Notes on A Magazine Printed with HIV+ Blood

Media publish what sells. But HIV doesn’t sell anymore. People got too relaxed about it and it doesn’t make the headlines anymore. That’s why we need to talk about it.
– Julian Wiehl, Vangardist Magazine

Let’s trace the word: a stigma is a mark made by a pointed instrument. We trace the use toward its roots, and find that it’s akin to “stick.” (Just like the plants that they describe, these branching flows of words through time conduct the nutrients of thought through mind and culture.) That “pointed instrument” might be the nails of Calvary, the steepled A of Hawthorne’s scarlet letter, the needle leaving track marks in a junkie’s arm like blackened veins in leaves, or HIV-transmitting pricks that prick a person’s pride and social life like needles, nails, or pointed looks.

That prick defines a boundary – the first division, setting story into motion. The traces that it leaves tell tales – or, more precisely, fertilize the void within which our cognition grows its own interpretations, coming up with often-scandalous imaginal projections that we use to fill the mystery. Like other signs and symbols, stigma are an invitation into inquiry, an opportunity to notice how we mortar over gaps in what we know and jump to our conclusions. But too frequently we take the signs we’re given at “face value” and collapse the field of possibility with our assumptions, nipping that potential blossom in the bud and over-pruning life’s most beautiful and complicated stories with a simpler version that is simply wrong. When we declare a boundary without reflection, we clip the Tree of Life to just a stump, which (since there isn’t any gap between us and our stories) leaves us stumped.

So many of us hide our stigma, and in darkness marks are all the darker. Rather than exposing them to air and light to heal, we bury them, which makes the mystery and shame much deeper. Hidden, trees don’t grow; they die, decay. If we can’t talk about our problems (as we see them), nothing good can ever come of having them. Our stories don’t contribute to the greater social story. We become the “other,” over the horizon, inaccessible to empathy.
By contrast, it’s the “mark” of healthy culture to expose its stigma, bare its wounds, and let what otherwise would be a rift between us to become the crack through which true understanding enters. When all of us can honestly divulge to one another our tattoos, our STIs, our toxic habits, our mistakes, the very marks that seemed to separate us fill the gap they represented.

Divulge: to publish, to announce...from “di-” (or “widely”) and “vulgare” (“publish,” which in turn descends, or stems, from “vulgus” or “the common people,” as in “vulgar”). When daring magazines use ink infused with HIV-infected blood, they literalize this sacred act of opening the wound and making something merely vulgar into something shared. The rate of HIV infection drops when people talk about it more. The Vangardist, by using one part HIV+ blood to twenty-eight parts ink to print their latest special issue, performs an act of alchemy, transforming broken into whole. They give communion, joining us within the body of a greater story than the ones we use to poke at one another.

(Then the only question left to ask, perhaps, is whether even this uniting story takes us deep enough. It is a story, after all, which speaks of joining parts and only hints at how our prior unity might fold that play of separation into something even more profound. And so, we’re wise to ask: Who’s aware of the story?)

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