The Herpes Joke: An Analysis

Here's what happened the first time someone told a herpes joke, around me, after I knew I had herpes:

Location: a stage, pre-show.

Characters: various backstage professionals, including the Flyman (Bob), and the Production Assistant (yours truly), and one actor (Sugar Ray) doing vocal warmups.

Tensions are a little tight between Bob and the PA, as tensions can sometimes be between two departments that function together on a show, but have no clear lines of hierarchy between them. For the most part, Bob and PA make the best of this, although there are, occasionally  spats. The PA is relatively new at her job, and Bob has been in the business a long time. As a result, the PA is often unsure of herself, and frustrated with how little she seems to know; Bob, alternatively, like to demonstrate how much he knows at every conceivable opportunity.

Lights up. The stage is busy with four of five people walking across it from time to time, carrying furniture, checking lights above their heads with tiny palm pilots, etc. BOB enters, vacuum in hand, slightly before THE PA, who enters holding a clipboard.

BOB: Fucking events. I hate fucking renting this fucking place for events.

PA: Yup. They fucked with a bunch of the props too.

BOB: Ah man. You roped 'em off?

PA: I did... Yup, the whole section. Bright green gaff, big sign "DO NOT TOUCH." Maybe that makes it too interesting. Might do better with no sign at all. Was it kids, this weekend?

BOB: Yeah. Some kind of elementary cultural thing. Lots of fucking glitter.

PA: Fuck.

BOB: Yup. Theater herpes, whoohoo!

The PA looks at him, and then quickly at the floor. Bob notices nothing, and turns on the vacuum.

BOB: (yelling over the noise of the vacuum) Have a good weekend, Sugar?

SUGAR RAY: (also yelling) Yup, yup. Whatchoo vacuuming for?

BOB: An event over the weekend - they used lots of glitter.

SUGAR RAY: (looks at the floor) Ah, yup yup.

BOB: Fucking herpes of the theater, man. Once you got it, you got it, and it spreads like that (snaps his fingers).

Bob pushes the vacuum a few more strokes as we see the PA walk quickly back across the stage one more time, carrying a mirror and hand towels. As she gets to BOB, she stops, and just as he turns off the vacuum, she speaks.

PA: (yelling, loudly, although there is instantly no more vacuum): CAN WE CUT IT OUT WITH THE HERPES JOKES PLEASE.

Silence.

The PA walks offstage. BOB and SUGAR RAY watch her leave, say nothing. Bob turns on the vacuum again. Blackout.

Needless to say, I was pretty hurt. I tried not to show it much, and basically failed. I didn't want to make a big deal about it, because we were at work, and I wasn't sure it was appropriate, or more so, I wasn't sure I wanted to deal with the fallout. But I said something because I had to say something, and there was (as there usually is) fallout (Bob and I had a conversation that involved a non-apology apology, and he avoided me for a while).

And those are basically the two things at odds whenever someone makes a joke like that, I think: the importance of my hurt (and by extension, how I might mend that hurt according to my beliefs and values), and the importance of propriety.

I haven't really learned to handle it much better, to the point where, most of the time, I just let it go. Which is... sucky. And not really holding with my personal philosophies about sex positivity, or life, or anything. So, here's where I'm stuck, and maybe telling you why I'm stuck will help unstick me (as it often does).

Options for responses to herpes jokes:

1. The Outing: fairly straightforward, I-have-herpes-please-don't-make-those-jokes-in-front-of-me statement. And even without the first part, I always feel it's sort of obvious (why would I ask you not to make those jokes if it didn't matter to me in some intrinsic way; the herpes-ally isn't really a thing, or if it is, I don't think other people think it is).

Pros: I feel better for having spoken up, the irking behavior (usually) stops.

Cons: I'm outed, or at least outed as being "sensitive," or "easy to offend." There's also often a long an obnoxious conversation involving various versions of "I didn't man anything by it," and "I wasn't trying to offend." (my response to which is, most of the time "I totally understand - it still did/you still did, and I'd like you to take responsibility for that, just as I can acknowledge that your actions weren't motivated by malice, and weren't intended to hurt someone."

2. The Silent Partner, or, I Say Nothing.

Pros: I don't have to deal with any of the above.

Cons: I don't get to deal with any of the above, and I feel bad about myself, usually for a few days afterwards.

