Hold Tight Gently

by Duberman, Martin

  Besides, Mike was dumbfounded that Richard, who was in good health, would choose to get sexually involved with someone possibly contagious and probably fatally ill. With typical directness, Mike simply asked him—and was amazed at Richard’s matter-of-fact response: “I’m a gay man living in New York City. I’m going to have to deal with this disease sooner or later. I may as well begin now.” Richard, too, had had numerous partners in the past—though he couldn’t match Mike’s high numbers—yet he’d had few sexually transmitted diseases and didn’t have a compromised immune system.

  It was at just this critical juncture—July 1982—that the CDC released new findings that further muddied the waters. Within a two-week period the CDC announced three cases of PCP among hemophiliacs and thirty-four cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma among Haitians living in the United States. The CDC offered no commentary to accompany the figures, but obviously the “gay disease” had now been found in several other populations and wasn’t strictly confined to gay people. Reactions ranged from excitement to rage. The excitement was mostly felt by gay men relieved of the singular onus for the plague (the term “GRID” quickly gave way to acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS) and hopeful that a substantial rise in federal funding and research would follow. The rage was felt among hemophiliacs who had previously assumed that the blood supply was uncontaminated, and among Haitians for being unfairly singled out for discrimination. AIDS had also been found in Denmark in 1981, but that was all but unmentioned, as Haiti—in a clear case of racism—was highlighted. Within a few months, the Haitian Coalition on AIDS was founded to challenge, successfully, the designation of Haitians as a risk group.10

  With Mike’s health improved, he and Rich Berkowitz set to work on the Sonnabend-inspired article. It took three months to complete and Mike, ever the perfectionist, was ready for yet another rewrite until Rich called a halt by pointing out that the number of diagnosed cases in New York City had doubled from three hundred to six hundred during the time they’d been at work. They entitled the piece “We Know Who We Are,” and it appeared in the November 8–21, 1982, issue of New York Native with a byline that added “with Richard Dworkin” to Callen and Berkowitz. It minced no words: “Few have been willing to say it so clearly, but the single greatest risk factor for contracting AIDS is a history of multiple sexual contacts with partners who are having multiple sexual contacts.”

  “Other factors may contribute,” they acknowledged later in the piece, but went on to insist that to date “no evidence supports” speculation about a new or mutant virus. It was true that the CDC had found a cluster of nine gay men who’d had sexual contact only with one another over a five-year period, and yet each man had developed Kaposi’s—thus suggesting that a virus, not promiscuity, was centrally involved. Yet in a footnote, the CDC had acknowledged that the nine “tended to report having more sexual partners in the year before onset of symptoms (median: 50).” As for hemophiliacs, the U.S. blood supply comes of course from many different donors with many different viruses, and “continual re-exposure and re-infection” over the years may have weakened the recipients’ immune systems. In regard to the infected Haitians, CDC scientists reasoned that in the course of frequent visits to and from the island, with its poor sanitary conditions, they may have picked up “a variety of tropical viruses.”

  Mike and Rich argued in their article that “whichever theory you accept, promiscuity is the way AIDS is being spread among gay men”; they specifically cited, as did a number of specialists in the early years, the known fact that repeated re-infection with a common herpes virus—cytomegalovirus (CMV)—“produced a mild sperm-induced immunosuppression.” Both were forthright about acknowledging in the piece their own sexually active histories and went to great lengths to avoid being misunderstood as saying that there was something inherently wrong with having a large number of sexual contacts. Not only did they still believe in sexual liberation, they argued, but they were not suggesting legislating an end to promiscuity—like passing laws to close the baths or back-room bars. The underlying cause of AIDS, they insisted, was homophobia: “Hatred has forced too many of us into the ghetto of the bathhouse circuit . . . disease settings equivalent to those of poor Third World nations, and junkies.”

  Instead, Rich and Mike called for “sexual alternatives”—like “ ‘fuck buddies’ . . . circles of healthy individuals who can be trusted to limit their sexual contacts to members of that closed group”—until greater understanding of AIDS and treatments for it had developed: “The epidemic of AIDS need not result in abstinence or even monogamy for everyone. Not everyone who wishes to discuss alternatives to promiscuity,” they insisted, “is sex-negative or a sexual fascist.”

