“I met Richard the first year I worked at ‘Sesame Street,”’ Gibson remembered. “I worked in the mail room and after six months I was able to move into a position in the production department, as a script typist. On one of my first trips to the studio, I was distributing the scripts and I looked up and there stood Richard: the wonder boy from New Jersey.
“He was one of the principal Muppets: he was the back end of Snuffleupagus, not a speaking part. He had a lot of roles. He was Gladys the Cow. He did a lot of the minor Muppet characters.
“What I remember is Richard calling me in the wee hours of the morning, most of the time waking me in my sleep, inviting himself down with a quart of orange juice and whatever drugs he had at the time. Probably pot. At that time I don’t think cocaine was part of it. So he would arrive on the scene, and we’d get high and we’d drink our orange juice. And we’d go to bed, which was where we belonged. Richard and I belonged together in bed. We were right together in bed. The less said the better. He looked great. He was wonderful. All those basketball games: they did him good.
“This was probably 1972, the first year I moved to New York. Richard lived an exciting life. He knew celebrities. He was high, he was up and he was on. Things were happening. The Muppets were emerging. They were novel and exciting. They were big.”
Once Rudolf Nureyev made a guest appearance on the Muppets. The first time he met Richard Hunt backstage, Nureyev looked him in the eye and introduced himself this way:
“You love to suck cock, don’t you?”
Gibson was blond and good-looking and boyish, and he was completely open to the new world around him. He loved the New York men of the early seventies: “They were all unique,” he recalled. “There were no clones at the time”—mustachioed men who wore identical uniforms of T-shirts and blue jeans. “They looked independent. They looked assertive. They stood their ground. They looked confident.”
He was also in love with adventure: “the thrill of living, and the thrill of discovery. A feeling of being at the center of the universe: discovering a new planet. Extending the frontier. New York was energized. It was an education; it was like a university of life. It was a place where every person had something to say—and no matter how simple, whatever they were doing, it seemed exciting to me. Everybody was remarkable.
“There was nothing risky about sex that I can remember. I suppose there was some chance of falling in love, or it being one-sided. But you didn’t think about those things. They always seemed to work themselves out. There was always the prospect that even if it didn’t become something serious, that you stood to make a friend.”
Gibson first found out about HIV sometime in the early eighties. By now he was living in California, and when he began to read articles about the virus, “It didn’t make much sense to me. It was happening somewhere else: it wasn’t happening in Sacramento. It wasn’t happening in the Grand Canyon—or Death Valley [where he had also lived]. It was something that I read about that was happening somewhere else.” Then he saw the picture of an old friend from New York, Mark Feldman, in a gay newspaper in San Francisco. The picture accompanied his obituary. Feldman was the first person he knew who had died of AIDS.
“What I remember is that I knew at one point that there was a risk of exposure, and I remember sort of making kind of a conscious decision not to take any precautions. I think I did bring it on myself. I don’t know why I did that. It was almost like I was trying to beat the odds, perhaps. I don’t know. I think that at that time I probably could have avoided exposure if I had … if I had really, really thought about … if I really had … if … if … if I had taken the time to, to really think about it. If I had, if I had talked to people, if I had listened. If it had somehow come home to me in a very dramatic way. I just didn’t realize.
“I found out I was positive in eighty-six or eighty-seven. I had a pretty good idea that I was. I had a friend who was living in Sacramento at the time, a fellow I had become friends with when I was living in the Grand Canyon and we were going to get tested. I thought about it and I decided it was better knowing than not knowing. And I found out.
“My friend was negative. His name was Joe. We got tested together at a clinic and they did it anonymously. When we went back for the results, Joe went in to get his first. After having been taken out to be told the results of his test, he came back and he sat down. He told me he was negative.
“Then it was my turn, and I went in. And instead of coming back to my seat I was instructed to [go to] another room. To a counselor. Whose job it was to cushion the blow.” Gibson laughed at his memory of that moment: “Some cushion. I didn’t want to be cushioned. I thought I was probably positive because I knew what the risk factors were. And I knew that I had taken those risks.
