Visions and Revisions

by Dale Peck

  But a few weeks before Mark Fisher’s memorial service I rejoined ACT UP. I had marched in the memorial procession for David Wojnarowicz on July 29, 1992, and I had been present at the Ashes Action on October 11, 1992, when the cremated remains of people who had died of AIDS were thrown over the fence that surrounded the Bush White House, but this, it seemed to me, was a totem of a different order. In fact it wasn’t a totem at all: it was a body, and I had come back to ACT UP to walk with it through the streets of New York City because I thought the statement Mark Fisher had chosen to make with his life and with his death and with his corpse was so powerful that America—that Americans, if not America’s leaders—could not ignore it. But they had. New Yorkers, who love a spectacle more than anyone else, had looked at Mark Fisher’s face and then their own faces had hardened and they had looked away; and as I looked at Mark Fisher’s face I knew that despite five years of ACT UP—despite the Wall Street action in 1987 and the St. Patrick’s demo in 1989 and the Day of Desperation in 1991, despite the front-page press coverage that had attended these spectacles and the hundreds of thousands of dollars raised through the sale of T-shirts and posters and stickers and pins, despite Rock Hudson and Ryan White and Magic Johnson, despite Elizabeth Glaser’s speech at the Democratic National Convention on July 14, 1992 and Mary Fisher’s speech at the Republican National Convention on August 19, 1992, despite 200,000 deaths in the United States and twelve million people infected worldwide—despite fifteen years of plague New Yorkers still looked at people with AIDS in the same way they looked at Mark Fisher: through a sheet of glass. Through a screen. AIDS wasn’t their problem, but the problem of people who lived and died somewhere else and only entered their consciousness through their televisions, at which point they hurriedly changed the channel. I myself hadn’t known Mark Fisher except by sight. I don’t know that I ever spoke to him. But I had walked with his dead body up Sixth Avenue at rush hour for more than fifty blocks and watched thousands of people look at his face through the clear top of his coffin, and those people had not cared. And if they hadn’t cared about this body, then why should they care about the words said over it? Why should they care what those words meant? It seemed to me that those words lacked even smoke’s ephemeral substance before it disappears: even as they were spoken, they were no longer there. Twenty-one years later, I don’t remember a thing anyone said. I remember only the act of speaking, and Mark Fisher’s body.

  3

  Thomas Mulcahy died a few months before Mark Fisher, in July of 1992. At the time of his death he’d been a fifty-seven-year-old sales executive for a company called Bull HN Information Systems living in Sudbury, Massachusetts, a “comfortable suburb,” according to the New York Times, “fifteen miles west of Boston.” He had worked at one time in South Africa; had fathered four children; was married to a woman named Margaret; and, again according to the Times, gardened “busily” and to great praise from his neighbors. He was described by the Times, twice, as “active in his church,” and his cousin, a Catholic priest, said mass at his funeral. One can assume from his last name that Mulcahy had been Irish, although this detail, and pretty much everything else mentioned in the Times, was overshadowed by the shocking nature of his death, and by a single other fact: Thomas Mulcahy was a closet case. Though ostensibly in New York City to give a sales presentation on July 8, 1992, he went first, on July 7, to the Townhouse, a restaurant on the Upper East Side with a reputation as a hustler bar, and from there, at 11:30 P.M., to an automated teller machine, and then, rather than return to his room at the Barbizon Hotel, he went at some unknown time with the person or persons who eventually dumped seven plastic garbage bags containing pieces of his body, and an eighth that contained his briefcase, along two highways in Ocean County, New Jersey.

  Mulcahy might have continued to rest in whatever kind of peace a man who’s been hacked to pieces can rest in if the body of Anthony Marrero hadn’t turned up ten months later, in May 1993. Like Mulcahy, Marrero was found in garbage bags—this time six—that were scattered along a highway in Ocean County, and like Mulcahy simplistic generalizations can be made about his life based on information that was widely reported: Anthony Marrero was a crack addict. Anthony Marrero was a Port Authority hustler, which is to say that Anthony Marrero earned $10, as opposed to $150, to do in a public restroom what higher-priced hustlers—the kind of hustlers who were said to frequent the Townhouse—do in apartments and expensive hotels, and Anthony Marrero was gay, or perhaps bisexual, though in either case he didn’t deal with it very well. He had been married once, divorced, and according to his brother continued to “see” women. He had been born in Puerto Rico in 1949, raised in Philadelphia, and spent five years on the road after his marriage ended, landing in New York in 1985. But what made Marrero of interest to readers of New York newspapers was not, as the Times told us, that he once tried out as a pitcher for the Phillies, but that he was the second of three victims of a serial killer whose m.o. was distinguished by two things: he picked up gay men, and when he was done with them he chopped them into pieces.