  Their article caused an immediate uproar. It should be remembered that in November 1982—just one year into the U.S. epidemic—a significant number of gay men were still in denial about both how extensive and how lethal the plague could become. Thanks to assorted CDC reports, there was also a fairly widespread conviction, bordering in some quarters on hope, that heterosexuals would become infected in mounting numbers. It was a message that the new organization the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) eagerly promoted in the expectation that it would prompt the federal government and the medical establishment to respond with a massive research effort and a quick cure—since heterosexual lives mattered.

  At the time, GMHC, under the conservative leadership of Paul Popham, a Republican gay man and ex-marine, had in an “educational” brochure only gone so far as to say that the disease might be sexually transmitted. David Goodstein, the even more conservative owner of the national gay magazine The Advocate, expressed far more concern about the rise of the Religious Right than about “the gay cancer.” At the end of 1982 he listed AIDS as ninth among the top ten stories affecting homosexuals that year. As for most of the national media—the Boston Globe and National Public Radio were among the few exceptions—they either entirely ignored or profoundly downplayed the mounting health threat. It wasn’t until May 31, 1982, that an American newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, ran a front-page story about the disease now known as AIDS. And during all of that year, the three major television networks devoted a combined total of thirteen minutes to the epidemic, though 853 people had already died from it.

  Not even the countercultural Village Voice had opened up its pages. Dr. Lawrence Mass had been consistently providing reliably sober articles for New York Native about the epidemic, but the Native had only fourteen thousand regular readers in a city with an estimated gay population of six hundred thousand to a million. Since the Native’s circulation was only about 10 percent of the Village Voice’s, Mass submitted an article there in an effort to reach a larger audience. He was turned down on the grounds that “it isn’t a Voice piece.”

  Given the general climate of dismissiveness and denial, Mike and Rich could have logically expected little or no reaction to their own article. But they’d been so deeply engaged with the epidemic and knew so many young men who’d been afflicted (both were members of the first AIDS support group, which met weekly) that they felt and hoped that the piece might have real impact. It did—but not in the way they intended. The response was almost entirely negative, the prime objection being that they’d turned their backs on the sexual revolution and joined forces with Larry Kramer, who in his 1978 novel Faggots had famously and controversially excoriated gay male “promiscuity.”11

  Charles Jurrist, a dance critic for the New York Daily News, published a retaliatory article, “In Defense of Promiscuity,” in the Native accusing Mike and Rich of “the unleashing of hysteria.” Only 716 cases of AIDS had been reliably documented, he argued, and many more people than that “were injured or killed last year in automobile accidents.” After all, he wrote, “life can’t be made risk-free. . . . You can’t very well ask every man you meet to go for $400 worth of laboratory tests and give you a notarized copy of the results before you’ll go to bed with him.” He intended, Jurrist went on, to lead his life
pretty much as he had been: “I will continue to be ‘promiscuous.’ I won’t be scared out of seeking fulfillment. Nor will I consider my behavior in any way as self-destructive.” Jurrist died from AIDS in 1991.

  In the Native, Dr. Peter Seitzman, president of the New York Physicians for Human Rights, agreed with Mike and Rich that “it is the number of different partners that increases risk, not the amount of sex itself,” but he objected to the “vehement” tone they’d employed and accused them of “shout[ing] guilt . . . from the rooftops.” In the Advocate, Nathan Fain, a GMHC board member, similarly claimed that Rich and Mike were urging gay men to “follow along in self-flagellation.” And even Dr. Lawrence Mass joined the chorus of contempt, inaccurately accusing them of linking hands with the Religious Right in demanding that the baths be closed down.

