Hold Tight Gently

by Duberman, Martin

  He was outspoken and unashamed about his “sluthood.” Not every fuck had been magical, but the vast majority, he insisted, had given him pleasure. And what, he wanted to know, was wrong with that? No coercion had been involved, no pederasty, no exchange of cash, no pretense at faithfulness or romance. Like other gay male sex radicals of the day, Mike denounced the puritanical fuzziness that sanctioned multiple monogamous orgasms in order to produce children but frowned on a comparable number with multiple partners to produce pleasure. He did “not accept the concept of sexual addiction at all.” A bit later, after he’d become a spokesperson for a segment of the People with AIDS (PWAs) movement, he’d read his sexual history somewhat differently, referring to his generation of sexual liberationists as “predatory, shame-based, dark, use-once-and-throw-away, no contact sex—[all of which went] deep into our wiring.” Later still—in part as a result of reading books by “sex-positive” feminists—he’d reclaim and celebrate his “slut” years.

  There was one hitch: the escalating number of STDs. Mike was in and out of Sonnabend’s office so often that they eventually shifted to a first-name basis. Mike was fond of saying that “if it isn’t fatal, it’s no big deal,” but Joe was less nonchalant about his multiple, incessant infections. When Mike contracted hepatitis for the third time and developed fevers, night sweats, and bloody diarrhea, Joe hospitalized him. Consommé and a battery of tests were his diet for a week. His acne and hemorrhoids improved but a firm diagnosis remained elusive. Sonnabend called in a tropical disease specialist, but the best he could come up with was “atypical malaria.” Mike had never been to the tropics, and the paracytology tests failed to confirm that diagnosis or any other. The doctors were back to where they began—scratching their heads.

  And not just those in New York. The appearance of other, seemingly anomalous symptoms among young gay men was beginning to puzzle physicians elsewhere. The most perplexing were Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), typically associated with the suppression of the immune system; and the appearance of purplish spots on the skin. Sonnabend was among the first to recognize that the spots were indicative of lymphatic tumors, a rare cancer known as Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) that was traditionally associated with elderly men of Mediterranean origin. Mystified, doctors began to compare notes with colleagues around the country.

  Mike wasn’t Joe Sonnabend’s only patient to experience night sweats and weight loss. As the numbers mounted, he decided to send blood samples to the University of Nebraska, the only place at the time with up-to-date T cell testing technology. Joe drew blind samples from three groups of patients whose histories he knew well: ten were in monogamous relationships; ten were in sexually open-ended relationships, both partners “dabbling” with third parties; and ten were, like Mike, “sluts.” Sonnabend’s theory was that the degree of immune deficiency would correlate differently for each group—a theory confirmed by the test results: the monogamous group had on average the highest count of protective CD4 cells, the sluts the lowest.

  Knowing that Mike was “highly suggestible,” Joe refused at first to provide his individual results. He gave Mike assorted excuses: the technology was new and its reliability not fully tested; yes, the three groups did have distinctive patterns, but no one knew why; and so on. “Well, you must think it means something,” an impatient Mike persisted, “so you might as well tell me. I promise to keep my blabby mouth quiet.” And so Joe finally did: “Your immune system is shot—your crucial CD4 cell count is lower than I’d hoped.” “How low?” Mike persisted. Joe retreated to generalities: “I can’t tell you for certain. Obviously it’s better to have more CD4 cells than less, since they indicate the health of your immune system. But the CD4 count is known to fluctuate considerably for a given individual—so don’t start getting crazy on me.” Within days, Mike fell into a clinical depression that lasted some six months. The year was 1980.

  In June 1981, the CDC reported in its prestigious journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) that between October 1980 and May 1981, five young men in Los Angeles, “all active homosexuals,” had come down with PCP and two of them had already died. A few weeks later the MMWR added twenty cases of KS among gay men in New York and six in California to the puzzling count. That led the New York Times’ medical reporter Dr. Lawrence Altman to write a short article in July 1981, reporting that a fatal “gay cancer” had been found among homosexual men who’d had “multiple and frequent sexual encounters with different partners.” Thus was the equation drawn early on between gay male promiscuity and terrifying disease.

  It was a familiar pairing. The view that equated homosexuality with “sickness” had long held sway both in the general population and among the medical “experts.” Thanks to pressure from the post-Stonewall political movement that arose in the early 1970s, some progress had been made in disassociating the two phenomena; the American Psychiatric Association dropped homosexuality from the category of disease as early as 1973. But the new gay political movement had drawn only a small number of adherents; many gay men (lesbians much less so) associated gay liberation during the 1970s with sexual freedom, not with attempting to shift public opinion through educational efforts or pressure politics.

