Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle

by Michael Thomas Ford

  I nodded, knowing full well I probably wouldn't. I loved Taffy, and she'd been a great help to me after Alan died, but seeing her made me think too much about him. The two of them had performed at the first Wigstock, dueting on "These Boots are Made for Walking," and they'd been planning a big production number for the 1986 show. It was to be Taffy's first public appearance following her long-awaited sex change surgery, and they were going to perform "I Enjoy Being a Girl" from Flower Drum Song . Alan's death had also been the death of Bitta Honey, but Taffy had gone on with the show alone, dedicating her performance to Alan's memory and holding a minute of silence in his honor. I'd left halfway through the song, overcome with sadness, and had spoken with Taffy only a few times since. Suddenly it felt like the entire parade was a parade of memories. I turned to Andy, Jack, and Todd. "I think I'm going to go," I said.

  "Stay," Todd protested. "The parade's only half over. We've still got the guys from Splash coming." "And then there's the pier dance," Jack said. "We got you a ticket."

  "Thanks," I told them. "Not this year."

  "You're sure?" Jack asked.

  I nodded. "I'm just a little gayed out," I said.

  "Okay," he said. "I'll call you later, though."

  I left them and started to walk home. As I did, I stuck my hands into my pockets and felt something prick my palm. I'd forgotten all about the button I'd stashed there. I took it out and was about to toss it into a nearby garbage can. Then I stopped and looked at it. SILENCE =DEATH . The words struck me with their simplicity and truthfulness. I looked at the tiny hole the pin on the back of the button had made on my hand. A little drop of blood was welling up from the center of my palm, like a miniature stigmata. I returned the button to my pocket and continued home, thinking about the ACT UP float and how I'd felt seeing it. I thought about the clown like Ronald Reagan jeering at me, and about how he represented the feelings of so many Americans. It angered me, the indifference and blame. It angered me that so many people were dying for nothing, while instead of looking for answers, politicians and pundits were looking for someone to blame.

  As I walked past the various booths that lined the streets offering everything from overpriced bottles of water to Pride stickers, I saw a young woman with an ACT UP T-shirt handing out flyers. I took one from her and read it as I walked. It was a call for volunteers. "Don't wait for someone else to do something!" it said in bold letters. "ACT UP! FIGHT AIDS!"

  The following Tuesday, I arrived at the Lesbian and Gay Community Center on 13th Street to find the main meeting hall packed with people there for the ACT UP meeting. Taking a seat in the back, I looked around at the other faces. Most of them were young, white, and male. They were the faces I saw in the clubs and on the streets, handsome and untouchable. They seemed to me too young even to know who they were, let alone to be interested in political action, but they seemed determined to do something. The meeting began when a young man with a body built by hours in the gym stood up to speak. "I'm guessing that for a lot of you, this is your first ACT UP meeting," he said. "Can I have a show of hands from the first-timers?"

  A full third of the room raised their hands, myself included. "Great," the young man said. "We want to thank you for coming out tonight. My name is Max, and as our name says, we're the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. We're fighting in the streets to get people to give a fuck about this disease."

  His remark was met with applause and clapping. He continued. "We're fighting because nobody is fighting for us. The government doesn't give a shit. The churches don't give a shit. Well, we're going to make them give a shit!"

  The passion behind Max's words reminded me of Harvey Milk. I hadn't heard such intense dedication to a cause in many years, and I found myself believing what the young man said, that we could change things by taking action. When he asked us to break into smaller groups for more discussion, I gravitated toward the group of which he was the facilitator.

  "What we're looking for," Max said once we were gathered around, "is people who are willing to hit the streets to protest. This isn't an organization that writes letters. We put ourselves right in the middle of things. You might have heard about our Wall Street protest in March, where we demanded that the pharmaceutical companies stop making such huge profits from AIDS drugs. That was our very first action. Seventeen of us were arrested at that. We've also protested at the White House and the International Conference on AIDS, and we got Northwest Orient to reverse their policy on banning people with AIDS from their flights. Two weeks ago, we held a four-day, nonstop protest at Sloan-Kettering to demand clinical tests on more AIDS drugs. Those are the kinds of things we need to do more of. But this isn't easy. You could get arrested. You'll probably get arrested. So make sure this is something you're willing to get involved with, because we only need people who are really committed."

