He Stood Alone

On September 8, 1990, flanked by her parents and lawyer, Kimberly Ann Bergalis, a 22-year-old waitress and college student, held a press conference to publicly announce she had been diagnosed with AIDS. Her mother, a nurse, had noticed Kimberly’s failing health when the girl returned home from college and insisted that she get a full health panel. When the results came back positive for HIV, Kimberly—who maintained that she was a virgin—surmised that her dentist, David J. Acer, had infected her when he removed her molars two years earlier. Acer’s quiet life as a bachelor and his increasingly visible physical deterioration caused much chatter in the conservative coastal town of Stuart, Florida.

“What we’ve gone through is an injustice,” Kimberly said during the press conference. Abetted by her high-powered lawyer, she sued Acer’s practice and insurance company and won nearly $1 million in damages. Three months before her death in December 1991, she traveled by train to Washington, D.C., to testify before a congressional panel convened to debate a bill mandating HIV testing for all health care workers. (The bill eventually stalled.) At every turn, Kimberly and her team emphasized her innocence while national and local media capitalized on her tragic story. “I did not do anything wrong,” Kimberly said from the witness stand, her weakened body in a wheelchair, “[and] yet I am being made to suffer like this. My life has been taken away.”

In contrast, David Acer, and the particulars of his life, had disappeared in the swirl of events much earlier. He had died from complications related to Kaposi’s sarcoma on September 3, 1990, at age 40, just days before Bergalis went public with her AIDS diagnosis. A closeted bisexual who had sought HIV treatment under an alias in neighboring towns, Acer was accused of spreading the virus to Bergalis and, later, to five other patients. (Whether he actually infected them remains unknown.)

Scrutinized by the same media apparatus that upheld Bergalis as a paragon of innocence, Acer was branded a villain who intentionally infected his patients to get revenge against the unresponsive medical bureaucracy in the United States. Years of investigation at the local and federal levels, multiple changes to CDC recommendations regarding HIV transmission risks, and a slew of spurious claims by detractors and defenders alike muddled Acer’s story. There are still no definitive answers as to how his patients contracted AIDS; to date, these cases remain the only documented instances of transmission in a dental setting.

Thirty years after Acer’s death, the poet Steven Reigns set out to humanize the maligned dentist in a book-length documentary poem titled A Quilt for David (City Lights, 2021). Reigns—who is also a scholar of Anaïs Nin and previously worked as an HIV/AIDS testing counselor and maintains a private practice as a psychotherapist—researched the Bergalis case for more than a decade. He pored over court records and traveled to the Florida coast to interview those close to Acer, piecing together a portrait of a man torn apart in the public record by histrionic and homophobic tabloid media.

The result is neither a satisfying conclusion to a sordid and tragic moment in recent American history nor a particularly clear sketch of Acer. Instead, this catalogue of Reigns’s good intentions limns the contours of what HIV/AIDS poetry in the United States must still contend with some 40 years after the virus appeared: how should artists approach a disease that disproportionately affects the marginalized and continues to thrive on shame? What are the risks—and consequences—of aestheticizing a subject so riven by politics, and how does the documentary form attempt to mitigate these risks?

***

In its apotheosis, the poet Philip Metres writes, the documentary poem “withstands the pressure of reality to remain a poem in its own right,” irreducible to topicality and staunchly positioned “between language of evidence and language of transcendence.” In the early years of the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis, American poets found themselves at a similar crossroads. As the critic Sam Huber argued in a recent essay for the Yale Review, the two paths for poets responding to the epidemic were to be resolutely militant, as Essex Hemphill or Paul Monette were, or to retreat inward into contemplative verse, as John Ashbery and Thom Gunn did.

If these two modalities diverge in their response to the epidemic, each nonetheless acknowledges the fact of the crisis, whose impacts reverberate in these poets’ verse. The compounding forces of governmental inaction, weak medical messaging, and homophobic mass media left thousands of queer, trans, and poor people to die, many of them alone. Although Bergalis was lauded for her efforts to protect others by insisting on wider awareness of HIV, gay men were treated with suspicion and contempt. Consider, for instance, the case of Gaëtan Dugas, a French-Canadian flight attendant accused of being “Patient Zero,” the first to spread the disease in the United States. Presaging the work that he did for Acer, Reigns dedicated a poem to Dugas in his first collection, Inheritance (2011), in which he writes of his yearning to know the “man with only one public photo,” a man who “was responsible / for the deaths of my friends.”