  Nor was the negative reaction confined to New York. A number of the early male leaders of gay rights activism, including Marty Robinson and Jim Owles in New York, Morris Kight in L.A., and Frank Kameny in D.C., actively and publicly resisted any suggestion that recreational sex could be linked with disease. In Toronto, the radical paper Body Politic published a piece by Michael Lynch and Dr. Bill Lewis denouncing the efforts of some gay men to “rip apart the very promiscuous fabric that knits the gay male community together. . . . Gays are once again allowing the medical profession to define, restrict, pathologize us.” Such a response was perhaps understandable, given the fact that the medical community had for generations pathologized gay people, but it was also a misunderstanding of Mike and Rich’s basic argument. In a sharp reply to the Body Politic, Mike fought back:

  Lewis and Lynch are at a loss to understand all the “fear and paranoia” which the AIDS epidemic has caused. It astounds me that I have to point out that all this “panic” is because gay men are dying. . . . However much gay people have suffered at the hands of medicine, we cannot allow our knee-jerk defensiveness to delay urgently needed, rational discussion about the medical hazards of promiscuity. Promiscuity may indeed be the warp that “knits together the social fabric of the gay male community,” but this lifestyle is clearly killing us. . . . By refusing to see that our lifestyle is potentially fatal, we may permit the ultimate triumph of the Moral Majority: we will kill ourselves.

  In a 1983 interview on the TV show Freeman Reports, Berkowitz went still further, likening promiscuity to “alcoholic addiction,” agreeing with his fellow panelist Larry Kramer that “homophobia”—not pleasure—was “at the heart of promiscuity”; the denial of civil rights, the two men claimed, forced people “into the ghetto” and a life of promiscuity. Thus began an ugly schism within the community of gay male activists, one that would at times take on a fiercely acerbic edge.

  In a further attempt to rebut the angry critiques, Mike and Rich submitted a fourteen-page reply to critics of “We Know Who We Are,” in which they justly claimed that their views had been misread, misunderstood, and misrepresented: “Neither of us has experienced a moment of guilt about our own promiscuous behavior. . . . Neither of us has problems with our gayness or with sexuality; we have problems with disease.” They wrote understandingly of a community “dazed by tragedy” but insisted that the best defense was to “educate ourselves about how our bodies work.” The Native refused to print their response and turned down as well another piece that specifically replied to Jurrist’s critique.

  As the debate raged on, New York City hospitals were reacting to the mounting number of AIDS patients with a harshness reminiscent of the medieval treatment of lepers: as contagious sinners kept in de facto isolation from “innocent” human beings. It wasn’t yet clear whether AIDS was most efficiently transmitted through blood or semen, and tales abounded of nurses, gowned and masked from head to toe, ignoring patients or approaching them only with the utmost wariness, frequently sliding meals somewhere in their vicinity—like outside in the hall—rather than risk actual contact. Some AIDS patients, refused a room, ignored by orderlies, died on hospital gurneys in the corridors.

  Nor was funding for research on AIDS remotely keeping pace with the exponential rise in case numbers. During the 1982 Tylenol scare, in which seven people died after taking cyanide-laced pills, the federal government allocated—within two weeks—$10 million to investigate the contamination. In New York City, it was the theater community, not city or state officials, that led the way with fund-raising efforts. As early as 1982, cabarets like Don’t Tell Mama, the Saint disco, and the restaurant Claire did small-scale benefits for AIDS research, and the pace quickened in 1983 when Mike Callen, along with Tammy Grimes, Rex Reed, and others, performed Pal Joey as a benefit for GMHC at Town Hall.12

  During the first year and a half of the AIDS crisis, Washington did little—other than indulge in repetitive, homophobic speeches from congressmen like Jesse Helms and William Dannemeyer in which they applauded the Lord’s righteous punishment of homosexual immorality and recommended a large-scale quarantine program. In these early years of the epidemic, Representative Henry Waxman was nearly alone among congressmen in declaring himself “very disappointed with the government’s response.”

  On the state and city levels the record varied somewhat. New York had more than one-third of all AIDS cases in 1982 but reacted more lethargically in the early years than San Francisco or Los Angeles during the same period. Mike and the GMHC leadership had their differences, but they thought and acted on parallel lines when it came to trying to activate city officials. Mayor Ed Koch, though widely rumored to be gay, had essentially disassociated himself from the epidemic. He assigned Herb Rickman as his “liaison” to both the gay and the Hasidic Jewish communities—an action akin to sending the same ambassador to Iran and Israel.