  Max spent an hour with us, answering questions about what ACT UP was planning and how we could help. At the end of the meeting, I signed up to be part of the next action. I half hoped nobody would actually call me, and when the phone rang a few nights later, I was surprised to hear Max's voice.

  "Hey, Ned," he said, as if we were old friends. "We're planning a protest for Friday in front of the Health Department. We want to snarl traffic at rush hour and get maximum exposure. Can you come?"

  "School gets out at three-fifteen," I said. "I could be there by four."

  "That's perfect," said Max. "Do you have an ACT UP shirt?"

  "Not yet," I told him.

  "Pick one up over at A Different Light bookstore on Hudson," he said. "They're selling them for us. Wear that. We're making signs, so you can get one at the protest. I'll see you Friday." On Friday afternoon, I rode the subway downtown, my ACT UP T-shirt hidden beneath my button-down blue Oxford. When I arrived at the protest site, I removed the outer shirt and stuffed it into my backpack. Max was there, along with five or six other volunteers, stapling posters to wooden handles to make our signs. When he saw me, he shook my hand. "Thanks for coming," he said.

  "What do we do?" I asked him.

  "Take a sign and get ready to block traffic," he answered. "That's all there is to it."

  I chose a sign at random. It was the generic ACT UP logo printed over a large pink triangle. I considered exchanging it for an image of Reagan with devil horns added to his head, but a part of me still felt kindly toward him for his work defeating the Briggs Initiative, so I stuck with the one I had. As more and more people showed up, our group swelled, until there were almost eighty of us. Right at five, Max shouted for our attention. When we quieted down, he said, "Just walk into the streets. Stop traffic. Don't move, even when they start blasting their horns. I give us about twenty minutes before the police show up. Let's go!"

  We followed him into the street. As we swarmed around the cars stopped for a red light, the surprised drivers looked at us with a mixture of bemusement and irritation. We ignored them, scattering ourselves among the vehicles.

  "Act up! Fight AIDS!" I shouted as someone began the chanting. The honking began as soon as the light turned green. We stood our ground, continuing to shout and wave our signs. A few feet away from me, a skinny Puerto Rican man waved a sign proclaimingYOU

  THINK THIS IS INCONVENIENT ?TRY DYING . Behind me, a woman shouted, "More trials, fewer deaths!" It was bedlam. Cars honked. Drivers shouted obscenities. We shouted back. And as Max had predicted, all too soon the police showed up. At first, they tried to reason with us, asking us politely to come out of the street. When we ignored them, they began taking us one by one and dragging us to the sidewalk. But because there were only a handful of them, the process was ineffective, and as soon as they turned their backs to go after another protester, the one they'd just dragged away would return to the street.

  We lasted maybe forty-five minutes. Then, on Max's signal, we emptied the street. The police watched us go, but didn't follow as we made our way back toward the subway. I looked back at the traffic, hopelessly backed up, and felt a rush of excitement
.

  On the train home I wore my ACT UP shirt for all to see and held my sign face out. The suit-and-tie commuters eyed me warily, as if I might at any moment begin to rail about the end of the world, or ask them for change. A few riders, mostly men, nodded at me approvingly. When I got home, I was still feeling the adrenaline pumping through my veins. I hadn't felt so alive in a very long time. Every part of me was trembling with forgotten excitement, and to my surprise, I realized I was unbearably horny. Afraid the sensation might fade if I hesitated, I stripped and lay down on the bed. With a sense of urgency, I jacked off, thinking the whole time of Max.

  CHAPTER 54

  By the end of 1987, ACT UP had become the main focus of my life. I was not unique in this. Many of the group's members spent the majority of their time planning, protesting, or meeting. When we weren't actively doing these things, we were thinking about them, and when we weren't thinking about them, we were feeling guilty about applying our resources elsewhere.

