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When I speak with Joe Osmundson via Zoom on June 30, the frustration in his voice is palpable. It’s the last day of pride month, he’s in the middle of a self-funded book tour for VIRUSOLOGYand history repeats itself – again. “It was really, really hard to be on a road trip for a book called Virology as yet another, quote unquote, emerging virus [monkeypox] it has a negative effect on queer people, including people I know very well,” says Joe. “It was incredibly painful to sit in meetings with people from the CDC, the federal government and the White House and again call for action while people were getting sick.”
Joe and I met a few years ago, before I knew what the words “global pandemic” really meant, at the Tin House Writers Workshop. I immediately started following him on Twitter and listening to his podcast, Food 4 Thot, getting to know him as a funny, kind, brilliant, quirky creative writer and scientist. When early 2020 alarms started sounding about a new coronavirus, I turned to Joe and his tweets. His channel maintained the appropriate level of concern about the harm the new virus could cause and the actions we can all collectively and individually take to mitigate that harm. He and the other scientists in his community seemed better equipped to lead society through a pandemic than the government or any of the people actually charged with helping us.
When the pandemic hit full force and then went (and on, and on, and on), Joe became my north star for factual information. Even though we’re not close friends, I DM’d him all sorts of questions. He always answered. The way he cares for other people is evident in all his works. His research into both viruses and queer history positions him perfectly to speak factually and candidly about bodies, viruses, and the ways in which the two interact; to borrow from the title of his book, he is literally an expert on “the living, the dead, and the little things in between.”
It was no surprise to me that Joseph Osmundson wrote the perfect book on the COVID pandemic. It is incredibly depressing that since its publication the book is more relevant than ever. “I’m a bucket of rage,” says Joe on the day we speak, just a month ago. “We’re all grateful to be in a place where we can advocate for our community … where we can push the levers of power to work faster, even when people are actively getting sick. But it was really painful to see the levels of inaction.”
He could have been talking about February 2020. But he wasn’t. He was talking about June 2022. He was talking about right now.
Virology: Essays on the Living, the Dead, and the Little Things in Between is an ambitious book that succeeds in its efforts to shed light on viruses with nonfiction, yes, but also to shed light on the messy realities of life with strange theories, travelogues, archival data, personal essays, and above all, bare honesty .
“Just looking back I can see the four pillars of the book,” says Joe, “which are scholarly writing, literary analysis, queer theory, and memoir. And just looking back, I can see what I was trying to say – that viruses, especially in this viral moment, are biological, but biology is not enough to really understand them… all these things together might actually allow us to let’s wrap our minds around these submicroscopic particles that are the most common things on planet earth. It can also kill us sometimes.
The book is made up of eleven essays, each of which weaves a different story related to virology: “At Risk,” “On Replication,” and “On the Virus” might seem like obvious titles for a book about viruses, but “In Personal Writing,” “On Mentors” and “On Whiteness” also find their places comfortably in the book. The hybrid nature of the text makes its messages vast and expansive; Joe’s ability to collaborate and analyze dense theory and make it relatable gives the book texture and layers that may surprise the casual reader or someone who picks up the book expecting a scholarly textbook. I think this is a welcome surprise.
“I’m a writer who, you know, if I didn’t make a certain type of reader uncomfortable, the book wouldn’t be successful,” Joe says. “I want to write a scientific paper from the point of view of a scientist who says, hey, scientists really do have sex. We are emotional people, doing science is emotional, we live in a biological world, but also a world that is more than biological. And all of this must be contained in the pages of scientific texts if we are to be honest about who we are and what we do.
When I asked Joe how this book came about, he said very simply, “The book was discovered every day through the writing and editing process.” He explains that he’s been writing about viruses—mostly HIV—for a decade, but when “the writing was on the wall’ in February 2020 regarding COVID, he was unable to write.
“I was just doing activism,” he explains, “because I felt the thing I could do was use my background in molecular biology and virology. We were in these rooms with city, state and federal health officials. It was the Trump administration. It was a very difficult political atmosphere… I loved being a resource for people, it made me feel good that I could help people understand what was going on. And my friend Alex Chee said, well, writing is an extension of that. You know, you don’t just have to help your friends, you can write and help people understand this moment who aren’t your friends. And then I started writing, in addition to activism.
