by Dale Peck
The media that reported this story were London’s tabloids—the Sun, the Mirror, the Star, the Mail—and they laid it out with their usual combination of tact, compassion, and nuance. The story figured in the gay press, of course, in the Pink Paper and Capital Gay and Gay Times, was given its due in the mainstream dailies, the conservative Times, Telegraph, and Evening Standard, the more liberal Independent and Guardian. But it was the News of the World that found it necessary to run photographs from a gay BDSM catalog beside photographs of the victims, and it was the Sun that felt the need to explain—incorrectly, as it turned out—the rudiments of the handkerchief code, and, as they say, it would have been funny if it hadn’t been grotesque. Now, it should be noted that by 1993 London had a chapter of ACT UP. London had a Queer Nation. London had a group of its own creation, OutRage!, and London had Boy George and Jimmy Somerville and Sir Ian McKellen. London even had Simon Watney, author of Policing Desire, the urtext of queer media criticism. But in a city where it was illegal for same-sex couples to hold hands or kiss in public, it seems safe to say that London’s queers didn’t wield even the qualified political power that New York’s did. It was a group called Gay London Policing that first suggested to the Metropolitan Police that the murders might be the work of one person, and later served as a conduit for information from gay witnesses reluctant to speak directly to the police. But GALOP aside, ACT UP and Queer Nation and OutRage! aside, London’s queers couldn’t do anything about the homophobic sentiments that appeared in the press for six weeks. Just one example: “The gay scene is ideal for killing,” the Daily Express quoted a forensic psychologist as saying. “If the killer is good-looking, and regarded as something of a catch, then his victims might not be asking too many questions.” It occurred to me as I read that line that it was exactly what the reporter from the Sunday Times was hoping I would say to her.
WHEN, IN AUGUST, I left London, and Colin Ireland, and Peter Walker and Christopher Dunn and Perry Bradley and Andrew Collier and Emanuel Spiteri and the Sun and the Mirror and the Daily Express, I arrived back in New York to read in the Times and Newsday and the Post and the Daily News about Michael Sakara and Anthony Marrero and Thomas Mulcahy, and, shortly afterward, an editor from the Village Voice contacted me and asked me to write my own version of this story—a kind of Tale of Two Cities, only this time the cities would be London and New York and the war would be against homosexuals rather than the ancien régime. It was only the second reported story of my career and already the second about gay serial killers. In truth the story should have been old news by the time I returned to New York, had the New York City Police Department and, by extension, the press chosen to take note of it after Anthony Marrero had been murdered three months earlier, in May. The NYPD had been made aware of the murder of Thomas Mulcahy in July 1992 by both New Jersey police and the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, because the last place Thomas Mulcahy had been seen alive was the Townhouse, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The NYPD had again been contacted by Jersey police and AVP after the murder of Anthony Marrero in May 1993, and, further, had been made aware that both New Jersey cops and AVP were, according to Bea Hanson, AVP’s Director of Client Services, “making connections between [Marrero] and the Mulcahy body.” Both times the NYPD declined to get involved because, according to Hanson, “the bodies were found outside of New York state … even though the origination of the crimes was in New York City.” Instead, the NYPD adopted a wait-and-see attitude, which meant, essentially, that it would wait to investigate and it would wait to inform New York’s gay community of the possibility of a serial killer until another gay man was killed. In the meantime, according to Hanson, “New Jersey cops came [into New York City] and we worked with them to check out bars. New York City cops could have easily done that.”
It wasn’t until the NYPD was made aware of the recovery of parts of the body of Michael Sakara in Rockland County, New York, on July 31 and August 1 that the existence of a serial killer of gay men was finally declared, and then only tentatively. As Rockland County District Attorney Kenneth Gribetz put it in Newsday, “We’re not trying to cause panic but we don’t want to be living in a dream world”; the similarities, he went on, are “enough for the public to be concerned about.” Or, as New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told the Post when asked if a serial killer was murdering gay men in New York: “It’s too early to say. He appears to frequent clubs of that nature.” Translation: we don’t know if there’s a serial killer, but we do know he hangs out at gay bars. Finally, at a Gracie Mansion press conference held August 8, where City Council member Tom Duane, who is openly gay, as these things must be put, spoke, and openly gay City Council member Antonio Pagan did not, Mayor David Dinkins—who, like Councilman Duane and Councilman Pagan, was running for re-election, said, “We do not know if a gay serial killer is stalking our city, but we do know that over a two-year period the dismembered bodies of five gay or bisexual men have been found.”