  In the historically significant election year of 1980, the fledgling gay movement played little role, its issues ignored by the major political parties. Ronald Reagan’s ascension to the presidency marked the onset of a conservative retrenchment that would have horrific ramifications for the mounting epidemic and—in tandem with economic distress—heighten the plight of the disadvantaged in general, bringing the era of civil rights to a screeching halt. Within a year of his election, Reagan’s Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act inaugurated massive cuts in social welfare, soon followed by several-billion-dollar reductions in food stamp and child nutrition programs. Funding for the construction of subsidized housing fell from nearly 145,000 starts in 1981 to a mere 17,000 in 1986, disproportionately affecting low-income African Americans and Hispanics. By 1982, much of the limited progress that had been made in this country, starting with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives against poverty, would be wiped away.

  The Reagan agenda had a different set of priorities: increased spending for combating “communism” (especially in Central America), an emphasis on traditional family values (“Just Say No”), and a “trickle-down” theory of supply-side economics that envisioned a future harkening back to Herbert Hoover. The key spokesmen for the administration, Gary Bauer and William Bennett, held traditional values about gender and sexuality that reached back beyond Hoover to the late nineteenth century. Reagan did appoint a few African Americans to high judicial office, but they were uniformly tried-and-true conservatives opposed to affirmative action and to extending federal action on school desegregation: to chair the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, for example, he chose Clarence Thomas, that exemplar of deafness to human suffering, who would later be elevated to the Supreme Court.

  To further ensure that the underclass would fail to improve its lot, Reagan embraced states’ rights—that traditional weapon of white supremacists—and mocked “welfare queens.” In a speech he gave in Philadelphia, Mississippi—the town where three activists against segregation had been brutally murdered in 1964—Reagan made it clear that “states’ rights” would indeed retain its long-coded meaning of “white supremacy.” Those other undesirables, homosexuals, sex workers, and intravenous drug users, would be treated dismissively as well. As Congress gradually increased funding over the years for AIDS education and research, it would always be more than the Reagan administration had requested or would spend.

  During the 1980s as well as today, Washington, D.C., itself was something of an anomaly. It simultaneously has a high median income level and a nearly 20 percent poverty rate (exceeded only by Mississippi). During the economic restructuring in the country as a whole during the 1960s and 1970s, technological advances had led to the loss of many manufacturing jobs; they were replaced by low
-paying service jobs and a high level of unemployment—which disproportionately affected black workers. In the public sector, ironically, blacks with college degrees were able to find professional jobs in the federal government, leading to a significantly larger black middle class whose comparative prosperity contrasted sharply with the decline in economic security for the majority of blacks.

  D.C. has always had a large African American population—in 1970 it reached a peak of 70 percent of the whole, since declining to about 50 percent. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, rioting that raged for three days had broken out in black neighborhoods and been quelled only by some fifteen thousand federal troops. It wasn’t until 1973 that Congress had given the District home rule, providing for an elected mayor and a thirteen-member council. In 1975 Walter Washington became D.C.’s first elected mayor and first African American to hold the office. He was succeeded in 1979 by Marion Barry, another African American leader, but one—he’d been chair of the radical Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—of a quite different stripe.

  Not surprisingly, few blacks—fewer than one in ten—had voted for Reagan in 1980 or supported his draconian measures, but that shouldn’t be taken as the measure or proof of a unified local black community. Many members of the churchgoing black middle class in D.C. feared Barry as a dangerous extremist, a threat to whatever “betterment” they’d managed to attain, and in the Democratic primary for mayor they’d supported his opponent, Sterling Tucker, former director of the cautious Washington Urban League. Neither Barry nor his antagonists, moreover, had as yet shown any awareness or concern for the all but invisible black gay men and lesbians living in their midst, often in isolation from each other.4

  In 1980, the largely hidden, unorganized world of black gay people stood in stark contrast to the visibility and assertiveness of the white gay community, as spearheaded by the newly radicalized D.C. chapter of the pre-Stonewall Mattachine Society. Though its membership never exceeded a hundred people, with a mere dozen serving as the activist core, D.C. Mattachine had successfully challenged the discriminatory policies of the Civil Service Commission and had gone on to pressure the federal government for concessions on additional issues.

  To its credit, D.C. Mattachine had attempted to recruit members from the African American gay bar Nob Hill, though with scant success. Mattachine, like many white-dominated gay organizations, then and now, never understood that the issue of sexual orientation was merely one, and not necessarily the most important, issue that afflicted black gay people on a daily and ongoing basis. Washington, D.C., was segregated in all but name—meaning not just the bars, but schools, housing, medical facilities, and employment opportunities as well.

  A black gay presence was just beginning to emerge openly in D.C. and in the nation at large. As early as 1975, a group calling itself the Baltimore Gay Alliance had appeared, and by 1978 the D.C. Coalition had emerged as well. Then in August 1979, just two months before the first national gay march took place in Washington, the initial issue of Blacklight magazine appeared under the editorship of Sidney Brinkley (it would continue publishing until 1986).