“It’s painful sometimes to find myself in a crowded bar [in 1991] and to look around me and to imagine myself ten years ago in that same place in those same circumstances, knowing how different it was. And the very dramatic differences for me. My perspective today, the realities.
“I’ve avoided intimate situations where you would feel an obligation to tell someone. If it was sex I was looking for, I would put myself in a situation where I could have sex without any commitments. Sex where I would be able to remain anonymous. And yet safe. But without feeling the same obligation to be forthcoming about my HIV status.
“Hopefully, you know, something will turn up. But it’s hard to go on living with a smile, or go on living with any real enthusiasm, or any real joy. It’s like with the frequency of people dying it’s almost—it’s so temporary: the pleasure, the joy, the thrill, the excitement, the enthusiasm.
“It’s like my future consists of appointments to see doctors. I Just see this progression. But who knows? Some part of me—that survivor part of me—likes to tell myself that somehow or other some miraculous thing is going to help me to come out of this relatively unscathed.”
DAVID BARTOLOMI was born in Boston in 1965, which made him part of the generation that followed Charles Gibson. Bartolomi had fooled around with his best friend when they were both nine and again when they were twelve, and he had also had a couple of fleeting experiences in camp. But his first serious sexual encounter occurred when he was seventeen.
Bartolomi believed the main reason he avoided the epidemic was because his father always sold pornography in his smoke shop in East Boston. “Thank God,” he said, “because it really did save my life.
“Hustler ran before-and-after pictures of this incredibly handsome man who looked like a model—one where he was young, beautiful, and healthy; the other one, emaciated, sickly, and old. The article didn’t have a name for this ‘gay disease’ because AIDS still wasn’t talked about in eighty-one. But it was enough to scare the life out of me. It burned its image into my brain. I knew there was this disease out there that affected gay men. I didn’t know what it was called. And it seemed to be a sexually transmitted disease of some sort. I don’t think I knew what kind of sex; I just knew that having sex with gay men was becoming risky. Maybe it did say anal sex because I knew it was anal sex. I wasn’t that much in the closet about what was happening in the world. But if I’d never picked up those magazines, I never really would have been aware.
“In 1983,1 met a guy in Filene’s Basement,” Boston’s famous discount department store. “This handsome man—he was thirty-two—it turns out he was cruising me. I thought he can’t be interested in me—I’m in my sweatpants and T-shirt. I haven’t shaved. I look like a total slob. And I just had no idea that I could be attractive. And we exchanged phone numbers, and he called me, or I called him one night. I was still living at home. And we arranged for me to come over. I told my parents I had a night class—I was directing a show and I had to work on some scenes. He had a little railroad flat by the train station right at the bottom of Beacon Hill. It must have been the Red Line. I walked in the door, dressed like some greaseball kid from Brooklyn, with greaseball taste, with a guinea T-shirt on and a pair o
f tacky Jordache jeans. It turned out he was from my hometown—he was from East Boston. He was Italian. His name was Felix DeMarco. I walk into his place and we talked for a minute, and the next thing I know, he grabbed me. He kissed me—threw me down on the couch and had my clothes off so fast my head was spinning. And then he had my feet in the air.
“And I was like, ‘Whoa! This is just happening way too fast.’ He was fighting his way inside me. Trying so hard to get inside me. And I was just like, ‘No, this ain’t going to happen.’ Like I’m not ready for that act yet. Psychologically I’m not ready for that. I know that there’s this gay cancer. I just tightened up all my muscles until he finally gave up. Thank God. He said, ‘Okay, you can be inside me.’ He was fine with it. He let me fuck him twice without a condom. Which leads me to believe that he didn’t know he was sick. Because he didn’t say, ‘Put a condom on.’ I was in and out, no problem. After sex, he said to me, ‘I’d love to see you again.’ And I was all nervous, and not ready to handle any sort of relationship with a man even if it was just sexual. But I had had the night of my life.
