Hold Tight Gently

by Duberman, Martin

  Koop’s blind spot about the special needs of the African American community was also characteristic of the New York Times coverage. Its very first article on the subject of AIDS wasn’t published until late in 1985. What followed was a rash of stories linking African swine flu to AIDS, along with coverage of the discomfort felt by the black world in general with the “immorality” of same-gender sex. As Cathy Cohen has pointed out, the Times published only three articles between 1981 and 1993 that focused primarily on black gay men with AIDS—but nine about afflicted women of color, portraying them primarily as “innocent victims” of “bisexual” black men.

  The AIDS community reacted to the Koop report as a sign of hope—and there had been few of late—that more attention might finally be paid. By the end of 1987, AIDS had appeared in some 113 other countries. Europe reacted with a massive educational program to inform and protect its citizens. The United States reacted with a denunciation from the right-wing antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly declaring that Koop wanted to institute “grammar school sodomy classes.”

  The swift growth of ACT UP chapters and confrontational direct action reflected the growing anger in the gay world at the lack of progress against AIDS. Back in 1976 the CDC had spent $9 million within months of the outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease (which killed thirty-four people); during the first year of the AIDS epidemic, with more than two hundred people already dead, the CDC spent $1 million. By the mideighties, the lack of research had been accompanied by growing calls—and not just from right-wingers—for mandatory AIDS testing, quarantine, and even tattooing (the latter advocated by William Buckley). People with AIDS were being attacked, not succored—evicted from their apartments, fired from their jobs, confronted by masked and gloved nurses in hospitals, denied even the assurance of safe private space thanks to the Supreme Court’s 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick ruling.8

  Even as the federal government refused to marshal its resources to combat the mounting AIDS epidemic and in general cut back on social welfare programs that aided the poor, the Reagan administration seemed to have no trouble at all in spending vast sums of money for other kinds of war—including sending marines into Lebanon, invading the tiny island of Grenada, and supporting brutal right-wing elements in El Salvador and Nicaragua. The coffers stayed closed for sissies and perverts, but they spilled forth without prompting for the promotion of macho violence.

  Increasingly, the gay community fought back. The growth in direct-action protest culminated in a massive March on Washington in October 1987. The night before the march, Essex and Wayson did a ten p.m. show at d.c. space and another, joined by Michelle, at midnight. At the earlier showing, at Essex’s initiative, the two men performed a piece denouncing RENAMO (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana), a right-wing political party in Mozambique that was backed by the South African apartheid regime. As Wayson remembers it, the audience response was lukewarm; that in itself bothered Essex, but he was annoyed, too, that Wayson didn’t know as much about RENAMO as he thought he should. The more Essex became a cultural icon in the black gay community, the more, as Wayson saw it, “he was hurt when he felt like he wasn’t understood.” Another example was the negative reaction some members of the black lesbian community had when Essex and Wayson used the word “bitch” when performing the piece “To Some Supposed Brothers.” Essex regarded the piece as “a powerful feminist statement against the verbal abuse and disrespect of black women” shown by many black men, and he felt deeply frustrated that the message had failed to be appreciated. Similarly, when Essex at one point casually dated a white guy, it became, according to Wayson “a bicoastal scandal”—e-mails were exchanged questioning his credibility as an exemplar of black gay male identity and his “blackness credentials” in general.

  At the 1987 march, estimates of the size of the crowd, as always, varied. But as a participant—I went with my partner, Eli, the man I’d met the year before and with whom I still live—I felt confident that the outpouring, led by PWAs, some in wheelchairs, was “huge”—hundreds of thousands. The New York Times estimated the crowd at two hundred thousand, but we thought Newsday was closer to the mark in citing upwards of half a million. “Miles and miles of marchers,” I wrote, went by “in interchangeable blue jeans, wool shirts and sneakers, making the strong visual point that ‘we are everywhere, and everybody.” Watching the TV coverage that night of the simultaneous Columbus Day Parade in New York, with its paramilitary drill units and rifle clubs, I was glad that in our march no one brandished a single weapon; nor were any police needed to discipline the crowd. I saw only one bunch of angry, confrontational people—the Jesus freaks, carrying their hate-filled banners, screaming their violent slogans.9

  It would be a mistake to conflate the heightened number of gay people now committed to direct action against governmental AIDS apathy with the whole of the gay community. Mike’s “quintessential image of an urban gay man in the Reagan 1980s” was someone “sick; shunned; frightened and frightening; and largely unprotected by either law or popular opinion.” Plenty of gay people remained cowed in silent terror—at the disease, at coming out to family and friends, at employers who applauded the recent Justice Department ruling that in regard to federal contracts, employers were entitled to fire employees simply on the suspicion that they were HIV-positive and might “casually transmit” AIDS in the workplace. Still others in the gay community, though not ill or in terror, retreated to an ostrich-like head-in-the-sand attitude.

