You can’t contract HIV from swimming in the same pool as someone who has been diagnosed with AIDS. Sure, that’s common knowledge now, but in the late 1980s when Mike Sisco, an openly gay man known to be HIV-positive, made national headlines after attempting to take a dip in his community pool in West Virginia, the entire country panicked, proselytized and prayed.
So little was known about this mysterious “gay disease” then that it’s easy to imagine the coy homophobia and rampant paranoia laced throughout Terrence McNally’s “Lips Together, Teeth Apart.” It’s the Fourth of July on Fire Island — Long Island’s upscale answer to the bawdy revelry of Key West, Fla. — and Sally has inherited her brother’s immaculate beach house after his AIDS-related death. She and husband Sam invite Sam’s sister and her husband away for a peaceful and relaxing holiday, but naturally, everyone has packed their own baggage. No one will go in the pool, and with so many secrets swirling among the four of them, it’s a volatile Independence Day that produces fireworks of a more emotional variety.
