“And is that when you came out? In the Green Parrot?”
“Not quite. I was in Karlsruhe, in Germany. It was a wonderful time in my life. And I was a novelty to them. Americans were still exotic. They weren’t sick of us in Europe the way they are now. And the gay scene was very stylized. It blew me away totally. There was a strong distinction between macho men and effeminate men. Very clear-cut roles. A huge emphasis on leather. I was not into S&M, all that slavemaster stuff. Didn’t do anything for me. But I think Germany defined for me that it was the more masculine men that turned me on. My interest in effeminate men had been because it was easier to discern that they were gay. But it is the masculine look that turns me on. I could now see the cliques: leather, sweater, dykes, tykes, fag-hags or fruit flies—”
“Fruit flies?”
“—Women who hang out with gay men. But my most enlightening and exciting experience was in Amsterdam. I was seeing bars where I never felt I had to be furtive going in. The atmosphere of the bar spilled out into the street! I could be just as gay in the streets outside as in the bar! It was my first taste, in a sense, of gay liberation.”
The atmosphere of a bar spilling out into a street. I thought of the atmosphere of the Connection, which had little, at least as far as I could tell, of this exuberant spirit of liberation. Then I remembered the dancing at the Connection and at the bar in Boston I had wandered into—the men dancing, not in couples, but together as one entity, like a family or tribe. I could understand how someone would want to be part of that feeling, especially someone who had never really belonged to any group. Someone like Gordon who had left home looking for a place to feel truly accepted without having to hide.
“So that’s when you came out?” I asked Fred. “In Amsterdam?”
“No, not really. When I got to Wisconsin for my postgraduate work, I was so conditioned by what had happened in Florida—the incident with that girlfriend, my general secretiveness—and by what I had seen in Europe, that I swore in this new town I would never hide who I was. I got into gay liberation in a powerful way. There was an advertisement in the college paper: Gay Liberation Group Meets at . . . It was in a church somewhere. The group had been going for six months already when I got there. For its time, Madison was really advanced. This was, I think, the time just after the Stonewall riots, but I may be wrong.
“I called the contact number, and as it turned out the person who answered was someone I already knew from one of the gay bars in town! When I walked into the first meeting at the church, I already knew half the people there from the Rathskeller Student Union building where one corner had become an informal gay corner.”
“When you say ‘knew’ them, do you mean knew them sexually?”
Fred laughed and said, “Yes, in some cases.”
As Fred said this, the picture of a wheel came to my mind: In models of sexually transmitted disease, spread of infection among gay men is often depicted as a wheel. Aggressive contact tracing often establishes that there are multiple cross-links: The “index” case may have had contact with not only the next person in the chain but others farther along; a circle is formed. In a small town the circle is small; in New York City it is larger, but the circle still closes. Gaetan Dugas—identified as “Patient Zero” in Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On—the handsome, Air Canada flight steward, showed just how large the circle could be: At least 40 of the first 248 gay men diagnosed with AIDS in the United States had sex either with Gaetan or with someone who had. By contrast, heterosexual contact tracing resembles the spokes of a wheel: the wheel is so huge that it is practically infinite, with contacts leading linearly away from the index case. The AIDS virus took advantage of, and drew attention to, a level of sexual activity among an exclusive group of individuals in a way that no other sexually transmitted disease had done to that point.
Fred continued: “We called ourselves the Gay Liberation Front, the word ‘front’ designed to be offensive. And that was our mood. We had a great deal of consciousness raising. We brought in speakers. Some of the ‘speakers’ were really people we put on the hot seat. They had no idea what they were getting into. We had a psychiatrist who thought that he was being invited to convert us—this was a time when the American Psychiatric Association had just stopped listing homosexuality as a disease, but I think most straight psychiatrists were still into curing gay men. This guy got there and he didn’t know what hit him. We had some of the best minds on campus in the audience, and they just about mentally raped him, beat him to a pulp, figuratively speaking; he got away with his life.