  I did nothing about my attraction to Max. He was, I told myself, too young, too beautiful, too focused on our work to be interested in me. Instead, I threw myself into being the implementor of his plans. I made posters. I leafleted. I made calls and wrung donations out of the people who signed up for our mailing list, which seemed to double every time we made appearances at community events. I did whatever I could to ensure that Max's ideas were made flesh. Because I could not have him, I turned him into a reason to keep going.

  At first, Jack and Todd found my interest in activism a relief. I was getting out. I was happy. I wasn't moping. They supported my efforts, and listened to my stories over dinner. They themselves were slightly wary of ACT UP's tactics, finding them too confrontational.

  "I understand their anger," Todd said one night while we ate at Clare's in Chelsea. "The problem is, all people see is a bunch of angry queers getting in their faces. That's not likely to make them feel more kindly toward us."

  "They need to know what's going on," I argued. "Until they know, they're not going to do anything."

  "That's true," said Jack. "But don't you think there are less offensive ways of educating them?" "Offensive?" I said. "What's offensive is that we still don't have a vaccine, we still don't have enough money for AIDS research, and we still don't have enough drugs. That makes me angry, and if someone doesn't like that I'm angry, then tough shit."

  I'd gotten very good at being angry. Fueled by the message of ACT UP, I'd started to see the world as Usvs. Them. "Us" was anyone whose life had been affected by AIDS and who had decided to do something about it. "Them" was everyone else, including the apathetic gay men who did nothing while their brothers died. Them I despised most, because I believed them to be cowards. Hiding their heads in the sand, they waited for AIDS to go away so that they could get back to fucking and sucking without worry.

  In early 1988, we began preaching the message of safe sex. Suddenly, rubbers were hot, or at least we tried to convince people that they were. Latex barriers were eroticized, and we proved it by holding demonstrations in which we rolled condoms onto bananas using only our mouths and donned examination gloves and simulated fisting. We let people know that sex was once more an option, although we knew that most of them had never stopped having it in the first place. It was Max's idea to promote kissing as an intimate act. Where before many of us had regarded it merely as foreplay, now it became one of the safer forms of physical connection. We decided to hold a kiss-in, where pairs or groups would make out for the edification of the masses, demonstrating both that mouth-to-mouth contact was not a means of transmitting HIV, and that it was one alternative to riskier activities. The first one was planned for the Friday before Valentine's Day, with groups gathering at strategic locations throughout the city.

  I was assigned to Grand Central Station, where I went with Max and two dozen others. Spacing ourselves beneath the dome of the great hall, we prepared to shock the commuters who would soon be passing through on the way to their trains. It was dusk, and the lights that covered the ceiling above us glowed faintly, forming the astrological constellations for which the hall is famed.

  "Who's your partner?" Max asked me as people paired up.

  "I don't have one," I said.

  "You're with me, then," he said, counting heads to make sure everyone was accounted for. I started to protest, but it was too late. As five o'clock neared and the streams of passersby grew noticeably heavier, we began our demonstration. Facing me, Max put his arms around me and pressed his mouth to mine. I stiffened, and he pulled back.

  "You can do better than that," he said. "Just pretend I'm some guy you have the hots for." We tried again, and this time I gave in, kissing Max passionately. He responded, slipping his tongue into my mouth and moving his hands lower on my back so that he could press himself into me. Oblivious to the stares of the people heading home to Westchester, Croton-on-Hudson, and Mahopac, we kissed without stopping for what seemed an eternity. When we finally stopped, Max cleared his throat and said,

  "Do you want to take this back to my place?"

  Few things spark passion as easily as revolution. In Max's bedroom, we explored lovemaking with an energy born out of our shared convictions. When his mouth moved down my chest toward my belly, I reminded him to beware the stickiness already seeping from my aroused cock, and when later on he entered me, it was with the protection of not one, but two, rubbers. Our ejaculate remained a safe distance from any vulnerable tissues, and afterward we cleaned ourselves separately and well. I expected our exchange to be a onetime event, and was surprised when Max suggested we do it again. I agreed, and soon we were regularly spending time in one another's beds. We became known as a couple within ACT UP, and it pleased me to watch Max lead an action or invigorate a group and know that he was my boyfriend.