“So I pull in about eleven o’clock to my parents’. And I’m thinking, I pulled it off, I’m pretty cool, you know. And my father comes into my room to check on me. While we’re talking, I begin to get undressed and ready for bed. As I’m hanging my shirt up, he says, ‘Don’t think I don’t see that hicky on your neck! And I got one word for you: you just better be careful, mister!’ And he walked out of the room.
“I froze. I’m so caught! What hicky on my neck? I didn’t even know I had a hicky on my neck. But my dad saw through it all. He didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl. He just knew obviously I’d had sex that night.
“So that year I moved to New York to attend NYU for film. One night my best friend from high school called to verify the name of my Filene’s Basement one-night stand.
“‘Why?’ I asked—not a clue that anything could be wrong.
“‘’Cause I just read in the paper he’s dead. He had AIDS.’ And all of a sudden, my whole life flashed in front of me.
“Now I think to myself, if that night had been a little different—if he had either forced his way in you, or you had a few beers, chances are, you would have been infected. You would have come to New York, had sex with boys and girls, and because you would have been too scared to admit that you had unprotected sex or had AIDS, you would have infected other people. And oh my God—this is how it spreads among teenagers because the odds of getting fucked the first time are so tremendous. If it had been just a little different, my life might have been altered forever. When I hear teenagers [are] still contracting HIV, you want to go, This is crazy because this can be avoided. They’re still young enough to be educated.”
IN 1984, Todd Alexius Long was twenty-three years old when he went on a blind date with Ethan Geto, who was then forty-one. Long was a recent graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology, where he had studied photography. Besides being a lot older, Geto was almost a foot taller than Long. “I said, Well, I could never go out with him,” said Long. “But then I did right away. I liked him very much. I guess I felt like he really listened to me. We just seemed to have a lot in common right away.” The blind date led to a long relationship, whose first phase lasted four years.
Three years later he decided to bury his past, and in 1988 he legally changed his name to “Xax”—because “I knew my Todd Alexius Long had nothing to do with me.” Five years later, he discovered the Radical Faeries, which were started by Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay. One reason Xax appreciated Hay was that the Faeries’ founder “points out that we’re not male or female—and why should we even want to be? We’re just something other—and that’s why I changed my name to Xax. Because it had no gender connotation, it had no connotation of anything.
“It was almost even nonhuman—just like an object. And that way whatever came to be ‘Xax’ would just be whatever I became. It was a pure starting point. Because I always thought of myself as being omnisexual, omni … everything. Just completely inclusive.”
The same year that he changed his name is when Xax believes he caught the HIV virus—during his first threesome.
“I met this guy at the gym. Got together with him and his lover. Had a great time. Rubber broke. And in retrospect I knew, because the guy was really upset about that. And I was like—it was the beginning, I wasn’t really that concerned about AIDS yet. We didn’t know much about it really. I was just like, I’m fine—nothing hurts me, I’m invincible. Blah blah blah. And he was just so concerned about it. In fact he would never talk to me after that. His lover kept in touch with me for a little while, I think just out of concern.”
A few months later Xax came down with shingles, which is sometimes an early indication of the onset of an AIDS infection. “And I was so sick for six weeks. And the doctor said we have to test you right away. And that’s how I found out”—in February 1989.
But Xax had a very unusual reaction: “I’ve always looked at that as the most positive experience of my life: finding out I was HIV-positive. Because it was such a blessing in disguise for me that it made me rethink my life: ‘Oh, I do want to be alive—and these are the reasons.’ Looking around and seeing that tree, ‘Well, wow, that’s a good enough reason. Oh, that friend of mine—well, that’s a good enough reason.’ It starts to build the one thing on the next, so you think, Wow, I guess there really is a reason. And I was always very determined to conquer it. Like if there’s only one person who conquers AIDS, I’m going to be the one. I don’t care if everybody else drops dead, nobody’s going to put me in the box of you’redying-tomorrow.
