Not So Good a Gay Man

by Frank M. Robinson

  But Dr. Volberding had been right. Reid didn’t want to go back to the hospital despite his friendship with the volunteers in the ward. Dr. Wofsy said if he stayed at least a little while they could get some nutrition into him. Reid said, “Do you really think so? I’ve eaten here before.”

  He meant it as a joke, more a commentary on the food than on his condition. Somewhere inside, Reid was still functioning.

  Outside in the car, I told Tom what had happened. “I didn’t think it would be like this,” he said. He confessed having a mental image of Reid gradually fading away like the heroine in Camille. He hadn’t suspected that death would come as a puffy-faced, emaciated man with purple splotches covering his arms and face and with his shirt and Levi’s hanging on him like laundry on a clothesline.

  Reid had been unable to dress himself without help, unable to feed himself without assistance, unable to walk down a flight of stairs without aid.

  His well-meaning friends and the doctors and nurses at the AIDS clinic had been even more helpless. In the things that really mattered, there was nothing any of us could do for him anymore.

  Reid was going to spend the rest of his life, however long or short it might be, struggling against the side effects of chemotherapy, trying to keep down what little food he could eat, mustering enough concentration so he could follow the intricacies of the afternoon soap operas he watched from his bed, trying to work up enough enthusiasm for meaningless conversations with the few friends who dropped by to see him. Reid knew better than anybody else that he was never going to get well.

  Henry Fielding had been right when he wrote: “It is not death, but dying, which is terrible.”

  Like everybody else, I was frightened—sticking my tongue out when I brushed my teeth in the morning, looking for the whitish splotches of thrush.

  I was frightened but nowhere near as frightened as the people who had to work with AIDS patients every day—the doctors and nurses, who had no solid information yet on how HIV was transmitted. Could it be transmitted by water droplets, if the patient coughed or sneezed? Or even breathing the same air? What about bathroom sinks or clothes?

  Some gays thought it could be transmitted by sitting on a wet bench in a bathhouse. For medical personnel, it was a lot more serious, and many began wearing masks and gloves when handling patients. And what about surgeons, cardiologists, and operating room teams? All high-risk jobs—who would want them? And ER personnel would have their own problems with patients with gunshot wounds or who had been in accidents. Lots of blood would be splashed around—and there were no reliable HIV tests for blood until the middle 1980s.

  Some hospitals refused to admit new patients, claiming they were full. Most stayed open, and the doctors and nurses and interns stayed on the job—warriors in the front lines.

  A doctor friend told me of his problems with an obese, middle-aged drug patient with a respiratory infection and high fever. The doctor finally got a syringe with needle through folds of fat when the patient suddenly bucked, throwing out the needle, which punctured the back of the doctor’s left hand. After sending the blood-filled syringe to the lab for an HIV test (the doctor forged the patient’s signature for permission), he spent the rest of the day scrubbing the back of his hand. The test came back negative, but there was a two-to-six-week window before he could be sure.

  My doctor friend came back for anonymous testing every six weeks for a year before he was reasonably certain he was clean.

  I didn’t ask him how close he thought he could get to his girlfriend. I knew the answer—not very.

  The richest country in the world was no better than the poorest when it came to letting its citizens die for political and religious reasons. At the start, the only ones who stood between the country and medical catastrophe were those same citizens—their generosity and intelligence and in many cases being willing to put their own lives on the line to try to save the lives of others.

  Checking my tongue every morning for the signs of thrush was small potatoes. I was frightened—but like a lot of gays, not nearly frightened enough. I picked up a kid at the Corner Grocery Bar and took him home. Dan Fuller was a handsome young man and showed me his model comp—like many handsome men he had wanted to be a model. The best photo was one that hadn’t been used in the comp and is currently hanging above my desk. A straight shot, not pretending to be a model—just himself. If you looked in his eyes you could see his whole life story. He probably had a lousy family life—especially if his parents had found out he was gay—and was looking for a better life out here.

  Dan gradually drifted away from me—I should have held on to him, but I was too busy writing bad fiction. He was the most handsome kid I’d ever met, with a sweet personality to match. He was picked up by an “A” gay and passed around the circuit.

  He never found the better life he’d been looking for. He died a year later.

  The last one was one of the worst. Steven Wallace was a dancer—not good enough to be a star, but happy in the chorus line. We hit the sack and a short time later stared at each other for a good five minutes. I think each of us had been waiting for the other to show some real affection. I should have made the first move and have regretted it ever since.

  He was my tenant for a while, along with his lover, finally moving into a nearby hospice to spend his time taking care of the sick and the dying. Then it was his turn, and somebody at the hospice had to take care of him until he, too, died.

  I regretted losing both Daniel and Steven more than I can say. That’s one-sided—they might not have been interested in any event. But I should have tried. Love usually has two components—sex and concern. I should have showed that concern was what I really wanted. (Sex without concern and affection is fool’s gold.)

