Plague Years

by Ross A. Slotten, MD

  Out of the Closet and into the Fire (Before 1983)

  In early March 1985, less than a year after I had completed my training as a family physician, my ex-lover Art called our office because he had diarrhea. Although Art was Tom’s patient—I’d referred him—pink slips with messages from all of our patients were posted on a board in the lab area that both of us could see. When I read this one, I didn’t think twice about the complaint. As long as I’d known him, Art had had an obsession with his bowels. It wasn’t unusual for him to have five or six loose stools a day. But in April he began to ask for Lomotil, a potent antidiarrheal agent that contains a small dose of an opiate, a distant relative of heroin. Soon he was calling several times a week to refill his prescription.

  When he came to the office for a checkup in May, two years had passed since I’d last seen him. His face looked gaunt and his clothes hung loosely on his frame, but except for the diarrhea, he said that he felt well. He still sported a thick, trimmed mustache, but his hair had thinned into a tonsure. Oversized glasses framed the blue eyes that had attracted me to him originally. I gave him an obligatory hug and exchanged brief pleasantries, as if nothing more intimate had ever passed between us. In that fleeting moment, all memories, good and bad, vanished. After he entered the exam room and the door closed behind him, some of those memories and others from my past flooded back.

  I’d met Art in the fall of 1978 at Alfie’s, one of the hottest gay bars in Chicago, on Rush Street a few blocks west of the Northwestern medical school campus. Although fashionable today in the 2000s, in the late 1970s and early 1980s Rush Street had some of the raunchiest bars and clubs in the city. It attracted tourists and the hoi polloi. During the day the building looked abandoned; it came to life at night. Sometimes I’d circle Alfie’s a few times until I worked up the nerve to go in. Feeling full of shame, I looked in every direction to make sure no one from the medical center was there to recognize me. It was a ridiculous precaution: only another gay man—or someone wishing to harm a gay man—would venture to Alfie’s.

  Because of persistent prejudice and hostility, many gay bars had no windows, and doormen guarded the entrances to keep out gay-bashers. The thick door at Alfie’s barely muffled the thumping disco music, and the scent of cigarette smoke seeped out. Inside it was dark, smoky, and deafening. Most men went to bars to hook up with someone, but I wasn’t looking for anonymous sex. I went hoping to find a long-term partner. I hated cruising, which meant standing in a corner or against a wall making eye contact with the hundreds of men who streamed by. The ear-shattering music killed casual conversation; you had to shout into someone’s ear to be understood, and that kind of verbal exchange didn’t last long. To distract myself and disguise my nervousness, I would sip a beer without gusto. Often I went home alone and disappointed.

  It had taken me a few painful years to get even to this point. Back when I had grappled with the academic requirements to get into medical school, I was also grappling with my sexual identity. I wasted a good deal of my college years at Stanford University, from 1972 to 1976, in varying states of confusion about who or what I was. Several friends have told me that they knew they were gay, even as young children. In high school I had no doubt that I was attracted to women. I had a girlfriend. We made out. Years later I learned that she was a lesbian. That conviction about being heterosexual (the terms straight and gay hadn’t entered my vocabulary) persisted in college until my senior year.

  My roommate that year was a tall, handsome African American man named Neal, who was flamboyant, extroverted, and self-confident, my opposite on the personality scale. We met on day one in our dorm’s lounge when we were asked to select roommates during an introductory meeting. He zeroed in on me, perhaps because of gaydar—that innate sense gay men have about others who might be gay but don’t yet know it—and I didn’t resist because he was charismatic. At first I worried that his wardrobe, like his personality, would overwhelm mine. But we turned out to be a perfect match, like Felix and Oscar from the odd couple, and equally humorous. When listening to a song by Chaka Khan or some other black pop singer who meant nothing to me (my musical tastes were strictly classical at the time), he’d amuse me by wagging a finger to make a point or lip-synching lyrics. We’d talk long into the night about everything, from coursework to what it was like to be a black student on a mainly white campus to the antics of our housemates. The one subject we skirted was sexuality. Neal hinted at his proclivities but, uncertain of mine, remained evasive about his sex life. But he loved to, as he said, “par-tay.” He’d go out on the weekends somewhere and return high or drunk. I suspect that he spent a lot of time in San Francisco, and he would have regaled me with stories had I asked. I didn’t ask. And I didn’t “par-tay.” On a Saturday night you’d find me in a library, studying.

