Humor Can Soothe AIDS Rage

Thank you for your outstanding article on “Healing Laughter” (Nov. 4).

I would like to add a couple of thoughts to the discussion about why AIDS humor at all, and why after all these years.

I am a gay man and have been working for the past five years at AIDS Project Los Angeles as a psychotherapist to people with AIDS.

The ghettoized gay community is entering a stage where illness, severe physical and material losses and death have stopped being “crises” in a person’s life the way they are to (others), but have become routine and normal. AIDS is a part of everyday life in a gay man’s life these days, if he lives a ghetto life in a big city.

What is abnormal and exceptional is a gay man who has not lost anyone to AIDS, who has not worried about catching a terminal illness while having sex, who is not worried about his health every time he sniffles or has a sore throat.

So AIDS and death and pain and loss are part of our daily routine. This being so, it is only natural and very understandable that we would want to include humor in our lives, including those areas of our lives that are AIDS-affected.

A second reason for the blossoming of humor is the significant increase of rage in the gay community. The losses to AIDS in our community, individually and collectively, have been accumulating for a whole decade. Some lingering pain remains unresolved from each individual loss, and also the sheer number and frequency of the multiple losses does not allow for the appropriate time and investment in dealing with that loss. The unresolved grief turns into rage, and the rage feeds the humor because humor is one of the most successful pacifiers of rage.

A last thought about why some people appreciate the humor and others don’t: Grief is a long, complicated process that manifests itself in highly individualized forms from person to person. There are stages in grief when humor is experienced as very obnoxious and there are stages where it is a vital, helping tool.

I suggest that this fact might explain the variety of people’s reactions to AIDS humor.

DINO KOUTSOLIOUTSOS

Los Angeles