  Shortly afterward a young Latin kid took to flirting with me. He liked me a lot and called me “Dad”—to him that was the role I was playing. One time David got behind in his rent and was about to be evicted, and I and a friend went over, packed him up, and put his belongings in storage. While tieing the drawers of his bureau shut so they wouldn’t slide open, I saw a photo and picked it up. A bathhouse group shot with all the customers lined up on one side of the pool, stark naked. I didn’t ask David which one he was.

  He vanished for a while, then showed up at the door. I took one look at the panicked expression on his face and knew the whole story. He ended up in a nearby hospice, and I went over frequently to see him. One day he asked for some Disney films, and I brought him over my tapes. The next day I heard he was dying. His entire family came up to see him, but I didn’t go. I thought the family had seen enough of gays.

  I wondered later if I should have said screw the family and gone over to see David. I wondered if he would have wanted to say good-bye to “Dad” if he were still conscious.

  XXVII

  I THOUGHT ABOUT writing a book about the young gays and what it was in their life that made them take the risk.

  Randy Schilts heard about it and came over to check out what I had in mind. I told him and asked what he was planning.

  Like a good reporter he said, “I’m going to follow the money.” (It was published as And the Band Played On and was a damning critique of a government that valued money over lives.) Randy had an autographing party for the book on the balcony of the Castro Theater. When I saw him, I wanted to break into tears. Randy had finally become one of those he had written about—gaunt and feverish. He dictated the final lines of his last book—Conduct Unbecoming (a book about gays in the military)—from his hospital bed. A few days later, he slipped away.

  What it was like for early homosexuals in the United States lacks historical context. To understand the reasons for the reactions of gay men to getting tested later for AIDS and what they considered infringements on hard-won rights, you have to go back a ways.

  From the ’40s through most of the ’60s, homosexual acts were against the law, with penalties ranging from fines to life imprisonment. It was guilt by associati
on at a time when blackmailers grew fat and murderers went free because society considered the murdered gay man to be less than human. In some states those convicted of homosexuality were issued an identity card. Local law enforcement kept records on all suspected sexual subversives and shared them with the FBI. You were forced to carry these cards for the rest of your life.

  The government and much of the populace considered homosexuals traitors and enemies of the people. They were denounced from the pulpit, and many doctors were afraid to treat them. Those who did were known as “clap doctors” (you trusted them with your privates but not with the rest of you). “Dirty Commie faggot” was a common expression, and during the Eisenhower administration, a shakedown was held at the State Department in a search for “Commies” and homosexuals. Hundreds of homosexuals were found and fired, but the search came up with just three Communists.

  In short, if you were a homosexual you were persecuted by the state, damned by the church, and considered sick by the medical profession. (Homosexuals weren’t taken off the “sick” list by psychiatrists until the early ’70s. Gay radicals from Chicago crowded the balcony of the meeting hall for a group of psychiatrists and hooted and hollered and the doctors below finally decided they weren’t sick, they were just angry.)

  There was no Kristallnacht for homosexuals, but no doubt there was a pogrom. Most people were unaware of it, but then most “good Germans” usually were.

  But it wasn’t that way for all homosexuals, especially for those who knew how to hide but still recognize each other. Many older gays looked at such times with a degree of nostalgia.

  One of the first persons I interviewed for my projected book was Bob Ross, the publisher of the Bay Area Reporter. He had been discharged from the submarine service shortly after World War II was over and never went home. The more he saw of San Francisco the more he liked it and the longer he stayed.

  “Halloween in the late fifties and sixties was a parade of stars. People used to line up around the major bars—the Black Cat, the Five-Two-Four up on North Beach, the Tenderloin bars—to see whole troops of costumed gays arrive in buses and limousines. There were searchlights in the streets and the bars were always decorated for the event, and people waited to see the drags parade through the bars.”

  The growing gay community in San Francisco had adopted its first communal holiday.

  It was a different community then. The bars were the equivalent of British pubs, where you met friends and made new ones. It was a far different atmosphere from a community of baths and people lining up outside the bars on the weekends to make throwaway friends with the strangers on the inside.

  Paul Lorch, the editor of B.A.R., moved in completely different circles. At the time I interviewed him, he was fifty-one years old, tall and graying, with a sardonic wit and abrasive opinions that weren’t always appreciated by some of his readers. He was an impressively handsome man, and most of those who knew him twenty years before described him as “stunning.”

  Lorch took his discharge overseas, where he spent a year in Vicenza, Italy. His stay in Italy was a love affair in more ways than one.

  On his return to the United States, Lorch worked for a bank in New York and later moved to California, where he got a job teaching school in Sacramento. On the weekends, he made excursions to both Los Angeles and San Francisco, preferring the former.

  And then, in a gay bar in Sausalito, Lorch met a wealthy older San Franciscan who showed him a city he had never really seen.

  The circles that Lorch now traveled in enjoyed dinner at Gordon’s or the Sausalito Inn, pool parties elsewhere in Marin, and yacht parties on the bay. There were obviously two worlds for gays—the world of Pacific Heights and the world of the middle class and the Tenderloin and it was very seldom that the twain ever met.

  I didn’t become friends with Lorch—far from it; his life had been a fairy tale in which I had no interest. And there was a streak of the vicious in him.