  Years later, Neal told me that he was the first to point out to my girlfriend, Chris, that I might be gay since we never progressed beyond the half-dressed phase, much to her frustration. He also revealed to me the breadth of gay life on campus while we’d been at Stanford. On his telling almost everyone was gay, which was an exaggeration, but he startled me when he listed the names of gay students, administrators, and faculty members with whom I had frequently associated. It was a Proustian underworld in which all the characters you thought you knew revealed themselves to be something entirely different. Decades later, I now wonder how many of these men survived the coming conflagration.

  Since I completed my premedical requirements only during my senior year (I’d wandered academically, obtaining a degree in classics before one in biology), I had to delay entry into medical school until the fall of 1977. For nine months I worked in a lab at the Stanford Medical Center for a pediatrician who researched the effects of a virus called CMV (cytomegalovirus) on newborn babies. During that time I shared a house in Palo Alto with Bill, a fellow classics major, and his friend Rick, a junior at Stanford who also hoped to be a doctor. After suffering some sort of breakdown, the cause of which remained a mystery to me, Bill moved out after less than a month, which left Rick and me in need of another housemate to help pay the rent. I convinced my friend Gene to take the third bedroom.

  Neal, who dropped by the house periodically, nicknamed Rick, who was half Mexican and half Swiss, Li’l Rick because of his short stature and boyish looks, but Rick comported himself like a man much older. A stutter made him cautious and introspective. When he was about to speak, he’d flutter his eyes as he gathered his thoughts; and when the words finally emerged, he spoke in a precise, melodious baritone that I found charming. As the weeks passed, Rick often made provocative remarks. When I told him that I planned to travel to Europe the following summer before medical school, he asked with a mischievous smile, “Oh, are you going to go to Gay Par-ee?” On another occasion he wondered if I knew anything about glory holes. When I later learned that a glory hole was an aperture in a bathroom stall through which you could stick your erect penis and get a blowjob, I blushed with embarrassment. Blowjob wasn’t a term I was familiar with either, and I’d never had or given one. The idea of a glory hole disgusted me, not so much the blowjob but its place in an unsanitary public restroom. I found myself puzzling over Rick’s motives.

  One fall evening in 1976, the three of us celebrated Gene’s acceptance into a graduate program in Slavic languages. Gene let us know that the Russian way to celebrate was to chase down black bread with shots of vodka. He’d procured some cheap vodka, but we had only a loaf of stale pumpernickel, so we sat around the kitchen table washing down chunks of terrible bread with the bitter clear liquid. It didn’t take much to get us drunk. Then Rick vomited in the bushes outside the front door, which prompted Gene, who was highly suggestible, to vomit before he fell asleep clutching the toilet bowl. As I nursed Rick on the sofa, we began to touch each other affectionately. In the heat of the moment, shirts were unbuttoned and pants unzipped. We weren’t naked, but Gene would have been shocked had he somehow arisen and stumbled onto us. What struck me l
ater was how natural sex with a man was for me, even though it was my first experience. Rick remarked that he’d never kissed anyone with a beard before.

  As our relationship progressed, Rick began to express doubts about being gay. I wrote to him a number of times from Europe, but his responses were full of ambivalence. Before I started classes at Northwestern at the end of September 1977, he traveled to Chicago for his own interview at the medical school. I was staying with my parents briefly until I could move into my dormitory room on campus, and he stayed in their guest room. Despite an overwhelming sexual attraction to him, I didn’t dare linger too long with him. I’d said nothing to my parents about our relationship and wasn’t prepared to deal with such a revelation at this point in my life, when I didn’t yet have a full gay identity. Afterward I took a Greyhound bus with Rick back to San Francisco, holding his hand under a blanket throughout the forty-eight-hour ride across the dull midsection of the United States. But then we argued about our feelings for each other and parted abruptly. On the bus ride back to Chicago I slept fitfully and read four novels by John Steinbeck, an author who’d attended Stanford—my way of keeping a connection to the university I revered and had parted from sadly—as a way to push Rick out of my mind.