The two bodies Mayor Dinkins referred to, besides those of Thomas Mulcahy, Anthony Marrero, and Michael Sakara, were those of Guillermo Mendez and Peter Anderson, whose deaths were shortly afterward ruled the work of another killer or killers.* What Mayor Dinkins’s speech left New Yorkers with, then, were three dead gay men (Mulcahy, Marrero, Sakara) murdered by one person, and a fourth dead gay man (Anderson) who, as it turned out, was murdered by the same person, although at the time it looked like he’d been murdered by some other person or persons. But by bringing Peter Anderson into the discussion, Dinkins had, wittingly or unwittingly, brought in Julio Prado, who had been murdered January 11, 1992, Van Pleasant, murdered July 19, 1992, Roosevelt Lewis, murdered March 3, 1993, Lawrence Andrews, March 1993, Dwight Greene, July 1993, and Jimmy Hawkins, who had been found in his apartment on August 15, 1993 with his throat slashed and thirty-one additional stab wounds puncturing his body. All of these men—like, presumably, Peter Anderson and Thomas Mulcahy and Anthony Marrero and Michael Sakara—had been murdered by men they picked up for a night of sex.
“This is all happening,” Bea Hanson told me, “in the context of another group of murders that the police have virtually ignored. In most of these other cases the police have not made an effort to work with the gay community.” It was, perhaps, a rhetorical question, but I asked it anyway: did Hanson think homophobia was a factor in the police department’s decision not to investigate these cases? “It’s absolutely homophobia. Even in the pick-up cases that aren’t murder cases the majority of the police response is, ‘Well, why’d you bring the guy home anyway?’ Then you have a murder: ‘So it’s a couple of fags dead. Big deal.’” Hanson continued: “There is, I think, a sort of homophobia that goes on that gives the police an excuse to not really investigate. Investigating means connecting with the gay and lesbian community. It means going to gay bars, so that officers need to keep confronting their own homophobia over and over again. And in addition to the homophobia that’s shrouding this whole investigation is the dimension of racism. Anthony Marrero, who was a Latino man [and] a street hustler, hasn’t gotten the kind of attention that someone like Thomas Mulcahy received. In the Mulcahy case, after his body was found, they assigned a detective to work specifically on that case. Anthony Marrero didn’t get any detective assigned to him.”
“It’s a shame that we have to wait until there is a bona fide string of these incidents before we can get any attention,” Matt Foreman, AVP’s executive director, told the Post, although it appeared that what it actually took to get police or press attention was not just “a bona fide string of these incidents,” but a bona fide string of incidents attributable to just one person. “We have been trying to get the police department to respond to this since July of last year,” Bea Hanson told the Washington Blade. “This could have been stopped earlier.” Hanson’s words sounded familiar to me. The same thing had been said in Milwaukee, of course, by both its gay and its black citizens. But that wasn’t what I was thinking of. Ten yea
rs earlier, in the March 14–27, 1983 issue of the New York Native, in an essay entitled “1,112 and Counting,” Larry Kramer had written: “We desperately need something from our government to save our lives, and we’re not getting it.” Kramer’s essay had come some twenty months after the New York Times’s “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals” headline of July 3, 1981, and, just as the Times article is generally regarded as the first news story about AIDS, Kramer’s piece is generally regarded as the first essay about AIDS, though both of these details are less important than the fact that Kramer had gone on to make the same demands for the next decade, and the Times had not. But despite the fact that 1,112 had jumped to 360,909—and counting—we still weren’t getting what we needed from our government.
And yes, I know: that’s probably melodramatic too. But it doesn’t make it any less true.
*On May 27, 2001, after the development of a technique called vacuum metal deposition made it possible to recover fingerprints from plastic, Richard W. Rogers, a fifty-one-year-old Staten Island resident, was arrested for, and later convicted of, the murders of Anthony Marrero and Thomas Mulcahy. He remains the sole suspect in the murders of Michael Sakara, Peter Anderson, and Matthew John Pierro, whose body was recovered in Lake Mary, Florida, on April 10, 1982, with a bite mark that was said by an odontologist to have been made by Rogers; Rogers’s fingerprints—which were on file because he had killed “an acquaintance” in 1973, for which he was acquitted on grounds of self-defense—were found at the crime scene. The murder of Guillermo Mendez (who wasn’t gay) remains unsolved.
4
April 19, 1991
I’m getting ready to take a disco nap when Suki, Tasha’s cat, starts to whine. I look at the clock: almost 6:30. She’s not fed till seven. I’ve gone out the past several Fridays (and most Saturdays, and a few Sundays) and the truth is I’m a little bored with the scene, though some new developments have made it more interesting. And I haven’t hung out in a while with CB, who’s driving in from Connecticut, so that’ll be nice. But it’s been a long day capping a long week, and I’m not going to do anything if I don’t get some sleep—and Suki, who can scream like she’s dying of feline leukemia, isn’t about to let that happen. “You win,” I tell her, coming out of my room. I dump some Science Diet for mature cats in her bowl, then head back to my futon.