  Michael Sakara was the third victim. Parts of his body were never found, but the parts that were recovered turned up in Rockland County in Upstate New York. His head and arms, as the Times, Post, and Washington Blade all pointed out, were happened upon by a hot-dog vendor in Haverstraw on July 31, 1993, though only Newsday reported that they were dropped at a “scenic overlook”; the scene that was overlooked wasn’t reported. His torso was found by a volunteer firefighter on August 1 in Stony Point, more than twenty-five miles away. Other facts: Michael Sakara was fifty-six years old at the time of his death. He was six feet four inches tall and weighed 250 pounds. Until January 1993 his lover of nine years had lived with him in a studio at 771 West End Avenue, and until July 29 of that year, or the 30th, or the 31st, he had been employed by the New York Law Journal as a typesetter, where he reported in at 2:15 P.M. For more than twenty years he went to the Five Oaks piano bar almost every night, and when, in the mid-eighties, he began singing at the piano, “he ended each night,” according to the Times, “with a vamp of ‘I’ll Be Seeing You.’”

  Twenty-one years later, this piece of information still strikes me as a quintessential example of what Joan Didion called, in The White Album, “the kind of ‘ironic’ detail the reporters would seize upon, the morning the bodies were found,” and like Didion I find myself alienated rather than moved by such tone-deaf accounting. “I’ll Be Seeing You,” the Phillies tryout, the fact that Thomas Mulcahy lived among the sort of people who complimented him on the number of annuals he planted. Did New Yorkers really need to know, as Mike McAlary informed Newsday readers, that Michael Sakara “used to joke that he wouldn’t be caught dead in an automobile”? Writers of these anecdotes labor under two misperceptions: the first is that, unless readers know something about a victim, they won’t understand the tragedy of murder, and the second is that a four-paragraph capsule biography can possibly carry the weight of a human life. (In fact readers never understand the tragedy of murder, and the biography has yet to be written that conveys the burden of a body as you walk with it up a city street.) And of course these summaries tend toward the homogenizing as well: the gay facts, the dirty facts as it were, of Thomas Mulcahy and Anthony Marrero and Michael Sakara’s lives are presented, but it is the sanitary details of the flower garden and the Phillies tryout that are emphasized, “the old familiar places” that are invested with the emotional tug of anecdote, all of which is done in an effort to make Thomas Mulcahy and Anthony Marrero and Michael Sakara, who may or may not have had anything in common with you or me, seem just like “you and me.” Because in this notion of shared humanity, “you and me” are not crack addicts or alcoholics and “you and me” are not prostitutes. “We” do not step out on our wives or girlfriends to pick up men for sex in restaurants and bars and bus stations because “we” are not closet cases because “we,” most important, are not gay.

  SO WE WERE being killed in the summ
er of 1993. This, too, is a simplification, and probably melodramatic as well. Nevertheless most queers know we are being killed every summer, in ones and twos, in fives and tens and twenties. The summer of 1993, however, the killings were brutal enough and numerous enough, the details of the cases sensational enough, that for two weeks the story of gay death was considered “newsworthy,” which is another way of saying that it was “of general interest,” which meant, in short, that straight people could be assumed to want to read about gay death. At any rate it was more interesting than yet another closeted actor dying of AIDS.