  Early in the first quarter, I hung out with a classmate named Mark. At 6:30 in the morning he would knock on my door in Abbott Hall to join him for a run on a nearby track or to play racquetball. In high school I’d had no interest in sports. I refused to learn to swim, I detested wrestling, and the most I was willing to do in gymnastics was a somersault. Sweating disgusted me, and group showering, which would have been a kind of heaven for most gay boys, intimidated me, in part because I didn’t reach puberty until the age of sixteen and felt more shame about my own childish body parts than curiosity about the mature body parts of others. When I went to college, I was a five-foot-eight-and-a-half-inch narrow-shouldered adolescent who weighed 120 pounds. In California, land of the bronzed six-packs, I made a concerted effort to improve my physique and took up weightlifting. In one year I gained twenty-five pounds. I also developed a passion for long-distance running. The Stanford campus sprawled across nine thousand acres, much of it undeveloped and wonderful to explore. In Chicago I looked for another way to exercise, especially in the winter, when only the obsessed ran outdoors. Mark introduced me to squash and racquetball, sports I turned out to have an aptitude for.

  In the first three months of medical school, Mark and I spent so much time together that others noticed. He introduced me to opera, and we attended chamber music and vocal recitals performed by his numerous musician friends. Once when he invited me to the symphony while we were in the dorm cafeteria, a female classmate asked with amusement, “Is that a date?” Although the question sailed passed him, I was mortified. By the end of December I was infatuated with Mark. We’d just finished playing racquetball one evening—unusual because typically we played in the morning, but that day my job drawing blood at the VA hospital interfered with our daily ritual—and as he reclined on his bed bare-chested, rather provocatively, I thought, I declared my feelings for him.

  I wasn’t prepared for his reaction. Flushed and confused, he squirmed into a shirt and demanded that I leave. My apologies fell flat. For the rest of the academic year he avoided me, and the following fall he transferred to a medical school in New York City, explaining to classmates that he wanted to be closer to his parents’ home on the East Coast. It may have been the truth, but I was deeply hurt.

  During orientation to medical school, when various individuals or organizations were allowed to make presentations to the incoming class, one courageous soul, a second-year student named Eric, invited any of us who might be gay to contact him about forming a gay medical student group. The general response was polite startlement; no one stirred. At the time it didn’t strike me how remarkable it was that he’d been permitted to raise what I considered to be, in retrospect, a taboo subject; a more conservative administration might have blocked him. I didn’t approach Eric until the spring of 1978, after I’d recovered from Mark’s rebuff. Although I got on well with all 160 members of my class, I felt lonely and isolated. I had my confidants—Neal and my high school friend Doug—but they lived elsewhere. A number of classmates had paired up, and others were married or engaged. I knew that there had to be a handful of others like me—and I had my suspicions—but all of us lacked Eric’s courage. Rather than congregating, we behaved like poles of a magnet and sat far from each other even during classes.

  Eric introduced me to Chicago’s gay bar scene. After we went out one night, he seduced me, and we had sex in his room at Abbott Hall. As we made out on the cold floor, I tried to drum up enthusiasm for him, but it wasn’t sex I’d been looking for; I was looking for friendship. I later resented the quid pro quo nature of our relationship—as a reward for being my guide, he expected me to have sex with him. I was still too green to understand the casual nature of sex for many gay men. For me, sex was the consummation of a relationship, not the initiation of one. But perhaps I wasn’t as different from other gay men, or men in general, as I thought. While struggling to satisfy Eric’s needs that night, I noted his flaccid pecs and hairy paunch, a combination of features that repelled me. Perhaps if he’d had a beefier physique and handsomer face, I’d have gladly given up my Victorian views.