Moe Crist, editor of Virology, reached over and asked if Joe had a book. Joe said, yes, a book about viruses, about COVID. No, counters Mo — not for COVID. About viruses. Honestly, maybe that’s why this book feels (at times, unfortunately) really timeless.
“And then we conceptualized the book with my agent at the time, with Mo and me, doing the collective thinking work,” Joe says. “It was a public project… My political belief is that no book is written by one person. There’s a name on the cover, but I really wanted to do something weird and break that kind of sole proprietorship. He is quick to point out his collaborators in this book: he co-authored the On War chapter with Patrick Nathan, he included the inner worlds and thoughts of his caranpod friends in the fragments of his COVID diary featured in On Private Writing, and one of my favorite chapters, “On Activism and Archives,” is drawn from a lot of archival material, including numerous conversations with Stephen D. Booth, a professional archivist and one of Joe’s dear friends.
And then there’s the Joe writing community. “Lacey Johnson suggested the order the essays are in,” he says. “She specifically suggested that the first essay of the book, as it now needs to be, be the first essay of the book. And so many readers have said that the essay represents the book perfectly, and it’s Lacey—it’s not me, not even my editor—who was so careful with every single word. So it’s really important to me to let that community of thinkers and creators be visible so that other people who write or younger people who write have the idea that this is the way books are made . There is no capitalist idea of a person crying in his room. I know some people do books that way, but I don’t and a lot of us don’t.”
Although Joe saw their book in the science section of a bookstore, they say it was also important to them that the book be located in its proper queer line as well. “I love weird science,” they say. “But I also want to make sure that the book exists in the legacy of queer theory from which it is built—in the legacy of contemporary queer essayists like Alexander Chee and Hilton Als, the legacy of the poetics of the 80s and 90s that the book is constructed from the poetics of people who have lived or lived around or very close to HIV and AIDS, the legacy of queer essayists like Audre Lorde and Susan Sontag, who write about bodies and illness from a very distinctly lesbian point of view. The book is in a literary line that doesn’t really involve a lot of scholarly writing. So not only should the book sit in the science section of the bookstore, but it should carry the science section of the bookstore into the heritage that gave me the tools as a writer to be able to do the work that I tried to do in the book.”
If there is a beating pulse behind every page, every sentence, every word in this book, it is the value of community care.
When Joe and I talk about life in general, about the ways his book can help us understand this moment (just as Alexander Chee suggested to him a few years ago), we get to how we both deal with the current realities of being alive right now. We compare our masking strategies, talk about exposures we’ve experienced, express disappointment that the government told everyone to stop wearing a mask on a plane. And then we talk about how challenging it can be to spend years avoiding a virus, really not wanting to get the virus, and then accepting the reality if you do get sick and finding ways to take care of yourself and for others around you without crashing when this is the case.
“It’s the mental gymnastics of being alive on a viral planet,” Joe says. “We are asked to live in an impossible world. To be alive in late capitalism, to be alive as so many of the structures we thought protected us are either being dismantled or shown to never have existed in the first place… it’s a tension. Living well on a virus-warming planet is too much to ask of any human being. Yet this is what our circumstances demand of us. So what are we to do but rise to these circumstances? We have ways we can use these circumstances to make life significantly different. Much better after us.”
I’m posting this piece almost a month after my first Zoom call with Joe; the monkeypox epidemic and the government’s response has not improved. It got worse. On Sunday, July 24, Joe tweeted: “The overall response of the queer community to monkeypox should be seen as an example to all. We led with demanding tests, vaccines and treatments. From May. When the government failed us, we came up with strategies to take care of each other even as we continue to stand up for each other. We were trained to work with HIV and COVID. And they worked SO HARD to help people who are sick and prevent more suffering. We are tired. But we show up.
I’m thinking about HIV, about COVID, about monkeypox. I think what viral outbreaks might happen next. I think about what it looks like to care for each other in difficult circumstances. I think of the living, the dead, and the little things in between. pick up Virology and I start reading Joe’s essays again. I want to learn how to live in an impossible world while building a better one with the people around me. I know that the lessons I need—the lessons we all need—exist in this book.
Virology: Essays on the Living, the Dead, and the Little Things in Between is out now.
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