  And, as well, it seemed that not only were we being killed in the summer of 1993, but that murder was following me around. A few months earlier, in fact, in February, I had traveled to Milwaukee to write about Jeffrey Dahmer on the occasion of the first anniversary of his conviction of the murder of sixteen men. A year and a half before that, when the case broke in July of ’91, I had been in San Francisco, on what turned out to be a fucking vacation. I spent four of six nights—maybe it was five of seven—tricking with someone, but because I didn’t keep a datebook then, I don’t remember exactly when I started reading about the serial murderer who preyed on Milwaukee’s gay black men. But I think it was on the morning of my first full day there, so that Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer became as much a part of my trip as did Anthony, and Matt, and later Anthony and his boyfriend Sammy. At the time I didn’t obsessively record the names of my tricks as I would later, and so I’ve forgotten the names of one, or maybe two, of the men I had sex with. Jeffrey Dahmer, I read, also forgot the names of his men. What he remembered was their bodies, and what he did to them. What I remember is mornings at the Café Flore, a cappuccino, the San Francisco Chronicle—and Jeffrey Dahmer. Milwaukee seemed far from America’s gay mecca, but Jeffrey Dahmer seemed quite close, not so much in the mornings when I was reading about him as in the evenings, in some bar or sex club or apartment, when the question would inevitably come up: Would you have gone home with him? It was a question I asked myself again in February 1993 when I visited the derelict industrial block of South 2nd Street in Milwaukee that was home to the city’s tiny strip of gay bars, otherwise known as Dahmer’s “hunting grounds.” The 219 came first. Neon tubes poked from the three floors above the bar, glowing pink and blue like the tubes on the outside of Mars once did, back in the days when New York’s Meatpacking District was still mostly meatpackers and gay clubs. Inside there was even more neon than outside, too many airbrushed photographs of naked men, a sparse crowd of ten or fifteen, all white—a change from Dahmer’s day, I was told, when the bar’s clientele was mostly black. The C’est La Vie was next, a carbon copy of the 219, and then the last bar on the strip: the Phoenix. The local hustler bar. From the entrance you could see—and be seen by—virtually the entire room, a deep featureless rectangle like a nail salon in a strip mall, although the dim, damp, smoky air made it feel as claustrophobic as a refrigerator box tipped over on its side. Three white drag queens stared at the door, waiting. In their brown polyester skirts and fuzzy brown sweaters and mouse-brown permed wigs, they looked like nothing but what they were: midwestern men wearing midwestern women’s clothes, sipping stingily at watery drinks in the hope that someone would come along before it was necessary to buy another. A couple of young black men stared at the door, one sitting, one leaning against a wall, waiting, and a couple of old, drunk white men melted into their barstools, also waiting. And one Latino boy thought his wait was over when I walked in the bar. When I looked at him he was already looking at me, staring without blinking, and he continued staring until I left the bar fifteen minutes later. He was handsome but thin, his frail body topped by big, dark eyes. Hatred filled those eyes, and at first I wondered if he thought I was the competition. But the even more palpable need in his expression told me no, he didn’t think I was here to challenge him for what were obviously slim pickings: he thought I was the pickings, and as I returned his stare I glimpsed for the first time the emotional and political reality behind Jeffrey Dahmer’s actions, the intersecting vectors of racism and homophobia that practically cried out for someone to take advantage of the situation. It was too easy to imagine this boy and boys like him, the handsome ones, the ones who needed to be told they were handsome, the ones, most of all, who had been cast out by friends and family and were willing to accept $50—they weren’t hustling, they were posing for pictures—as a substitute for love. This boy wouldn’t tell anyone where he was going because there was no one to tell, and for a few dollars more he would meekly hold out his thin wrists to be handcuffed for the “bondage” photo. He would drink a drugged drink. He would never wake up. And he would never be missed.

  Flash forward four months: June 1993, London, where I had made arrangements to stay the summer with my friend Scott, who’d returned to England after his internship ended the year before. I’d been in the country for less than three hours when I was awakened by a phone call from a reporter for the Sunday Times, who tracked me down through my agent in New York to ask me what, exactly, gay men who “practice sadomasochism” do in bed that leaves them vulnerable to murder. It was several minutes before the reporter could make my jet-lagged brain understand that the bodies of five London men had been discovered over the course of the previous four months, and that all five had been tied up and strangled in their homes. Four of the men, she told me, were openly gay, at least to friends, and three were believed to “practice sadomasochism” and were probably picked up in leather bars. I, as a gay writer whose work seemed, in the opinion of the reporter who called me, to have something to do with sadomasochism, had been singled out, tracked down, and woken up to comment on the lives of these five men I knew nothing about.