  Just two months before the March on Washington, when Eli and I vacationed on Fire Island, we stopped off one day to visit Larry Mass, Arnie Kantrowitz, and Vito Russo, who’d taken a house together in Cherry Grove. We found Vito in a justifiable rage over the seeming indifference of the island’s gay inhabitants toward AIDS; he’d written a fiery letter to the Fire Island Times denouncing the smug atmosphere in the community, and it had caused “outrage.” When, that same week, we had dinner in the East Village apartment of three of Eli’s friends, we found a different sort of inactivity—due to illness, not apathy. One of the three, sick with hepatitis and tuberculosis, could hardly sit at the table. The second had already been hospitalized once and had a T cell count of 0. The third had also been hospitalized but was currently feeling okay. The three men had in varying combinations been lovers for some fifteen years and were deeply supportive of one another; the atmosphere that night was “chatty” and “up.” Their untheatrical valor reduced me to near silence, and tears. No protest march for them. All three would soon succumb to the disease.

  Richard Dworkin had been urging Mike for some time to get back into his music. He not only believed in Mike’s vocal talent, but felt he needed a respite from the tension and acrimony of his life as a PWA activist. Earlier, they’d formed the band Lowlife. It had recorded a few songs and done a two-week tour in Fort Lauderdale and Key West—irrepressible Mike sometimes twirling a baton, yodeling, and playing synthesizer simultaneously—but Lowlife had lasted only until 1986. Sometime in 1987, Richard played the record Nina Simone and Piano for Mike—not simply for its own glories but to demonstrate to Mike that recording an album need not involve a huge production, complicated arrangements, or a ton of money—which Mike had long assumed.10

  Richard’s strategy worked. The power of the Simone record convinced Mike that neither a lot of musicians nor a lot of cash was needed to produce something musically and emotionally powerful. Yet some connections were needed, and it was Richard’s musical background that produced them. Back in the 1970s, when living in San Francisco, Richard had learned to play the drums and had also studied jazz with the saxophonist John Handy. He wanted to play with and for the gay male community—“giving it a voice it never had before”—and ultimately that came to include Blackberri (who both Essex and Joe Beam knew), the group Buena Vista, Casselberry and DuPree, and Steven Grossman, who became Richard’s roommate.

  With Buena Vista—named after the big gay cruising park—Richard sometimes played at the Stud, the hangout (in Richard’s w
ords) of “the hippie fags, the freaks of San Francisco.” For the first time, he was able to perform “an out-and-out love song sung by one guy to another guy.” He had also played for dancers in performance and was part of a group that organized a loft jazz space called the Blue Dolphin in the garage of a Victorian house at Seventeenth and Sanchez in the Castro District. Through a friend who was the keyboard player for the pro-gay Glide Memorial Church in the Tenderloin, Richard, out of his love for black gospel music, occasionally attended services there—though he was “raised and confirmed an atheist from birth.”

  The first post-Stonewall gay male record had probably been that of a group called Lavender Country, who Richard saw perform in San Francisco in the early 1970s. Steven Grossman’s album Caravan Tonight had claim to the first “out” gay record on a major label. (One of the main reasons Richard had left San Francisco for New York was his inability to get Grossman, who was an accountant by day, to stick with music consistently.)

  When he’d first come to New York, Richard had seen an ad in the Village Voice advertising for gay jazz musicians to play five nights a week in a gay bar. The bar turned out to be a New York City branch of the Monster, the well-known Fire Island hangout. Richard thought he’d “died and gone to heaven.” It proved something less than that, but it did produce a steady gig for a while. One night the bass player turned excitedly to Richard and said, “Look over there, I don’t believe it! It’s Fred Hersch”—the jazz pianist who was also on the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music. Richard recalled the incident three or four years later as he looked through a list of recording studios in Manhattan and saw that Hersch owned one of them. Richard went and talked with him and Hersch couldn’t have been more accommodating: he gave Richard and Mike an exceedingly low rate—something like $25 an hour—and even included an engineer in the package. (Hersch was gay and HIV-positive but hadn’t come out—but after meeting Mike and being encouraged by him, he openly acknowledged both his sexual orientation and his health status. He was one of the few established figures in the jazz world to do so.)

  Richard and Mike conceived of the record, which they named Purple Heart, as including several songs earlier recorded by Lowlife, and the rest of the album as pretty much just Mike singing and often playing the piano as well (though others did too, including his lesbian friend Marsha Malamet). Mike had written about 40 percent of the songs and lyrics, including the two that became best known, “Living in Wartime” and “Love Don’t Need A Reason (co-written with Malamet and her friend Peter Allen). What could be called Mike’s romantic view of love suffuses his lyrics, but no more so than his pervasive political awareness:

  They try to break our spirits

  try to keep us in our place

  They do it to the women

  and the poor of every race

  We face a common enemy:

  bigotry and greed

  But if we fight together

  we can find the strength we need

  we can find the strength we need . . .

  (from “Living in Wartime”)

  Love don’t need a reason

  Love’s never been a crime

  And love is all we have for now

  What we don’t have

  what we don’t have is time . . .