  Earlier in his career, Koch had positioned himself as an ally of the LGBT movement; on his very first day in office as mayor, January 1, 1978, he’d issued an executive order banning sexual orientation discrimination in municipal employment. But when he moved in 1985 to extend the order to cover city contractors, his good friend and ardent homophobe New York’s Catholic Archbishop John O’Connor threatened to go to court to block gay people from working with children. Koch agreed to let the courts decide—and they overturned the order.

  Koch did testify yearly on behalf of New York City’s gay civil rights bill—introduced annually until finally passed in 1986—but he failed to use his position to exert pressure for passage from behind the scenes. And nearly two years passed after the onset of the AIDS crisis before GMHC or any AIDS group succeeded in getting a meeting with the mayor. Koch did subsequently establish an Office of Gay and Lesbian Health Concerns, under which AIDS was subsumed—but it lacked the funding needed to develop a coordinated citywide response. He also seemed oblivious to the ravages AIDS was inflicting on minority communities. It would be the Manhattan Borough president David Dinkins, not Koch, who in 1986 would sponsor a special meeting of elected minority officials to apprise them of the mounting and disproportionate toll AIDS was taking in their communities.

  Moreover, the Koch administration consistently resisted implementing any AIDS curriculum in New York City’s schools. It wasn’t until 1991, under Mayor David Dinkins, that such education was mandated in the city’s schools. (Dinkins brought down the wrath of many AIDS activists, however, with his appointment of Woodrow (Woody) Myers Jr. as commissioner of New York’s Health Department; Myers had a conservative record on issues like quarantine while health commissioner in Indiana.) Koch did no better with regard to the adoption of a needle exchange program, an essential tool in any effort to lower the infection rate among intravenous drug users. Even Margaret Thatcher, the deeply conservative British prime minister, early embraced both needle exchange and AIDS education.

  Given the mixture of hostility and apathy that characterized the public response to AIDS in general, it became clear to Mike, just as it had to the founders of GMHC, that the stricken would have to form their own organizations and rely on their own ingenuity to stay alive. GMHC was the only service agency in th
e city at a time when even AIDS patients with health or disability insurance were unable to secure benefits. By the beginning of 1983, GMHC, remarkably, had put in place a hotline, crisis counseling, and a volunteer “buddy” system to visit and assist patients. Soon after came an array of additional services, including financial assistance and support groups—all of which Mike admired and applauded. Yet he continued to feel that GMHC’s basic message to gay men to have sex with fewer partners and only “healthy” ones was both vague and dangerously misleading at a time when the HIV virus hadn’t been discovered and “healthy” wasn’t easy to spot or define.

  Mike especially tangled with Mel Rosen, the first head of GMHC. In the fall of 1982, Rosen became GMHC’s executive director—his “field placement” as a graduate school student in social work. Rosen’s congressional testimony in 1983 to the effect that AIDS was “a steaming locomotive aimed at the general population” was in Mike’s view a dishonest attempt to extract more money for research. Berkowitz reported to Mike that when one of Sonnabend’s new patients contacted Rosen at GMHC, he’d warned the young man that “Dr. Sonnabend is not to be trusted.” Mike himself readily acknowledged that Sonnabend had “the eccentricity of genius” and could sometimes come across as “bizarre,” but that hardly meant that his scientific credentials weren’t superlative or that his multifactorial theory shouldn’t be taken seriously. The problem was that Rosen and the GMHC board had decided that they didn’t want Sonnabend’s theory taken too seriously. In the name of improving the public’s attitude, GMHC had made the conscious decision to avoid or downplay any disclosure of gay male sexual “excess” for fear such behavior would be blamed as the “cause” of AIDS. They wanted to emphasize instead that it was not a gay disease but rather an imminent threat to everyone, regardless of age, gender, or sexual orientation. As Berkowitz reported to Mike: “They don’t like what we’re saying about promiscuity. . . . They’re well-meaning but they’re misguided. . . . It’s like a club: you’re in or you’re out.”