  Later I learned a few things. I learned that Peter Walker was forty-five when he died. Christopher Dunn was thirty-seven. Perry Bradley was thirty-five. Andrew Collier was thirty-three, Emanuel Spiteri forty-one. I learned that Peter Walker was the assistant director of the West End production of City of Angels. Christopher Dunn was a children’s librarian at Harlesden Library. Perry Bradley, an American, was international sales director at J-B Weld, an adhesives manufacturer, Andrew Collier took care of the old people who lived at Greenacre Court in Hackney, and Emanuel Spiteri, born in Malta, worked as a catering assistant at Imperial College in Kensington. I learned that Peter Walker was found on March 10, 1993, Christopher Dunn on May 30, 1993, Perry Bradley and Andrew Collier on June 7, 1993, and June 9, 1993, respectively, and Emanuel Spiteri on June 15, 1993, the day I arrived in London. I learned, in other words, only what I read in the papers, which is to say, only what the papers found worth telling. What I didn’t learn was how these men lived, nor even, excluding the obvious mechanical facts, how they died.

  For most Londoners—for straight Londoners anyway, and for gay Londoners who didn’t “practice sadomasochism” or considered themselves prettier than the killer’s middle-aged, overweight victims—the case was essentially a six-week-long media blitz. (From my journal of June 23, 1993: “They’ve released a description of the serial killer: white, between 30–40, large build (fat or muscle no one said; clearly, not fags working this case), short hair (I think) & clean-shaven as of 2 weeks ago. Oh, and he has ‘discoloured teeth.’ Well, I suspect I won’t be asking him home anytime soon.”) It wasn’t until a few days after the fourth victim, Andrew Collier, was found on June 9 that the public was made aware of the serial killings, and by July 30 an unemployed thirty-nine-year-old named Colin Ireland had been arrested and charged in two of the murders; he was later charged in, and pleaded guilty to, all five. But before the arrest London had first, depending on one’s point of view, to be amused by or suffer through the reporting of the murders, and my eight weeks in England were punctuated by the press accounts of the story much as my time in San Francisco had been marked by the Dahmer spectacle. Only this time the story was more intimate—more titillating—because I was in the same city as the killer, and the killer was, at least initially, still at large. There was, i
n the first week, the requisite soft-pedaling of the victims’ lives. The Daily Star summed up Emanuel Spiteri this way: “One former barman—nicknamed ‘Cinders’—said: ‘He was always cheerful, with a nice personality and a pretty face.’” (One imagines Mary outside her son’s tomb: “He had such a lovely disposition. Didn’t complain even when they drove the nails in.”) There was, shortly afterward, the “investigative” journalism into London’s gay BDSM scene. One bar, the Coleherne, was referred to as the “Coal Urn” (c.f. Cinders?) when a reporter relied on the pronunciation rather than the spelling skills of his interviewee. I found signs when I went to another bar, the Block, posted in the corner where sex, when it happened, happened, informing a crowd of men whose activities didn’t seem much affected that, because of the serial killer, “reporters might be present.” There was, still in the opening weeks, the expected AIDS hysteria: three of the victims, it turned out, were HIV-positive, and for a few weeks an “AIDS-revenge” motive was bandied about; this wasn’t abandoned, exactly, but the complete lack of proof made it hard to discuss without appearing to speculate. Then there were reports of a series of phone calls made by the killer to the Metropolitan Police, press, and other groups. Thus the killer’s lack of respect for gay life was matched, we learned from the Daily Mail, only by his concern for dogs: after killing Peter Walker he called up the Samaritans to rescue the animals trapped in their murdered master’s flat. Early in July there was the “videofit,” a computer-generated image based on witnesses’ descriptions of a man who was assumed to be the killer, and there was, a week later, the fuzzy still from a video camera mounted in a tube station showing, clearly, Emanuel Spiteri and, obliquely, a tall, fattish man following him. A week later a nearly identical still, referred to as the “enhanced” image, was released; the only additional details I could make out were the fat man’s shoe and part of his shoulder. Toward the end of July there was the tabloids’ long-sought-after visit with Dennis Nilsen, convicted in 1983 of murdering six gay men, and suspected in the deaths of nine more. Cast by both the press and himself in the role of Hannibal Lecter, Nilsen wrote in a letter printed in the Evening Standard, “Hate is not a factor in this maladaptive conundrum”; rather, he told readers, “the multifarious circumstances of [the killer’s] life came to a converging crisis in March and triggered him on his one-way ticket to multiple homicide.” There was, finally, the arrest, but by this time the multifarious circumstances of this maladaptive conundrum—dead queers, kinky sex practices, taunting phone calls, and psychokiller psychobabble—had come to their converging crisis, and were now used up. Reports of the arrest, where it was reported, were limited to the back pages, and then, in my final two weeks in London, there was nothing at all.