“All of us were very young, we had tremendous revolutionary spirit—public protest and so on. We formed a corporation. It mutated several times and became the forerunner to the major gay group in Madison that I think still exists to this day.”
It was still not clear to me how Fred had wound up as an accountant for the Burley warehouses around Morristown.
“I was taking more and more psychology courses. To the degree that changes were happening in my psyche, I became more interested in the human aspects of science, less so in protein chemistry and DNA. I wound up with a degree in psychology.
“I returned to Tennessee. For the next five years I was a home manager at a learning center for disabled adults in Knoxville and I taught at a community college. It was a time when I stayed very active with the gay community—the Metropolitan Community Church in particular. I was a student minister, I worked on east Tennessee’s first gay newspaper, Pride Press. I was involved with a gay discussion group for people who were coming out: There was a kid one time whose father had him locked up in the basement when he told his parents he was gay. Well, we went and got him. Others had more in the way of psychological problems than that kind of a physical problem. I helped organize a Gay Cover Group—an umbrella group to bring all the smaller groups together.”
I could see now how Fred had gravitated toward TAP, why he spent his evenings running off to TAP meetings despite Otis’s disapproval. He had spent a lifetime training for the role of AIDS activist in Johnson City. The stakes had never been higher; his activism now had a clear focus. It would be his therapy, it would give him long life, it would greatly better the lives of persons infected with HIV in upper east Tennessee. Otis could object all he wanted to; but he had better realize that Fred needed to be involved in TAP for his psychic well-being, as much as I needed to be a physician for mine.
“But why did you come back to Morristown?” I asked. “Don’t you see how strange it is for someone as educated as you to return to a town of less than 40,000 people and be in an accounting business? Why not stay in Knoxville?”
Fred pondered this a while. “When I came back in 1983, I was ready for a rest. I was burned out. I had been an activist since 1973—a full-time thing. Every gay pride march, every gay this-or-that, I had to go. I was worn out, ready to live a calmer life. A quieter social life, and a quieter political life.”
“Were you prepared to hide your sexuality?”
Fred was silent again and when he answered he sidestepped the issue of returning to the closet.
“I was so glad to be back in Morristown—no traffic, no hassles, just a simpler existence. And it was less of an effort to blend back into the shadows than to always be projecting this militant gay image and dealing with the bad stuff that inevitably came with it.”
“Did your parents know you were gay by then?”
“Oh, yes! There was a week in Knoxville where I was going to be appearing on TV, Channel 2, for Gay Pride Week. I decided to tell my parents beforehand. I had this vision of my parents discovering Grandma facedown on the carpet, one hand on her chest and the other pointing to the television set! So I came down one weekend. It was when we were having family pictures taken, everyone was there: Bettie Lee, my brother-in-law. We were sitting around the living room, my father was sitting on a stool, my mother in the big armchair. And I told them.”
I was curious to hear how he told them, what words did h
e use? Did he say “gay” or did he say “homosexual”?
“I may have said ‘homosexual’ first and then moved to the word ‘gay.’ I didn’t want my mother to say when I said gay, ‘Oh, that’s nice, dear; I’m so glad you’re happy!’ I did it in my typical way, my cerebral way, if you will: I brought a lot of pamphlets and literature. I had a speech, or at least a plan of how I would word things. To my surprise everyone was calm. Bettie Lee was, of course, helping me along. My father said nothing and my mother was quietly crying.”
“Did she say why she was crying?”
“Because she worried for my safety. She was thinking of my physical safety, that I could get killed in Knoxville. And she was right, of course. But to this day I am amazed and in total admiration of my family’s resilience. My grandfather wrote to me and said: ‘I don’t understand, but will not condemn you.’ You’d have to know him. He was old Morristown stock, a big landowner, he was an extreme conservative. And my uncle . . . it didn’t bother him.