  (from “Love Don’t Need a Reason”)

  The phrase “love don’t need a reason” derived, according to Mike, from reporters periodically dragging a reluctant Richard Dworkin into several interviews and invariably asking him something along the lines of, “Why would you get involved with somebody who has AIDS?” Richard’s moving reply was that “love’s a crazy thing . . . it doesn’t need a reason.”11

  The uniqueness and beauty of Mike’s voice was immediately recognized by most people who heard it. Its tone bright and pure, it had a special keening, wry quality, a pervasive vulnerability. In terms of intonation, Mike was technically very good—that is, he sang in key, hitting the right notes, never slurring his words. Always the perfectionist, he would fault his rhythmic skill—“I’m just a white boy from the midwest,” he liked to say. In his natural voice, he could sing quite high, a characteristic of many popular male singers—such as Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, or John Fogerty (of Creedence Clearwater Revival)—and Mike could sing falsetto as well.

  Singing publicly, unfortunately, was often “torture” for him. He felt that he’d inherited from his father “this absolutely impossible perfectionist system of judgment,” and he constantly judged each note as he sang it: “Was this the best note I could have possibly sung? Did I sing it well enough? Did I hold it long enough? Was it entirely in tune? Did the vibrato come in at exactly the right moment?” Eventually, Mike would be less hard on himself, but when he performed in the late 1980s, he kept “waiting for people to shoot me or start laughing.” Only the support of close friends and of Richard kept him going.

  When Purple Heart was released, Mike was too ill to undertake a tour—which pre-Internet was the only practical way to sell an independent album. Mike would later remember that the album “dropped like a stone.” But either his memory was faulty or his modesty was working way overtime. The reviews were not only plentiful, but mostly raves. The reviewer in The Advocate, Adam Block, called it “the most remarkable gay independent release of the past decade” and he especially loved one of the two sides—the bebop, rock-like one (the second side was mostly cabaret-style ballads, with Mike accompanying himself on the piano). The other critics outdid each other with praise. David Kalmansohn in the Los Angeles Dispatch called the album “startlingly sophisticated . . . a mature, original work.” Christopher Wittke in Gay Community News called Purple Heart “a great album,” David Lamble hailed it as “a virtually flawless debut” in the Bay Area Reporter, and Will Grega, in his Gay Music Guide, gave it a flatout rave: “Nothing less than the most stunning gay album recorded to date.” Two of the best cuts on the album had been recorded by Lowlife in 1985, and the least favorite among some of the critics was the hypersentimental “Love Don’t Need a Reason.”

  The praise eventually sank in and Mike learned to be proud of the recording—though in a few years his voice would drop down about three semitones and what the deeper sound lost in vulnerability, it gained in maturity. This would be especially apparent on Mike’s final album, Legacy, which he would come to feel was “the best thing I’ve ever done.”

  The release of Purple Heart in 1988 came soon after the publication of the 352-page Surviving and Thriving With AIDS: Collected Wisdom, volume 2, a collection of essays by many hands (volume 1, Hints for the Newly Diagnosed, had been half the size). Along with editing Surviving and Thriving, Mike contributed several essays and interviews of his own; Richard served as associate editor and Mike’s co-worker Jane Rosett (PWA’s virtual in-house photographer) as the art editor. Between them, they saw to it that the volume contained, along with a great deal of advice about sex, families, and treatments, two separate sections that were pathbreaking: “Women With AIDS” and “People of Color and AIDS.” Mike asked GMHC for help in distributing volume 2, but it refused after learning that it contained certain criticisms of the organization, and in particular of a GMHC editorial in its publication Treatment News that claimed “the preponderance of evidence to date is irrefutable” as to the positive value of AZT.

  The book makes for poignant reading today. Many of its contributors have long since died, and most of the debates over treatment issues (such as the efficacy of lipids, AZT or AL-721) have long since been settled. But the bravery, determination, and valor that suffuse its pages can never go out of date, representing as they do the remarkable gallantry so many showed in the face of what Mike called “the ineptitude and murderous lethargy of the federal government.” The volume also has historical importance. It documents how, despite suffering that was often acute, many people with AIDS managed to resist, to take charge of their own treatment, and to call public attention to the country’s catastrophic disregard (with some honorable
exceptions, like Matilde Krim, Elizabeth Taylor, and philanthropist Judy Peabody) of those facing death in the prime of their lives. Surviving and Thriving—note the persistent optimism, against all odds, contained in that word “thriving”—demonstrated, in the same way that the fierce defiance of ACT UP and other direct-action groups did, the determination of the despised to battle for survival.12

  Mike took the battle to the annual convention of the American Academy of Dermatologists, where he gave that august gathering, and the federal government, a blistering rebuke. The slow pace of response to the enormous suffering and mounting deaths—the business-as-usual attitude—represented in essence “passive genocide,” Mike told his audience, the “political perception that the value of the lives affected by AIDS doesn’t justify a swift, humane or top-notch response.” Why, he asked the audience of physicians, had only eleven full-time staff positions for AIDS research been filled when Congress had authorized 127? Why hadn’t DHPG, gamma globulin, fluconazole, and foscarnet been approved for varying AIDS conditions when the data on them were at least as impressive as that supporting AZT, which had been approved?