  Because it was an election year, our attention was on the race for president. Vice President George Bush (we had only the father to worry about then, and so did not feel the need to use either his initials or

  "Sr." to distinguish him) had proven to be as ineffective and uncompassionate as his mentor when it came to AIDS, and we were dearly hoping for a changing of the guard in November. Encouraged by early polls that showed Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis leading Bush by a margin of ten points, we dared to hope that perhaps the tide was going to change.

  Throughout the summer, we continued our campaign for safer sex and improved resources for PWAs. Max and I also added Dukakis to our list of pet projects, organizing several events within the gay community to raise both money and awareness for the beetle-browed governor of Massachusetts. We were constantly on the go, running from meeting to meeting, from march to rally. I had little time for anything or anyone else, and consequently saw little of Jack, Todd, or Andy during the first half of the year.

  In August, the tide began to turn. We watched, dumbfounded, as Dukakis slipped in the polls, his margin narrowing point by point until, by July, it had been halved. In August, we sat glued to the television in Max's living room during the four days of the Republican National Convention. On the final night we watched as Bush officially won his party's nomination and took the podium for his now-famous speech. Standing before a crowd of adoring fans, he spoke in his familiar nasal twang. "This has been called the American Century," he declared, "because in it we were the dominant force for good in the world. We saved Europe, cured polio, we went to the moon, and lit the world with our culture. And now we are on the verge of a new century, and what country's name will it bear? I say it will be another American century."

  "I don't think I can stand it," Max said, burying his head in my chest. I put my arm around him and held him while the former head of the CIA continued. "This is America: the Knights of Columbus, the Grange, Hadassah, the Disabled American Veterans, the Order of Ahepa, the Business and Professional Women of America, the union hall, the Bible study group, LULAC, ‘Holy Name'—a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky."


  "LULAC?" I said. "The Order of Ahepa?"

  "Latin Americans and Greeks," Max said, sitting up. "He's just throwing everything in there." "Except gays and lesbians," I said.

  "It doesn't matter," said Max. "He's saying just what America wants to hear."

  He was right. Following the convention, Bush's numbers soared. His "Thousand Points of Light" speech was quoted everywhere. Dukakis and the Democrats attempted to bring the focus of the election back to the state of the union, but they had nothing to counter with. On election night, Todd and Jack threw a party, although since we expected defeat, the mood was more somber than celebratory. As we watched the numbers come in and saw the states on the graphic map of America turn red one by one, with only a handful of states going blue for Dukakis, we knew we had lost.

  "Even California voted for that dickhead," Max raged. "What is wrong with people?" "They're afraid of change," Todd said.

  "They're just afraid," said Jack.

  In the end, Bush only won 53% of the popular vote, but it was enough to get him 79% of the electoral votes, making it a landslide victory. And that's exactly how we felt waking up on November 9, as if we'd been buried in a landslide. I remember Max and I turned on the television, hoping against hope that some miracle had occurred between our going to bed and the sun coming up. But Bryant Gumbel informed us that it had not, and we reluctantly got up and prepared for life under George Bush. The election changed us. Overnight, we went from being filled with enthusiasm to feeling tired and worn out. While I expected the threat of another four years under Republican control to energize our movement, it seemed to have the opposite effect. The ACT UP meetings started to feel repetitive to me, as if we were saying the same things over and over and over (which, of course, we were, since most of the problems we were fighting had yet to be solved). I continued going, however, and in December participated in a mass protest at St. Patrick's Cathedral to voice opposition to the Catholic Church's homophobia and views on safe sex education. The action resulted in widespread media coverage, but resulted in a black eye for ACT UP when the public decried the behavior of a single protester who grabbed a communion wafer and threw it to the floor.