“So when I returned to Morristown for good, my family knew I was gay. I didn’t flaunt it any longer. But here I was, unmarried, in my thirties. And I’m sure quite a few people either knew or speculated about my sexual leanings.”
“How did you integrate?” I asked. “I know you are a regular church member; I have heard you mention choir practice on several occasions. Did you have any problems being accepted by the community?”
“Church is really important for me. Growing up, my parents thought church was important for us even if they didn’t go themselves. I was dropped at church every Sunday, and picked up after Sunday school.”
I was thinking back to my own childhood in Ethiopia. The church services of our small Christian Indian community were interminable and conducted in an ancient language, Syriac. My parents and the other Indian Christians in Ethiopia knew the liturgy by heart, it was what they had grown up with. And to stand together in an Ethiopian church that they rented, to worship together in a language that could be traced to St. Thomas and to Jerusalem, was an affirmation of who they were, a connection to a corner of India so far away from Africa.
But for us fidgety children the services were boring and sadistic—two hours of standing and listening to someone drone on in a language you do not understand is the surest way to dry up religion in a young child. When, years later, my brothers and I negotiated our own paths back to some form of religion, it was despite that childhood experience, not because of it.
Fred went on: “When I was in Wisconsin, I became involved in the Episcopalian Church. I liked it so well that I was confirmed. The people there tended to be intelligent, educated. I liked, the doctrine of the via media—the concept of a middle way. I could have a relationship with God, whatever I conceived Him to be. At the same time, in the evenings, I was involved with MCC—the Metropolitan Community Church.”
I had heard of MCC. It was formed by a Pentecostal minister, Troy Perry. He was thrown out of his church for being gay. After much soul-searching, he eventually founded MCC, now a huge international organization that has been admitted to the World Council of Churches. Perry had written a book, The Lord Is My Shepherd and He Knows I Am Gay.
“When I came back to Morristown,” Fred said, “there was an MCC group in Johnson City. But it was a long drive down on Sunday evening when I preferred to be at home. So I went to the Episcopalian Church in Morristown when I first got back—after all, I was a confirmed Episcopalian. But I was disappointed. They were very stodgy. And for a while they didn’t have a pastor. I thought of them as the ‘brooches, minks and morning prayer group!’ They had Communion rarely, mostly morning prayer. I missed the doctrine of Communion; it was very important to me. I didn’t go back for a long while. Then the Episcopalian Church got a new priest, an older fellow but with an unshakable belief in goodness, grace and God’s mercy. I went to meet him. I told him I was gay. Told him I wanted to be more of an activist, socially: outreach, helping the poor and all that. He encouraged me to get involved, but without telling the church members I was gay.”
“Why? And did you go for it?”
“His reasoning was that if I said I was gay, people wouldn’t get to know me before they voiced opposition. So that’s what I did: I went to choir, deacon’s committee, Church Society meetings.”
“Do you think you compromised your beliefs by coming back and taking on the role you did in your town?”
“No, I feel it was more a growth process than a compromise. I met with the pastor privately once a week. Even though he did not agree with my outlooks on sexuality, he did not believe it impaired my ability to be a Christian. He believed in me. My perseverance and his have paid off. He turned out to be right in terms of my not bringing up my gayness right off the bat so people could make an issue of it. For example, when I first joined the choir, I think there were some men who were fearful that I would grope them! That—”
“—But how did they know you were gay if you hadn’t told anyone?”
“Well, I had appeared on TV in Knoxville, on stations that are carried in Morristown. People knew. Or at least, some did. But then when I turned out to be a loyal, regular, reliable choir member and did not grope them, they became friends and supporters. The issue of my being gay became quite secondary. If anyone asks me, I will willingly tell them—that has never changed. And I can be anywhere, and if I hear someone tell a gay joke, I will tell them why it is not funny.” Here Fred gave a nervous laugh. “Except perhaps in the tobacco warehouse. There I let it go.”