  Back on planet Earth things were happening that were of primary importance. Selma Dritz, the chief epidemiologist of the Health Department, had kept a map in which she marked the location of every case of AIDS. After a few months of collecting them, she told Dr. Silverman, the head of the department, that the foci of infection for AIDS were the bathhouses.

  Larry Littlejohn, former owner of the Psychedelic Shop, found out and threatened to put closure of the bathhouses on the ballot in November. To some of us in the community it was a clear call to close the tubs. We approached Silverman, who refused to do it without support from the community. Twelve of us then drew up a letter and signed it as representing community support.

  When word got out, the battle began. The bathhouses had played too important a role in the life of many gays. They protested that it was an invasion of their freedom, a warning of things to come. Four (or maybe more) of the bathhouse supporters appeared on the steps of city hall with white towels wrapped around their waists. They claimed they represented the community far more than we did.

  The real threat had come from Larry Littlejohn, who said he could get enough signatures to put closure on the next electoral ballot. We knew there would be a battle then, and everything that happened in the tubs would become public knowledge, including slings, fisting, and a dozen other practices. The fallout would be a public relations disaster for the community—and the reason why a dozen of us had written the letter—to avoid a city vote on bathhouses, one that the gay community would surely lose.

  Attitudes in the city were already changing. AIDS had spooked everybody—cops put on rubber gloves before arresting a gay man, a TV station interested in interviewing an AIDS patient was faced with an employee walkout. The solution was to put the AIDS patient in one room and the interviewer in another and then the patient would be interviewed via telephone. Concentration camps and identity cards were once again bugaboos that haunted gays.

  Locally we had a debate between the doctors and members of the community at a lesbian bar, Valencia Rose. The purpose was to expose the very real dangers of going to the tubs. Several doctors were present, about fifty bathhouse devotees, and myself.

  The B.A.R. had gotten hold of a copy of the letter, and all of us who signed it were listed as traitors in an editorial by Lorch. The list included Harry Britt, the supervisor, Randy Shilts, Bill Krause (a man who had spent years working for the community and was devastated by the criticism), and various other members of the gay political community, including myself.

  On the way over to the bar I ran into Bob Ross, who said bitterly, “Frank, how could you betray us?”

  At the meeting, the doctors gave their views, summing up the very real medical threat that faced all gays. The final doctor to speak, his shirt soaked with sweat, received a chorus of boos from the audience. I was the last gay to speak, pointing out the dangers of a ballot initiative. The audience was already walking out when I said that there were forty-seven members of the community who could not vote because all of them were dead.

  When I got home I ran into my tenant coming out of the laundry room. I asked him if he had ever gone to the bathhouses, and he said “Once.” I asked why only once and he wrinkled his nose in disgust. “The smell.”

  The position of the B.A.R. was strange—or perhaps not so stange. Every week they devoted a page or two to photographs and short bios of those who had died the previous week. (Some weeks later I paged through a copy of the B.A.R. and noted page after page of the deceased—perhaps four pages or more in all.)

  Keeping them company were the usual dozen full- and half-page ads for the bathhouses—the main income for the paper and presumably a good chunk of Lorch’s salary.

  Silverman’s initial response was to put posters in the bathhouses warning of the dangers and to install monitors to make sure that the doors to the cubicles were not completely closed. It was a futile gesture. The posters ended up gathering dust at the ends of hallways, and the monitors lounged by the entrance enjoying a joint.

  A few mon
ths after that, Silverman reversed himself and closed the tubs by executive fiat—an authority he’d had the entire time. The numbers of those dying had become too great.

  Medically, some progress had been made. One of the researchers discovered that an AIDS-free baby had been born to a mother who had AIDS. The conclusion was that AIDS was a bloodborne disease. The transfer of “bodily fluids,” a euphemism that included semen as well as blood, was to be avoided.

  Hemophiliacs were at risk—the blood banks had to test their blood (something they had rejected because of the cost and because a large number of their contributors were gays who objected to being tested and some were heroin abusers who frequently used the same needle). Gays were urged to use condoms—and to be tested. The latter was objected to by many members of the community who didn’t want their names added to any list. They had spent too many years of their lives hiding and did not wish to add their names to a list accessible to a government they did not trust.

  It wasn’t all paranoia. Old-timers could remember when homosexual acts were against the law, with penalties ranging from fines to life imprisonment. It had been a world of first names and passwords, introductions by friends when it came to people you didn’t know.

  For me, I kept getting jobs where I thought I should be careful. One of the first was the Sunday supplement Family Weekly that went to small towns. In my own mind, to come out was risky. Ditto working for Science Digest and even Rogue and Cavalier. I was probably safer at Playboy, but a squib in a newspaper that the man giving out advice to the straight readers of Playboy was a gay man, and Playboy probably would have decided they didn’t need me that badly.

  The Eisenhower administration had cleaned house of suspected subversives but the Reagan administration tied the hands of researchers and doctors in a totally different way. The weapon was money. Early requests for research money are usually minor—but necessary. Few problems are cured by simply throwing money at them, but in 1982, when Congress appropriated the munificent sum of $500,000 for AIDS research, the appropriation was promptly vetoed by President Reagan.