The Way We Live Now

Yvonne offers a unique perspective in the story as a literal outsider. Her actions suggest a close kinship with the protagonist: She flies into town from London to visit him in the hospital (Paragraph 7). Because she is not part of his everyday community, she reflects on his social network from the perspective of an observer.

From Yvonne, the audience learns how people beyond the group are responding to the AIDS epidemic. Her description of the perception of AIDS and the treatment of those who are diagnosed in London is bleak. She suggests that AIDS patients there are social pariahs, quarantined from friends and loved ones who are afraid to share physical proximity with them. She calls the protagonist “fortunate,” because “no one is shunning him” (Paragraph 8), suggesting that this is the typical response to someone’s AIDS diagnosis. Her observations reveal that unlike the friends of the story, many people would be “afraid to hug [a person with AIDS] or kiss [them] lightly on the mouth” (Paragraph 8), despite the impossibility of transmission through such surface contact. This allows the other characters to view themselves in a superior light and captures the ostracism that patients with AIDS suffered in the early years of the disease due to popular misconceptions about how the illness was transmitted. The friends reject the assertion that they are “cool and rational” for understanding the transmission of AIDS and their own risk, but Yvonne insists that they have established a “beautiful” “utopia of friendship” (Paragraph 8). The character’s reading of this situation as a “utopia” without critiquing the shunning of AIDS patients presents this marginalization as an understandable response to the disease.

Betsy is a friend of the protagonist. Although she positions herself as one of “the inner circle,” she is insecure in her social standing; she complains to Jan that she believes that the protagonist is “keeping a tally” of visitors and that others are “jockeying for position around the bedside of the gravely ill” (Paragraph 9). She admits that she is “suffused with virtue at our loyalty to him” and believes everyone else is, too, but laments that her actions and attentions don’t appear to be as favored as the attention of others (Paragraph 9).

As an apparently straight woman, Betsy vocalizes views that were commonly expressed in the US in the 1980s. She defends heteronormative concepts of marriage and family when she describes a spouse or children as occupying places in a hierarchy that “no one would dare contest” (Paragraph 9). Betsy relies on traditional systems of powers to define her space. She views familial hierarchies as less clear in a queer chosen family such as the protagonist’s, and her assertion demonstrates her belief that family units led by a mother and a father are superior for their recognizable structure, while queer families are rooted in more tenuous relationships. When familiar power structures, such as families, are upended, people like Betsy are shaken because they no longer know where they belong.

She is representative of a common archetype: a friend who vocalizes support and offers advice but also blames the protagonist for his present health crisis. This moralizing is evident, for example, when she says, “He must feel awfully foolish now […] like someone who went on smoking, saying I can’t give up cigarettes, but when the bad X-ray is taken even the most besotted nicotine addict can stop on a dime” (Paragraph 11). Thus, she diminishes the protagonist’s sexuality to an action of ill-advised overindulgence and defines his sexual behavior as an addiction that is even more powerful than nicotine. Believing his actions are solely responsible for his diagnosis, Betsy holds herself separate from the protagonist and relishes the opportunity to feel superior for making choices that are different from his.