  Simultaneously, a somewhat select core group of openly black gay men and lesbians—from writers to filmmakers to service organizers—emerged into prominence, among them Billy Jones, Delores Berry, Gil Gerald, Essex Hemphill, Michelle Parkerson, and Renee McCoy. The D.C. black gay community realized fairly quickly that it had the potential to form a national organization, and among their first actions was to ensure that the 1979 March on Washington included their voices. They formally incorporated in October 1980 as the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays (NCBLG). By 1984, it had chapters in half a dozen cities and, unlike some other African American organizations, actively committed resources to fighting AIDS. Though some well-known figures would be involved over the next decade—including Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and Joseph Beam—NCBLG had to wage an ongoing struggle, which it ultimately lost, to raise money and build its membership rolls. Marginalized communities, even when comparatively well educated and gifted, usually lack an abundance of all resources except suffering.5

  The reasons are many. It’s probably safe to say that, despite individual variations, for many black gays, race—a shared history and marker of oppression—was and is the primary source of identity, with gender and sexual orientation often secondary (particularly since the latter can be usually hidden if necessary). That was certainly true for the poet Essex Hemphill. “My race,” he once wrote, “even at the point of birth, was more important than my sexuality. That’s going to always be the case. . . . I love my race enough to know that I’m a Black man first and foremost and that my sexuality falls in line after that.”6

  It’s often been argued that homophobia in African American communities is more deeply entrenched than in white ones, but that assertion, I’d suggest, mistakenly equates the black church with the black community—and even the church, it can be further argued, has in recent years come around somewhat on the issue. When Blacklight began to publish in 1979, the comment of Bishop William A. Hilliard that “the Church is diametrically opposed to homosexuality” or the publicly stated view of Bishop Jasper Roby to the effect that unless homosexuality ceased, it would “destroy us all,” probably typified the view of most traditional black church leaders and goers. After all, heterosexual blacks had themselves been caricatured for so long as (among other things) “lustful sexual beasts” that upholding middle-class white norms of monogamous pair-bonding and excluding noncomplying members of their own community had become an instrument of self-defense. Since then, as attitudes toward homosexuality have grown more progressive in general, so have those within the black church.7

  Even back in 1979, black families, arguably, didn’t disown or “throw away” their nonconforming children to the same extent that white families did (and still do). When the poet Essex Hemphill, for one, spoke of “home,” as he often did, he quite literally meant his own family—not the white-dominated gay “community.” The implicit agreement between black parents and their gay offspring often hinged on keeping the news tightly confined within the family circle. This was not the case with Essex. “I exercise the same candor with my parents,” he once wrote, “that I exercise with most people.” And candor was among his most marked characteristics.8

  Essex had been born prematurely and with a heart murmur in 1957—he was two years younger than Mike Callen. The second oldest of five children (three sisters and one brother), he was born in Chicago but raised mostly in Washington, D.C. His parents, Mantalene and Warren, had a stormy relationship that ended in divorce. Essex had a deep love/anger bond with his mother, Mantalene, a strong, dignified woman who would later hold an administrative job in the copyright division of the Library of Congress. But he rarely had a positive word for his alcoholic and abusive father (only once did he refer to both of his parents as having been “inspiring” to him). In his poem “Vital Signs,” Essex recalled witnessing his father’s violence: “I . . . always see him punching and pushing, slapping and yelling.” One of Essex’s close friends in adulthood recalls him saying that once he was even witness to his father stabbing his mother. In the poem “Fixin’ Things,” Essex describes the family’s dynamics:

  In retrospect, it wasn’t the sound

  Of my mother crying that hurt most,

  It was the sound of my father leaving

  His marriage, his house, his familiars.

  In the debris of ruptured bloodlines,

  In the domestic violence of our families,

  In the turbulence we call love was bred

  The possibility of my dysfunction, and yours.

  I tell you of the hatred

  That seized the boyhoods

  Of my brother and me,

  How we fought violently in public,

  Drawing blood as if it would

  Allow us to see

  What was wrong with it,

  With him, with me . . .<
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  As a youngster, Essex spent summers with his maternal grandmother, “Miss Emily”—for whom he felt “pure love”—at her home in Columbia, South Carolina. Her late husband had owned a small restaurant in town, but because it attracted a “risqué” crowd it had been declared off-limits to Mantalene and her siblings—except to deliver the peach cobblers Miss Emily made at home (though the kids would sneak by after school for lemonade or soda pop). Among other things, Miss Emily taught Essex to cook and praised him for turning out food that reminded her of her husband’s.

  As a growing boy, Essex wasn’t inclined toward athletics: “In the black neighborhood I came from, there was an emphasis on being able to play basketball or football. I, instead, was attracted to gymnastics because of the way the body looked. But I knew instinctively that if I had said, ‘I want to be a gymnast,’ among the fellas I ran with I would have been labeled a sissy.” Essex’s tight, slender frame never grew much beyond five feet six inches. As he later put it, “I was the smallest of the fellas that I ran with when I was growing up. When you’re the smallest, you absorb the blows of other people trying to be ‘manly.’ I guess it’s an awful fact of adolescence. That drove me to writing, I think.”