WHEN WE STEPPED outside to our cars, ours were the only two vehicles in the parking lot. The house neighboring the clinic had giant sunflowers spilling over to the clinic parking lot. There were yellow jackets that congregated around these flowers and made parking here treacherous. My beeper had gone off twice in the last five minutes: both times the number displayed was my home number. Since I was on my way home, I did not call back.
I walked Fred to his car. “Look,” Fred said, stopping and pointing. A cardinal was perched on a fence post about ten yards from us, its handsome crest clearly visible against the sky. In the shadows it looked more black than red, but its silhouette and the large conical beak were distinctive. We stood and watched it, until, feeling our gaze, it flew away.
I shook hands with Fred. He headed in the direction of Market Street to catch 11E to Morristown.
As I pulled onto Lamont Street, heading home, I realized how unburdened I felt by Scotty Daws’s death. For the first time in a long time I could go home directly without going to the Miracle Center first to check on Scotty. My visits to him every morning and evening had felt like parentheses that hemmed me in, left me little room to breathe. I always felt like a prisoner in his room, standing next to his bed, up so close to his pain. I could not escape the idea of what was coming for Fred, for Vickie, for Clyde and the others. Not just death, but the path to death, a path that might be filled with the same suffering that I saw Scotty go through. Surely, Fred must have this same sense of something hanging over him, no matter how hard he tried to put it out of his mind. I was telling my patients that they must learn to live in the present moment, but I could not always heed my own advice.
Perhaps this was how it was destined to be, I thought as I pulled up into my driveway: long dry spells while Fred and others lived relatively healthily, then spurts of in-hospital activity.
OUR BABY-SITTER’S car was parked outside the house. Steven peered out of the dining room window. His head disappeared now, as he raced to the kitchen door so that he could greet me when I walked into the house.
Pulling in next to Mrs. Stokes’s orange Dodge Dart with its vinyl top reminded me why she was here: we were invited to dinner by an Indian family. I had promised, for once, to be home early. But the conversation with Fred had kept me.
I gathered Steven up, said hello to the baby who was in Mrs. Stokes’s arms, and headed up to shower and change. Rajani was in the living room, dressed in a sari, with all her jewelry on, looking gorgeous. S
he sat on the sofa, a magazine in her hand. She glanced up as I mumbled my apologies. She did not say a word to me, nor meet my eyes.
11
RAJANI AND I made our way to the party that was being held in the gym of a local school, the Ashley Academy. We were quite late.
The Ashley parking lot was full: a few Honda Civics, an abundance of Honda Accords, a few minivans, a few Acuras (a natural progression from an Accord), and one Mercedes-Benz were in the lot.
The Indian community in Johnson City was growing logarithmically. The new complement of interns and residents always included three or more Indians, most of them married, some with children. They were the friends, relatives or classmates of those who had gone through the ETSU residency program, people who now put them up, lent them the rule book to study for the Tennessee driving license exam, shepherded them to the Highway Patrol office to take the test, cosigned their loan for the Honda Civic, helped them find an apartment, instructed them on whether the vegetables were fresher at Kroger’s or Winn Dixies, and introduced them to the old-timers of Johnson City, like Rajani and myself.
Once the newcomers were settled, they expressed their gratitude by inviting their mentors and their mentors’ friends over for a grand dinner. The mentors, once newcomers themselves, now had moved one step closer to the inner stratum of the social circle. At its center were a patriarchal group of families who had been there before the medical school and before liquor-by-the-drink had come to town. They had been there when North Roan Street was the edge of town; they were there before the mall, the banks, the car dealers, and the little strip malls with their necklace of colorful awnings had arrived on North Roan. Like a water beetle, the new development on North Roan had sucked the life out of downtown, leaving only a carcass. The old-timers told us how beautiful and quaint downtown had been: the Majestic Theater, the Fountain Plaza. . . . Now it was an empty shell of a business area with a few boutiques displaying slope-shouldered mannequins in faded and dusty fashions from the fifties.
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