoid the frustration of mistaken acquaintanceship.
I canāt speak for you, but the badges were what stuck in my mind: humor black enough to communicate the bleakness of its source. Itās funny how history can seem incommunicable. Odds are you reading this are young enough that if I try to tell you what it felt like to look down Lexington Avenue on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, and see a great column of smoke and no cars, you can place the reference but probably not the devastation. People dealing with the aftereffects of COVID now are having a hard time gaining empathy for what it feels like to have their body betray them; the distance of a couple decades or so is not going to help. To take history at all seriously is to admit that the various horrors of the past are ungraspable. But the badges allow you a glimpse of what it was like to live in the midst of this particular horror.
Which is not to say that the DPN guys were particularly concerned with history. Hamilton-style musings about legacies would have left them cold. History had, in a sense, been stolen from them, and so they were going to embrace the present they had left. Especially Thorne, who would be the guiding force behind DPN for the rest of its run.
The Story-within-a-Story of Beowulf āBiffy Maeā Thorne, Writer, Editor, Graphic Designer, Illustrator, Cartoonist, Recipe-Tester, Critic, Know-It-All, and Horndog Extraordinaire
and also, a babe. I donāt care what your gender/sexuality combination is, you wouldāve been at risk of doing some pining.
Beowulf Thorneāno, that wasnāt his birth name, but it seems to have been the name he used exclusively during DPNās run, so thatās what weāll stick withāwas born in 1964 and grew up in southern California, but fled to the Bay Area in 1983. I saw one source say he tested HIV-positive as early as 1986, which is to say before the term āHIVā was even in widespread use. Suffice to say, dude had to start contemplating his mortality far, far earlier than he should have. He was enrolled at UC-Santa Cruz for a while, studying biology, but that whole contemplating-his-mortality part led him eventually to focus on graphic design and advocacy: first with various condom-promoting organizations, such as the Condom Resource Center in Oakland, and then DPN.
If he hadnāt been doomed, Thorne probably wouldāve been one of those guys resented by his acquaintances, just for the sheer number of things he was good at. He was not only DPNās chief writer and editor but its layout artist and the designer of its related merchandise (not to mention the OIMBs). While working as a graphic designer for Addison-Wesley, he would occasionally piss textbook authors off by pointing out errors in their text, even though he wasnāt supposed to be factchecking: he just couldnāt help it. He did full-page, multi-panel āCaptain Condomā comics for several DPN issues; that takes some time and effort now, never mind with Adobe Illustrator as it was three decades ago. He tested all of the āGet Fat, Donāt Die!ā recipes. He was a gardener who specialized in orchids, cacti, and meat-eating plants, and beautifully detailed plant sketches are scattered in his collected papers.
1994 version of the Condom Educatorās Guide, co-written by Thorne and Daniel Bao (who would later work on DPN issues) and designed by Thorne on āhis trusty Macintosh.ā
And he could write. Reading him, youād never guess the man wasnāt a trained writer, or is now twenty-three years dead: his voice is unstoppable. Iām not the type who laughs out loud at books easily, and while reading the DPN back issues, I found myself giggling repeatedly at the turns of phrase in Thorneās porn reviews.
Oh, yeah: he also was Porn Potato. And just generally an unabashed horndog. He and Ace met when Ace saw Thorneās personal ad: āRelatively stable 25-year-old design student seeks other adventurous good-looking men for mutual sodomy and oral copulation.ā When a POZ writer asked Thorne about this in 1997, Thorneāwho by this point was dealing with neuropathy and killer candida that ate his gums down to the boneāsaid cheerfully of Ace: āHeās quite buxom. Iāve always had a letch on him.ā If Thorne and DPN stood for anything, it was the conviction that an AIDS diagnosis could not take away the right and responsibility to live, and living included being sexual.
