Joseph Osmundson - Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between

VIROLOGY

Essays for the Living, the Dead,
and the Small Things in Between

JOSEPH OSMUNDSON

W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

Independent Publishers Since 1923

For Randall, my first teacher.

SARS-CoV-2, like HIV, is a virus that is

transmitted between individuals in the course

of human relationships that take place in social

and environmental context.

JUDY AUERBACH

bc theres my body

and then theres your body,

and I dont think anybodys

coming over tonight.

TOMMY PICO

Virology

What Is There to Fear?

Its March 16, 2020, about a week before New York State will go on pause. I wait outside of Trader Joes on Manhattans Lower East Side, all post-industrial buildings, all gray and concrete, and the sky gray too, low and spitting rain. Fuck. I forgot my umbrella, too late to go back for it. I figure that on a Monday afternoon traffic to the store will be low.

I stand in the Trader Joes line outside under the spitting sky wondering what the store will be like inside. Crowded? Will there be lines for checkout too? Theres no tape or chalk on the ground marking 6 feet. But I know enough to stand 6 feet behind the person in front of me and to stare at the person behind me with an intensity that keeps them 6 feet behind me too. Im treating everyone like they might be infected, because they might be, and Im treating myself the same way too. Im a scientist. This is what I know.

SARS-CoV-2 is similar to other coronaviruses in how long it can survive on surfaces. What a virus is made of dictates how it will act. Coronaviruses are enveloped, wrapped in membrane just like our cells. Their genetic information is made of RNA, the less stable cousin to our cells DNA. And yet, these little sacks of membrane and RNA and a few proteins, too, can still remain infectious on certain hard surfaces for a few hours.

Riding down the escalator into Trader Joes, Im shocked at how empty it is. Keeping the line outside, where wind can whisk viruses away, thats smart. Suddenly I see a virus on every surface. That pile of avocados. That freezer section with only three pizzas left. The red onions Im stocking up on. From every surface, that virus gets on my hands. But I know enough to know: It cant infect me from there. I do not touch my face. I use the back of my hand to move my glasses up my sweaty nose. I think about Jos, I wish he was still here.

Jos Esteban Muoz was a Cuban American scholar of queer studies before he died in 2013 at only 46. He wrote two books before he died, Cruising Utopia and Disidentifications. I often find myself mourning the voices that I wish we still had to write us through a present crisis, even in line at the grocery store. Building on work by Leo Bersani, Muoz wrote that because queer people may choose not to have biological children, queers are within the dominant culture, a people without a future.

Ive argued for some years that climate change may make us all queer, a worldwide people without a future. For now, though, this is inverted: we are all without a present, living only for a future when things wont be like this. Were locked inside with our lives on hold. I can barely stand the stress of coming here, to Trader Joes. I stare out the window all day as I work, my only access to the outside world beyond this weekly trip to the grocery store.

This, for me, seems akin to queer childhood, growing up in tiny towns just living, just surviving, on the hope of growing old enough to leave.

For queer people, the life offered to us is never enough. And queerness isnt (just) who we sleep with; as feminist scholar bell hooks explains, queer as not about who youre having sex withthat can be a dimension of itbut queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent, and create, and find a place to speak, and to thrive, and to live.

Queer childhood is waiting for the possibility to beto makeones full self. Quarantine is putting the full possibility of social relationsone way to make oneself with otherson hold out of respect for the desire of living beings to keep on living.

In his book Image Control, Patrick Nathan argues that climate change is making us futureless, living at the end of the world as weve known it. A pandemic makes us live without a present, putting life on hold for the future when things will be better. No wonder 2020 presented such a challenge to us all, living without a present and understanding, too, the limits of our future.

When all we wanted to know was when will we be able toonce againgo outside without calculating probabilities of disease, death?

The basket of groceries digs into my hand. Its the liquids, I know: seltzer water, iced coffee concentrate, some beers, because nothing matters anymore at the end of the world. Theres no line to check out. I stand 6 feet, as best I can, from the nice woman running the register, number 17. She discovers that I teach at NYU, that I studied microbiology, and now she wants to talk.

What the fuck is going to happen? she asks.

I dont know, but its going to be like this for a while, I answer. How are you holding up? I ask.

Its not that bad, she says, and I look at her sideways. OK, fine. It is. But what else can I do? I nod, guilty for having put my body so close to hers. I pack my groceries into my massive camping backpack. I walk up the escalator, its empty, no one within 6 feet of me in any direction.

Staying inside is painful, its mentally exhausting, it... hurts. (The pleasure and pain of queerness are not a strict binary.) And yet, if we invert the mix of boredom and terror that is quarantine, we can understand it as a kind and generous act, one that gives us pride and, through pride, joy. By staying inside, Im caring for myself, yes, but also for this woman, an essential worker, worried about her own risk too.

The queerness of queer futurity... is a relational and collective modality of endurance and support. Being queer is a legacy and a history of care even in the face of systemic oppression, violence, murder, viral disease. Queer people have been training for this momentto sacrifice, in the face of a virus, to care for one another, and yet to never lose sight of pleasure, even when both the present and the future seem impossible. It is too much to ask of us. What choice do we have but to do it?

The first time I went down on a guy, my mind was doing math. One in 12,000 was the risk to contract HIV, I knew. Oh God, this is a mouthful, I thought. I was drunk, but my work as a scientist involved doing math even while inebriated. I didnt know what exactly it tasted like, but I sure knew I liked it. It tasted more like a body than anything Id had up until then. I didnt know why, but I grew hard at the tasting. I knew, too, that the virus, that virus, was poorly transmissible in any single act. Even bottoming (receptive anal sex) without a condom only had a 2 percent chance of seroconvertingmoving from the binary category of HIV-negative to the seropositive category of HIV-positive.

I wasI ama professional biologist. I did my postdoc, in part, in biostatistics. Long before I touched another man, Id gone to the CDC website and looked at a table of acts and percentages, calculated years ago.

My mind plots data without thinking about it, likelihoods over time. When it comes to viruses, I see curves of two types, one with time on the x-axis and a line on the y approaching 100 percent over time: the likelihood of being infected with a common human virus, like cytomegalovirus, or CMV, a part of human experience. Between zero and two years, we