The facts told a different story: Dugas did not introduce HIV to the United States; the virus was present in the country in the 1970s (and perhaps as early as 1969), more than a full decade before Dugas’s blood was sampled in 1983. However, his promiscuity and sexuality made him an easy scapegoat, particularly in journalist Randy Shilts’s bestseller And the Band Played On (1987). Shilts’s editor Michael Denneny later admitted that he had encouraged the author to sensationalize Dugas’s role to sell more books.

Recognizing the danger of narratives that unfairly impugn gay men, Reigns eschews such editorializing. “Every detail in this book is based on fact,” he writes in his introduction to A Quilt for David. “I decided not to use poetic license to avoid adding fiction to a story already loaded with misinformation.” At stake in Reigns’s project is an urgent desire to resurrect a version of Acer stripped of these biases; what limits the poet is the scant biographical information available, leaving Reigns to fill in the gaps with muddled information about Acer’s accusers. Reigns conveys the details of Acer’s life in a measured tone, parceling out just the facts: Acer graduated from Ohio State as part of an accelerated class in 1974; he then joined the U.S. Army and was stationed in Germany. Many of these facts are epistles addressed directly to Acer:

You bought the nicest house on Alameda Way, the street name Latin for ambitious. Furnished it with modern American furniture, sheer curtains, a full-size pool table, played Yes’s Owner of a Lonely Heart on the stereo, and fenced the backyard. Got a pilot’s license, ski boat and truck to pull it, and a tennis club membership. If you weren’t going to have a partner, weren’t going to have a family, you were going to create one.

These vignettes help substantiate a person the media described as quiet and shy, seemingly benign traits that marked Acer as suspicious once his seropositive status was disclosed. Reigns relates an anecdote about Acer at a Christmas party: “You stood alone, watched the ice cubes melt in your plastic cup.” Acer’s colleagues later recounted such ordinary behavior as antisocial, evincing his “wanting to be a part of the crowd, and not knowing how.”

Reigns is more effective—and Acer most fully fleshed out—when poems venture toward the visceral and intimate, as in a description of the hepatitis B Acer contracted in the Army (“Dark muddy brown urine”) or a description of how Acer used dental tools to cauterize a wound in his own mouth (“Red hot electrical heat on wet tissue”). Though bodily effects of opportunistic infections are common across HIV/AIDS patients—consider Reginald Shepherd’s descriptions of Kaposi’s sarcoma in his 1992 poem “Kindertotenlieder”: “harsh syllables pronounced / across the skin, the purple lesions almost / hyacinth”—these generic details paradoxically help Acer emerge as an individual made of sinew and blood rather than a literary site of projection.

Readers can look to Acer’s own words to aid this emergence, which Reigns includes in the introduction but, regrettably, not in the poetry itself. A few days before Acer died, his hometown paper, the Stuart News, published an open letter he had written from his deathbed. The letter reassures his patients that he took all precautionary measures but encourages them to get tested. As Reigns admits, these are the only words he can attribute to Acer, but they poignantly mark the frustrations of fighting homophobia and HIV discrimination. “I am a gentle man,” Acer wrote, “and I would never intentionally expose anyone to this disease. I have cared for people all my life, and to infect anyone with this disease would be contrary to everything I have stood for.”

***

If the task of the documentary poet is to bring to the surface voices repressed or forgotten in the annals of history, the political and aesthetic dimensions of this poetry are embedded in form and genre. In writing histories of the transatlantic slave trade, the scholar Saidiya Hartman pioneered a form she calls “critical fabulation,” complementing facts with fictional narrative to “imagine what cannot be verified” because of gaps in the historical record. Like documentary poetics, the aim of critical fabulation is to aid in a more expansive understanding of historical events and to help readers see more clearly the stakes of how written history reflects the ideologies and biases of those who wield power. Responding to the question of why he chose poetry as a form, rather than, say, an investigative article or a nonfiction narrative, Reigns insists that because the public’s sympathetic response to Bergalis was emotional, poetry, the “language of our emotions,” is an apt form for the task of generating sympathy for Acer.

Part of the challenge Reigns faces is exactly that of form. Lamenting that Bergalis has “four panels, photos, and a large starfish” in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, Reigns offers, in a second-person address, to do the same for Acer: “sew you into that larger quilt because / no one else has.” That ambition—to memorialize a man defamed by homophobic slander and biased reporting—is laudable, but in restricting himself to the spare facts of Acer’s life, Reigns struggles to lift Acer above the fray of a sordid media spectacle and contextualize him within the broader fabric of those who lost their lives to HIV/AIDS. Save for a few anecdotes of Acer’s kindness that Reigns relays in the introduction (he donated his extra theater tickets; he gave discounts on dental work), Acer’s life shrinks in the face of substantially more reported evidence about his accusers, making him a difficult fit for Reigns’s documentary mode. Instead of becoming fully human, Acer becomes a kind of background, however haunting, to the story of his patients.

