Love is the opposite of hygiene. As a small example, I have two cats, and roughly every few months, one of them has some kind of horrible poop accident. Because I have chosen to have pets, this is unavoidable. I have chosen to love something, which is another way of saying I have chosen to clean up poop with my hands. Having a pet drives home how much caring for another living thing is incompatible with cleanliness; animals are disgusting. But people are disgusting, too. Romantic love and familial love are also about making a promise to clean up someone else’s poop, if it comes to that. Perhaps in less stressful times, it’s possible to fool yourself into believing that romance is not like cleaning a litter box, but in a moment when everyone is encouraged to be hypervigilant about personal hygiene, it is harder not to notice that love is intensely, physically disgusting. We are all far more porous than we can conceive of. Love means getting our hands dirty figuratively, but also literally, and we are in a moment when the most important thing for all of us to do is to keep our hands clean. It seems unavoidable that this will strain our relationships with the people in our space, especially if self-quarantine drags on for weeks or months.

Historically, epidemics, especially those involving quarantines, have placed huge burdens on intimate relationships, and the transmission of infectious disease within households has often been used to scapegoat the most vulnerable people. The 1860s and ’70s in New York saw multiple epidemics, including typhoid, typhus, and cholera. In these epidemics, poor and immigrant families were often blamed and seen as a threat, depicted as the carriers of disease, according to David Rosner, the co-director of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University. When quarantines were enforced, they were often applied punitively to these communities, putting intense strain on familial relationships.“This led to, within the family, both a fear of disease but also [people] beginning to hide disease in order to make sure that no one identified you or your loved ones as being sick,” Rosner said. “It plays into this very deep anxiety about what disease represents that lives in the social realm as much as in a medical or environmental realm.”

Comparisons to the still-ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis abound on Twitter and elsewhere at the moment. The impulse to map this epidemic onto our current situation is one worth resisting. For many reasons—first and foremost given the burden on and stigmatization of queer communities both historically and today—it is not necessarily instructive or fair to make a one-to-one comparison between COVID-19 and the pre-antiretroviral era of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and ’90s. But stigmatization and racism are certainly present in this epidemic as well, in ways that echo, if not parallel, both the HIV/AIDS crisis and the epidemics of the 1860s and ’70s in New York. Steven Thrasher, a professor of journalism and scholar of HIV/AIDS at Northwestern University, talks about reactions within communities in the early 1980s. “In the community more broadly, gay people largely took care of each other,” he told me, “but I think one of the dynamics that was similar to what we’re seeing today—except it’s global now—was that all gay people were afraid and all gay people were at risk, and so as more and more people got sick it became harder and harder for them to take care of each other.”