Stephen Mcewen

An unwanted relation

In June 1981, the United States’ Centers  for Disease Control noted in its weekly report that five ‘previously healthy’ young men in Los Angeles had been treated for pneumonia. Two of them had died. On the other side of the country lived soon-to-be third grader Marco Roth, the son of a doctor and musician. Receiving an ‘experiment in nineteenth-century “middle-class” European education’, he was surrounded by classical concerts, classic literature and medicine in Manhattan. Oblivious to the fact that that summer’s bulletin included some of the first officially recognized deaths brought about by the AIDS epidemic, Roth was also unaware that his own father had been infected by the HIV virus at around the same time.

According to the ‘official’ version of events, recounted in the opening pages of his memoir The Scientists: A Family Romance, his father contracted the virus from a needle accident whilst taking blood from an infected patient. This truth remains unchallenged for the rest of his father’s shortened life, which Roth lives out with his ‘microscopic sibling, HIV,’ as the family maintains the secret of his father’s stigmatised condition. Domesticity is transformed as the family kitchen is full of magnified images of infected cells and stacks of medical reports, whilst his father slowly succumbs  in the living room , years before the advent of life-saving antiretroviral therapy.

Following his father’s death Roth attempts to move, both physically and mentally, away from the trauma of his adolescence. He charts his beginnings in academia, time in Paris desperate to meet Derrida, moving with his future wife to Oxford and fatherhood. This is interrupted when his novelist aunt writes her own memoir, in which doubt is cast over her brother’s sexuality and the manner in which the virus was most likely transmitted.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in