3. Joke-for-Joke, or, Anything You Can Do I Can Do Smarter: in which, when a herpes joke and/or inappropriate reference is made, I come back with a rebuttal that's both funny, and also points out how sort of fucked up it is to make those kinds of jokes. Something like:

"Hehe, fucking theater herpes - it gets everywhere!"

"Yeah! And hey: ninety percent of people who have it don't know they have it! Have you checked whats in your pants lately? Never know..."

That's not the best example, but something like that.

Pros: If the person gets it, they get both that the joke they made was ignorant and inappropriate (and sort of inaccurate, maybe), and they get to save social face, because nobody has to directly confront what's going on.

Cons: Sometimes people don't get the second joke, at which point you're stuck with options #1 or #2, again.

My favorite, by far, is #3. I've never really pulled it off.

But wait, dear reader. You might find yourself saying "but herpes isn't that bad! so jokes about it aren't that bad!" or, "in making it out like these jokes are terrible, you're painting a profile of herpes that's terrible, which it isn't really, and you're sort of undermining the whole point you're making with these incessant blog posts about STDs."

And I agree with you. A little bit.

I came around to all this because, the other weekend, a friend of mine (who doesn't know I have herpes - not that that should matter, really) made a herpes joke. We were sitting around, watching a high school volleyball game (like you do when you live in an unbelievably remote place and that is what there is to do on a Saturday afternoon), and someone passed a man we were sitting with a soda. He hesitated before drinking it, and my friend said "Oh, don't worry, his herpes is all cleared up." Everyone laughed.

In my logical brain, there are two things that make this difficult:

1) This friend of mine who made the joke is an excellent person. She's sex-positive, open-minded, accepting, non-judgmental. She likes me, and she likes my partner. Something from here wouldn't, I believe, ever be malevolent.

2) On the inside, deep down where things are most true, I know that herpes isn't really that bad. I haven't had an outbreak in... six months? (knock wood). Most days, I don't think about the fact that I have it.

Combining these two things (lack of bad intention, and trust of the joke-maker; as well as internal knowledge and security), there's really no reason for me to feel bad about this joke. No reason at all.

Except that I did. Terribly. Sitting there, in the high school gym, with the few friends I do have in this place, I felt like someone had dropped my gut out from under me, partly because it was my friend making this joke. Partly because she is one of the only people within a thousand miles who I know, let alone who I like and who likes me (I'm talking, count on your fingers here, folks. A thousand miles, and I've got... maybe five people who I could tolerate, and who could tolerate me, for the length of time it takes to eat a meal).

And the reason for the feel-bad, I think, is the same reason rape jokes aren't acceptable, even when they're made in a comedy club, by a lady comedian, on the ever-sacred-anything-goes-stage-of-modern-comedy (not that I'm equating the herpes and rape, at all; they are not the same, they are not the same, they are not the same). It's the reason why racist jokes are shitty even when they're made by "people who have lots of black friends and stuff." It's because the jokes themselves, no matter who tells them or who hears them, are based on a narrative that's shitty. They represent shitty things, and in telling them, those shitty things are given credence, period.

My friend's joke was based on this assumption: having herpes is bad enough, and rare enough, that the idea of almost-getting it from something as benign as drinking a soda is funny (which is doubly hilarious, to me, because people get herpes from sharing drinks a lot, in real life). And that's a shitty assumption. My friend is not a bad person, and I am not overly sensitive, but the assumption that herpes is bad enough, or that the social stigma around having herpes is legitimate enough to make that joke funny: this is why it's not an okay joke.

I don't have to be uptight for it to not be an okay joke, and my friend doesn't have to be a bad person to have made a not-okay joke. But it's still a not-okay joke, and I still sat there, and waited until the nausea died down, and waited until my face stopped flushing, and watched high schoolers slap a volleyball back and forth across the gym until I could swallow enough to talk and re-join the conversation.

Because this shit makes me feel bad. Period.

So how am I going to handle it in the future? I don't know. I think things like people declaring they have herpes (as my friend did on twitter last year) helps, reading things like this post and this post helps. But what will I do in the moment? I don't know. Work on better #3 rebuttals. Get smarter, get better at talking about it. And, probably, come here to write more. Because the writing at least helps with the feeling better about it. Sort of like, in the early days, saying it out loud and calling it by it's name.

All together now: herpes! herpes! herpes!