CB buzzes at nine. “I’ll wait for you in the car,” he tells the intercom. CB has this thing about cars: his last one was stolen (while he was having dinner with me, as it happens), and this one’s been broken into three times in six months, so maybe it’s justified.
Downstairs, I notice the absence of his current beau. “Where’s Jay?” I ask. “Jay’s at home,” CB tells me.
I met Jay at a birthday party a week ago. I’d heard about him for weeks—how he’d grown up on a ranch in Montana, how he met CB the first time he walked into a gay bar, how he’d been engaged to a woman who was now “back in Montana.” As a phenomenon Jay fascinated me: The Young Gay Man Upon First Coming Out. Though only twenty-two, a year younger than me, at the party Jay had seemed like a teenager, hanging his head, smiling a lot (but not talking), hiding behind CB. When he thought no one was looking he’d put his hand on the back of CB’s neck and let his fingers play over the skin. When I saw that, I remembered CB telling me that Jay had gone home with him without even a kiss first. I thought both actions stemmed from Jay’s nervousness about being gay (“Well actually,” he told me at the birthday party, “I don’t like to label myself.”), but then I remembered something else CB had said. At his house CB had tried to kiss Jay, and Jay had pushed him away. “How do you get AIDS?” he’d demanded. So instead of sex that first night, they’d had sex ed.
“Jay told me the other night that he’s definitely gay,” CB tells me as we drink Rolling Rocks and drive through the park. “But I don’t think he’s ready for this.” No, I have to agree, he’s probably not.
In 1984 HIV was identified as the cause of AIDS, but despite this fact, and the concomitant discovery that transmission of the virus could be prevented through fairly simple modifications to sexual activity—i.e., safe sex—in 1985 Ed Koch closed New York City’s bathhouses, sex clubs, and back rooms (heterosexual as well as homosexual, to be fair to Hizzoner) in the name of preventing the spread of HIV, and for the past six years public sex has been pretty much absent from New York. But David Dinkins defeated Koch in the 1989 Democratic primary, then defeated Rudy Giuliani in the 1989 general election, and almost as soon as he took office in 1990 things began to relax. Now Limelight, a Catholic church turned nightclub, has decided to test the waters by opening a back room at Mea Culpa, its Friday night party. The sex room is located in what used to be the friary, so people aren’t doing anything there that hasn’t been done before, except perhaps dancing.
As a college student in New Jersey I’d read Guy Trebay’s account in the Village Voice of the last days of the Mineshaft. I’d read Edmund White’s description of alfresco sex on the West Side piers in Nocturnes for the King of Naples and Andrew Holleran’s tales of hedonism in the Everard Baths in Dancer From the Dance and Larry Kramer’s debauched description of same in Faggots. It’s not that I wanted to visit a sex club: I felt compelled to. The gay identity I was adopting as both a man and a writer was epicurean, libertine, and quite possibly not good for me. In lieu of discrete acts of missionary monogamy, sex had become vertical, social, with innumerable partners coalescing and drifting apart in scenarios that could go on for hours, days even, though none of the players at the end might have been present at the beginning. And now, finally, I was getting a chance to find out what all the fuss was about.
Downstairs, some go-go boys are dancing atop the bar, and CB and I conduct a pseudointellectual discussion about the unsexiness of strippers so we can pretend our gawking is derisory rather than desirous. After a while that gets boring, so we dance. We drink. We separate. I find myself at the door of the sex room, which gapes at me like a big black mouth. The idea of anonymity is qualified as soon as I walk in and see CB. Unsure of the etiquette, I do my best to keep us in separate social circles, but, stealing a glance at his partner, I realize I know him too. I’m trying to remember if he and CB have ever met when someone puts his hand on my crotch and I forget about CB. It’s not as if my mind turns off or anything. If anything, I’m cerebrating even more than I did with the go-go boys—although, to be fair to myself, I should mention that I’d agreed before the fact to write about this experience, so I was primed to give it an intellectual frisson. No, that’s not quite right either. The truth is I’d heard about Mea Culpa’s back room weeks before but, despite five years of fantasizing about just this sort of thing, hadn’t worked up the nerve to check it out. But when an editor at OutWeek announced that the magazine was doing a feature on “a night in queer New York,” I immediately offered to cover Limelight. So I’m not just getting my rocks off: I’m working. But I’m also, you know, getting my rocks off, in the former friary of an old church filled with twenty or thirty men.