In an interview with Chael Needle for A&U Magazine, Reigns acknowledges that he has “tremendous empathy” for all involved, including Bergalis, and that to think otherwise would be to capitulate to the very mechanisms of shame that burden seropositive people today. That empathy, however, is belied by the seemingly sarcastic tone Reigns often takes when discussing the hypocrisy of Bergalis and Acer’s other accusers. Reigns states that though Bergalis maintained in press statements that she was a virgin, she “later gave video testimony she had had oral sex, refuting her earlier testimony. / What other things had she lied about?” In another poem, Reigns zeros in on Bergalis’s statement in her testimony that she did “nothing wrong,”: “She didn’t do anything wrong. / She did with that man, with other men,/ what lovers do, she explored the / pleasures of the body. The clit has more nerve / endings than a fingertip.” Rather than pursue a nuanced understanding of how the weaponization of chaste femininity impacted public opinion, Reigns instead steers readers toward speculation that verges on misogyny.

The bluntness with which Reigns communicates such details, if indeed intended for emotional effect, stultifies contemplation rather than encourages it, and these instances are rife throughout the volume. In a poem describing another of Acer’s accusers, 18-year-old Sherry Johnson, Reigns quotes Johnson’s mother’s statement that Acer had “chosen a lifestyle that put him / at risk but didn’t give my daughter that choice”—a statement whose loaded words (lifestyle) certainly drip with homophobic rancor. In the following lines, Reigns counters by pointing out Sherry’s hypocrisy: “Sherry made her own choices. At her diagnosis, / she already had six sex partners. / Five of them tested negative. / The sixth couldn’t be found.” In other instances, Reigns opts for more speculation when facts are difficult to cite. Discussing Bergalis’s job as a waitress at the Pelican Yacht Club, he notes that “A busboy worked there, thought / to have AIDS. We don’t know / how Kimberly treated him. Did she avoid him / out of fear, overtip out of sympathy, or / flirt with the ultimate bad boy?” ending the verse with “Maybe the yacht club was where Kimberly learned / how the infected were treated.”

Laying bare the hypocrisy of the media circus surrounding Acer’s case, Reigns misdirects his frustration and ire at individual figures such as Bergalis and Johnson, young women who had to stifle, dampen, or even lie about their sexual activity to fit the contours of the “perfect victim.” In turn, this volume leaves unexplored Reigns’s own ambivalence and curiosity about these figures—attitudes that necessarily contextualize the motivation to know Acer. Reigns’s discomfort with, and skepticism about, the motivations of Acer’s accusers may be more difficult to translate or fit into an empathetic portrait of the dentist, but the legacy of HIV/AIDS requires more than just a commitment to a neat narrative limned by available facts. Rather, what’s necessary is a recognition of how enduring biases ruptured the distinction between fact and fiction in the early years of HIV/AIDS.

Part of what makes Reigns’s project an interesting, if ultimately frustrating, aesthetic exercise is that it is fueled by a sense of injustice and is cognizant of the conditions that constrained the 1980s and early 1990s—homophobia and a lack of reliable information chief among them. The writer Sarah Schulman, one of the many champions of Reigns’s book, alongside David Trinidad, CAConrad, and Andrew Holleran, notes in her praise that “hypocrisy coheres communities by relying on cliches of femininity, bias, and repressive loyalties.” Excavating these clichés and conditions, Reigns’s fixation on individuals keeps him from eviscerating his declared target: the institutions and systems that failed Acer and that continue to fail queer people today. And as journalist and novelist Tim Murphy has written, the emphasis on exceptional cases like Bergalis’s reifies categories such as guilty and innocent, categories that must be done away with to eradicate the stigma that still lingers around the virus.

“There are no sure things. / No one comes out clean./ Everyone feels cheated,” Reigns writes in the final lines of his collection. In attempting to uncover the true David Acer, Reigns offers one way of relating individual lives touched by HIV/AIDS to the still-rampant societal biases that limit them. Could it be possible for contemporary HIV/AIDS poetry to also situate the crisis as a catastrophe that implicates every single person, regardless of seropositive status? To repeat an old Marxist koan, it is history that hurts, that atomizes us, shaping our understanding of the present. The task at hand is to use this understanding to collectively narrate the future.