I detest all acts of aestheticizing health, wherein health is turned into a model type, made to look attractive, based on class and history: (a) health as conflated category, with hygiene and virility as its defining marker (value); and (b) health as basis delimiting inclusion/s (statistics). (a) has something to do with use-value: to become product and maintain biological function; while (b) has something to do with order: the docile body ready to be tamed by authority.

The act of aestheticizing health based primarily on visuals was most excellently utilized in past images of those that died of AIDS, severely emaciated bodies riddled with disgusting lesions. Not inadvertently, those images were also used as warning and as pre-emptive muzzle that would instruct homosexual Eros; and on the other these gave rise to a generation of gays that would ultimately subscribe to upwardly mobile heterosexual values, embedded primarily and centered around the nuclear family.

The act of aestheticizing health is violent to queers like me. Hygienic and healthy homosexuals would rather I disappear because I celebrate the very thing (das Ding) civil society despises with all intimacy, from which they suckle in return: the frothing dirt and disgusting sludge of my Eros. And besides, as if to say to a disgusting, dirty queer like me: aren’t you supposed to be wasting away in some hospice bed, dying miserably, isn’t that what sick fucks like you truly deserve?

All acts of aestheticizing health is violent. E.g., how a performance artist, whose primary product is his photographic body aimed at going viral is then distributed to all his followers. It is not an exaggeration however when I claim that the strategic body poised for consumption is currently being utilized by this ongoing, ever shifting popular fascism: the symptom of poverty is the impoverished body itself, and so therefore must be eradicated. Proof of “clean bill of health” absolutely unnecessary, you are hereby mandated to disappear because you are misshapen, sickly, and also you look like an adik, and most of all because you are poor. How does, how can a malnourished body fight back, resist?

The body as product is also the disposable body, much like the dutiful obedience embodied in the form of a military stance. He is without Eros, without imagination. Eros is dirty, and imagination can’t be tamed. Eros is wasted energy from a body that is deemed best suited to building infrastructure upon infrastructure of revised history and steel mountains of debt (and the healthy bodies as outsourced payments). While imagination is waste of material resources, but instead of a suggestion towards commoning, these very resources are then privatized to have singular, heterogenous aspirational infrastructure in the slow conglomeration of malls, business districts, and condominiums (and these must be consumed by healthy bodies or otherwise, they are not healthy). Fascism’s plea: be an active product and consumer at the same time. Or die in poverty because you lack resilience to be healthy.

My body is mine and it doesn’t embody anything else. I detest your differentiation between your body and my body because through these differentiations, you want to codify me, categorize me; you are clean and I am dirty, you may be displayed and I, swept under. You want me to embody statistics. The last time I visited my AIDS doctor, she told me: You look healthy.  Instead of joy I felt unease. Maybe because I’m aware of the difference between being healthy and that of having a sense of “well-being”. On one hand, health’s emphasis is on the importance of the self as an individuated body primed for maximum utilization, to be utilized as easy disposable, and on the other, well-being has something to do with a body undifferentiated by value and statistics, and instead culminating with the idea that the only way for a body to achieve great sense of well-being is that if those other bodies surrounding one’s entirety also achieve this sense of well-being. Anxiety informs and traps the individuated products of health, while in the area of well-being, this anxiety is precisely lifted, because someone who feels immense sense of well-being knows that they are not alone, through the acknowledgement of the existence of not only the self, but of the other, their kapwa.

I never felt inferior after I found out I was HIV+. As it were, I understood even more the strategic importance of consciously aligning myself with those treated with disregard, those considered disgusting, crass, unmannered, dregs.  But mostly, this also reinforced in me another kind of sense, that I am not my body, that what constitutes my body is a multitude of others, I am made up of a cacophony of virus and bacteria. Scientific fact: we are only 10% human, and the rest of us is not even what can be considered human. Not only is health a relative formulation, neither proof of being nor something that mediates attraction, it is also unhinged from any sort of materiality.

Funny thing about herpes: there are many types of herpes, mouth sores, chicken pox, those lesions on your genitalia that show up then also quickly fade and disappear. When the body first encounters herpes, it will immediately destroy it. Gone. But it never really goes away, it then hides in the base of the spinal cord, and there will remain dormant until for instance the body gets its immunity compromised. The entry of herpes into the body is important because it triggers the immune system that will then produce newer and more effective line of defence, stimulating it in other words. Therefore, someone who’s never had chicken pox or mouth sore may have weaker immunity than those who already had it. Health is not the thing that will protect us, what will eventually protect us are the things we fear the most, virus and bacteria, the others. So, may you have herpes then.