But You Already Know the End of the Story
The hardest issue of DPN to read is the eleventh and last one, which came out in 1999, three years after #10. āIn the eternity since DPN #10 appeared,ā ran a note under the masthead, ā66.67% of the editorial staff expired.ā Botkin had died in 1996; that left Thorne and Tom Ace. By this point there was a new set of treatments available, but they worked a lot better if you hadnāt already been fighting HIV (plus the side effects of AZT) for over a decade.
One of the last DPN pieces Thorne wrote was on viatication, the practice of selling your life-insurance policy to be able to collect cash while youāre still alive. His health was failing pretty fast at that pointāanother of the last pieces is about CMV retinitis blinding himābut the article is practical, funny, and devoid of self-pity. It will break your heart nonetheless.
Deciding to viaticate my policy started with some soulful contemplation. The first thing I had to face was my own impending mortality. It was as though signing the paperwork obliged me to kick the bucket on some kind of schedule. For an obsessive taskmaster such as myself, there were some control issuesā¦.
Finally, thereās a little roulette. The closer to deathās door you areāon an actuarial basisāthe more moolah you get. You donāt want to cash in too early for a measly 50% (two-year life expectancy). On the other hand, if you wait for that 80% jackpot (six-month life expectancy), you might croak before you can enjoy it all. I was feeling pretty grim at that point, so the time seemed right.*
* For all you voyeuristic sickies, It was necrotic periodontitis.
He died on May 8, 1999. Reportedly his friends tried and failed to create a snowglobe with some of his ashes and Astroglide lube.
Tom Ace, miraculously, is still in possession of his mortal coil, or at least was as of 2010, when Vice interviewed him. Kauffman was able to talk to several of Thorneās friends for his 2020 Hazlitt article. Beyond that I didnāt find a lot of easily accessible information about DPNās survivors, either editors or readers.
Why Remember Diseased Pariah News
Itās not for everyone, Iāll grant you that. It never was. Even setting aside the sharp (necessary) line it drew between PWAs and HIV-negative onlookers, it was very much a product of a small, dedicated group with its own goals. If you are not a white gay cis man, you were not going to feel seen, as the modern saying goes, reading DPN. And if you donāt draw as strong a link between sex and vitality as its editors did, the repeated explicit celebration of dick might well put you off.
Itās still worth remembering, and celebrating. DPN is the kind of work thatās not easy to preserve. There were thousands and thousands of zines in the 1990s, and weāve got no hope of learning from all of them, or even a good percentage of them. Eventually the people who can remember getting zines in the mail (my husband still sometimes uses the term ātrib,ā short for āminimum acceptable contributionā) will be gone. Our ability to communicate has expanded so much in the last three decades that itās hard to archive and learn from all that communicationāthink of all the lost MySpace and Geocities pages, bulletin boards, emails. Preservation will be by definition selective, and later generationsā sense of what was actually happening thereby skewed, but we ought to preserve what we can.
But also: these guys were trying to bring laughs, help, and comfort to a vulnerable population, and in 2022 we like to think we approve of that kind of thing. Meanwhile they themselves were vulnerable, far more so than they should have been, and they recognized the unfairness of their situation but they did not whine. They were brave in the face of death, which is hard, and physical pain and the deterioration of the body, which is even harder. And we still in these supposedly enlightened times donāt have a good mechanism for thinking of campy gay men as brave. They werenāt looking to be remembered. We should remember anyway.
All the back issues of DPN are archived on Calisphere, the archives of the University of California, with Beowulf Thorneās papers. Direct links: #1 (1990), #2 (1991), #3 (1991), #4 (1991), #5 (1992), #6 (1992), #7 (1992), #8 (1993), #9 (1994), #10 (1996), #11 (1999). Some of the information comes from this collection of contemporary articles Thorne clipped.
Tom Ace, āThorne on Our Side,ā POZ, August 1, 1999
Mark Allen, āThatās Not Funny, Or Is It?,ā Vice, December 31, 2010
Jonathan Kauffman, āGet Fat, Donāt Die,ā Hazlitt, April 28, 2020
Greg Lugliani, āLast Laughs,ā POZ, October 1, 1997