“I immediately went to all the meetings, and found out everything I could find out. I made up a newsletter called ‘Save the Humans.’ I took the Save the Whale things and scratched out ‘Whales’ and put ‘Humans’ on them. I sent it to all my relatives and friends. I said this is what I’ve got, this is what is happening. Don’t believe all the crap you hear on the television. This is what’s known, this is what isn’t known. And I will not accept being stuck in a box. I just knew that thinking that way would kill me faster.
“I took Zovirax when I had shingles, although I didn’t take it fast enough because I always procrastinated about going to doctors. So it was caught just in time.
“So then I was very healthy. I didn’t take any drugs, I still thought drugs were terrible, I took lots of vitamins, health foods. I was macrobiotic.
“Until I found out I was HIV-positive, I didn’t want to be alive anyway because I was so depressed. And then, I became HIV-positive, and it kind of forced me to make a decision. It was like, well, here you go, this is what you wanted: take it or leave it or something. It’s like, well, you always wanted to be dead, so here you go. Is this what you want?
“And then I changed my mind. It made me see things differently; it made me make choices differently. Making choices toward living instead of against it.”
NINETEEN EIGHTY-SIX brought gay people in New York City two glimmers of hope—one from politics and one from science—and one devastating defeat from Washington.
Hope sprang from the action of the New York City Council, where a gay rights bill had been introduced every year since 1971, only to be stymied by the council’s majority leader, Thomas Cuite, who was a strong ally of the Catholic Church. “He was absolutely adamant against it,” remembered Ed Koch. “There was nothing I could do to get him to change.”
When Cuite finally retired at the beginning of 1986, Koch made a crucial deal: he agreed to endorse City Councilman Peter Vallone as Cuite’s successor—in return for Vallone’s promise that he would let the gay rights bill out of committee, even though Vallone did not support it himself.
Although Koch was frequently attacked by Larry Kramer and others for what activists considered a lackadaisical response to the AIDS crisis, the mayor had a strong record as a supporter of gay rights. In 1978, one of his first official acts as mayor was to issue an executive order p
rohibiting discrimination within the city government on the basis of sexual orientation. Most of the reporters in the city hall press room were horrified by this edict. Three years earlier, while serving as a congressman, Koch had been one of four cosponsors of a federal bill introduced by Representative Bella Abzug that would have prohibited discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations, and federally assisted programs on the basis of “affectional or sexual preference.”
Tom Stoddard, who by now was serving as the legislative director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, drafted the New York City bill that prohibited discrimination in housing and employment on the basis of sexual orientation. Stoddard “was an extraordinary lawyer,” Koch remembered. “Even though he never retreated, he would find a way to explain, to placate and convince opponents that his approach was reasonable, rational and one they could accept. That’s a gift.”
Despite a huge last-minute push by John Cardinal O’Connor—who said the measure would offer protection to sexual behavior that was “abnormal” and a “sin”—the bill finally passed the council on March 21,1986, by a vote of twenty-one to fourteen. Ethan Geto was one of the principal lobbyists on behalf of the legislation. The vote was greeted “by cheers and tears from supporters,” Joyce Purnick reported in the Times.
“God, I can’t believe it—after all this time,” Stoddard told reporters.
The temperature dropped into the twenties that evening, but more than a thousand demonstrators gathered in Sheridan Square at the site of the original Stonewall riot to celebrate. “Psychologically, people can come out of the closet now,” Christopher Mountain exulted.
The passage of the law encouraged thousands of New Yorkers to declare who they really were during the coming decade. Among journalists, for example, in 1980 Joe Nicholson was the only publicly gay reporter at a New York daily; by 1996 more than three hundred of his colleagues at other media outlets had emulated him.
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