  I spent much of the summer in search of love but had to settle for a few unsatisfying hookups. One September evening at Alfie’s, my gaze landed on Art. He squeezed his way toward me and offered to buy me a beer. Short, balding, and muscular, he had a thick brown mustache, a warm smile, and dazzling blue eyes. He wore a T-shirt, cowboy boots, and tight jeans that bunched up suggestively at his crotch, the stereotype of a butch gay man in the late 1970s. Although I didn’t find him good-looking, I felt an animal attraction to him. His face lit up when I told him that I was a medical student. He was in the healthcare business too, he said. He embraced me, which made me uncomfortable because the gesture was unexpected and presumptuous, but I was also excited and flattered.

  Fourteen years older than I, Art was an ordained minister and executive director of a retirement facility in the suburbs, which explained his winning way with people and why I felt at ease with him after just a few minutes. He told me that he had been born on the West Coast, grew up on a farm, and attended seminary in New York City before relocating to the Chicago area after spending time in New Orleans as a pastor in a church. He’d married and had two young daughters, but his wife filed for divorce when she discovered that he was having sex with men. His move to the city from the suburbs had been abrupt; he brought with him only his clothes, his car, and a few possessions.

  Art took me to his apartment, a dismal place on the edge of Uptown in a type of building called a four-plus-one, a cheap brick and glass midrise with paper-thin walls. Inside you could hear car doors banging and the dumpster top slam shut as if they were in the room next door. His place was furnished with a teak table and chairs in the living room, but we went quickly to the large bed in the bedroom, which overlooked an uninspiring courtyard. After sex, we fell asleep. The next morning he projected a different persona, reserved and businesslike. I watched him in the mirror as he dressed in a three-piece suit, strength, ambition, and resolve in his eyes. He apologized for not driving me back to my apartment because he was heading in the opposite direction, but we exchanged numbers and promised to get together again. I’d enjoyed the night and felt sad at our parting. I’d used to smirk at the speed at which young couples fell in love in operas after one or two arias, like Rudolfo and Mimi in La Boheme or Alfredo and Violetta in La Traviata, but great composers hit on a simple truth: we attach ourselves quickly to the objects of our desire. After one night, I was attached.

  The next night Art called me, and we met again two days later. In his apartment was another young man named Jim. Exceptionally lean, perhaps ill (in medical terminology I would have referred to him as cachectic), he had a handlebar mustache and mischievous gree
n eyes. Jim stayed there while Art and I went to dinner and was gone when we returned. A year later Art told me that he had told Jim about his latest trick, and that Jim had dared him to call me so he could size me up. I surprised him when I appeared at the door, because I wasn’t the person he’d imagined, although I didn’t disappoint him. He claimed that he’d been drunk the night we met and suffered from a hangover the next morning. I’m not sure why Art told me this; I didn’t think it was funny, if humor was the intent. Jim’s presence that night turned out to be an omen, in more ways than one.

  In the beginning, Art seemed to have all the ingredients I’d been searching for: maturity, stability, and keen intelligence. I viewed the age difference as an asset, not a liability. At twenty-four, not yet fully comfortable in my gay skin and uncertain of my future, I looked to him for guidance. It wasn’t just his age; it was his position in life. Even as an unbeliever, I held clergymen in as high regard as I did doctors, viewing them as two-dimensional heroes rather than complex human beings with contradictions and character flaws. Most alluring to me, Art took an almost childish delight in what the world had to offer. He enjoyed fine dining, tolerated opera, and accompanied me to marathon films like Shoah, a nine-hour French documentary that investigated the origins of the Holocaust, and Napoleon, a silent movie accompanied by live music from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He also had a penchant for travel. We spent our second Christmas together in Paris, the most romantic city in the world, and another week in Florence. Later we traveled farther afield to East Africa, Israel, and the Sinai Desert.

  But Art also caused me a great deal of grief. During the first year of our relationship, he gave me three sexually transmitted infections: crab lice, gonorrhea, and hepatitis B. His infidelities and their health consequences led to numerous arguments and promises from him to be faithful. Had I been a stronger person, I’d have bolted. Instead I rationalized everything, believing that I could transform him into a monogamous partner by laying down ground rules that in the end only I would follow. And in fact he’d acquired the gonorrhea he gave me from an old boyfriend, who’d spent several days with him while I sulked at home over another betrayal.