The section in Brother to Brother devoted entirely to AIDS was given the overall title “Hold Tight Gently.” Its searing content consisted of seven poems and seven prose pieces. One of the longer essays, by Walter Rico Burrell, a journalist with a master’s degree from UCLA, consisted of excerpts from his AIDS diary. Burrell had submitted the piece by mail and when Essex initially read it he wasn’t prepared for the scorching honesty of the diary entries—and burst into tears. He called Burrell on the phone and their shared pain reduced them both to crying. In the excerpts, Burrell revealed that he’d decided to give AZT a try, but when he took the doctor’s prescription, along with his Blue Shield medical insurance card, to a pharmacist, it was handed right back to him; “this prescription,” he was told, “is going to cost more than two hundred dollars and we aren’t allowed to make any third-party transactions on a sum that large.”
“Jesus!” Burrell wrote in his diary, “I was going to have to fight to get the very medicine I needed to hold the disease at bay. I immediately thought of all those street people, poor people, people who didn’t have the resources I had, the job I had, the insurance I had. Christ! What would happen to them? Were they doomed to death simply because they’re not middle-class enough to afford to fight AIDS?” The answer was yes, though some state and federal subsidy programs would subsequently kick in. The answer is still yes for many in the United States and also for the millions afflicted in developing countries.
When the anthology was published, Essex sent a copy of the book to Burrell. It was returned—marked “deceased.” Burrell had died of AIDS—as would nearly all of the fourteen authors represented in that part of the book.
The AIDS section of the anthology also included a piece by Assotto Saint—who worked in an office where co-workers would wipe the phones with alcohol after he used them—about the death of his long-term lover. The account began with his lover developing a small spot on his right foot, “purple with the stain of a crushed grape.” Soon after, the spot “multiplied like buds on a tree in early spring. It multiplied all over his feet, his legs, up his ass, inside his intestines, all over his face, his neck, down his throat, inside his brains. For nine months of fever and wracking coughs, nine months of sweat and shaking chills, nine months of diarrhea and jerking spasms, it multiplied, and wrenched him skinny like a spider.” And all through it, Assotto held him when he “gagged, choked, and vomited,” helped him sit up and cough, “changed his diapers, washed him, massaged his back, smoothed the bed sheets, caressed him until he’d fall asleep, then awaken from a nightmare struggling for air.” When the doctor said he was near death, Assotto called his lover’s mother. She arrived cursing, “huffing and puffing, waving her righteous finger” in Assotto’s face, telling him “You done perverted my son, you low-down immoral—” Interrupting, Assotto sat her down hard and told her he didn’t give a damn about getting her blessing. He was thoroughly tired of the heterosexual version of caring.
The poem “Hope Against Hope,” by Craig G. Harris (who died of AIDS in November 1991 at age thirty-two), in Brother to Brother exemplified one gay version of caring:
he swore no virus would beat him
armed with rose quartz
and amethyst, homeopathic remedies,
Louise Hay tapes
and the best doctors
at San Francisco General
he fought it
like a copperhead going
against a mongoose
when he lost
we all wore purple,
tucked him in white satin
with his crystal shields,
and thought of Icarus
soaring toward the sun . . .
Though Essex felt that “home” for black gays was far more likely to be found in the black community as a whole than in the white gay one, Brother to Brother contained a number of strong pieces that showed his open-eyed awareness that many leading black intellectuals and academicians continued to denounce homosexuality. He printed parts of a 1989 interview that he’d done with Isaac Julien, which detailed how the Langston Hughes estate had “disrupted the original version” of Julien’s film Looking for Langston by forcing the deletion of several of Hughes’ more homoerotic poems. The estate’s reaction to Julien’s decision to “take a black cultural icon and basically undress him” was, in Essex’s view, “based on the black middle class’s belief that it’s important to project the right image.” It was part and parcel, he felt, of “the manifest determination of major black publications such as Jet, Ebony, Ebony Man, Black Scholar, Emerge, Callaloo, and many other black periodicals and journals” to perpetuate “the lack of visibility and forthright discussion of gays and lesbians.”
That line of argument was continued in Brother to Brother in Ron Simmons’ interview with the black filmmaker Marlon Riggs. (His award-winning Ethnic Notions was soon followed by the stunning and controversial Tongues Untied.) Simmons, a good friend of Essex’s, pointed out in the interview that homosexuality had “been ridiculed and spoken of with absolute scorn by some of our most brilliant writers, scholars, and leaders—Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, Nathan Hare, Robert Staples, Molefi Asante and Minister Louis Farrakhan—most of whom view homosexuality as one more pathology resulting from white racist oppression.” To that list one can easily append additional names: Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint, and Eldridge Cleaver.17
Essex himself would devote an entire essay (in his collection Ceremonies) to Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, one of the lesser-known, yet influential, advocates of the “homosexuality as pathology” theory. At a 1987 London conference on AIDS, Welsing had declared that the U.S. government had deliberately created HIV in order to rid the nation of undesirable blacks. She had also written several attention-grabbing articles that in 1990 were collected in her book The Isis Papers, which enjoyed considerable prestige among black cultural nationalists. Essex found Welsing’s views more dangerous than those of better-known figures because she grounded her homophobia in African American history, explaining it “as evidence of Black Males adapting to oppression.” But not everything, Essex insisted, can be ascribed to racism. Homosexuality, he declared, was a natural variant; nature, not white racism, had created sexual diversity. Anthropological studies would later conclusively show that homosexuality was an indigenous phenomenon in certain African cultures.
In her book, Welsing also advocated the traditional patriarchal family structure—dominant male, submissive female—and this further offended Essex’s feminist perspective. Her views, in his opinion, widened “the existing breach between Black gays and lesbians and their heterosexual counterparts, offering no bridges for joining our differences.” Instead of fostering an appreciation of diversity, Welsing offered a brand of heterosexism that, in Essex’s opinion, would continue to fracture and disable the black community.
In the Simmons interview in Brother to Brother, Marlon Riggs struck a note that was soon to become a mantra (“intersectionality”) of queer theory and can also be read as moving in a somewhat different direction from Essex in regard to race. “The way to break loose of the schizophrenia in trying to define identity,” Riggs said, “is to realize that you are many things within one person. Don’t try to arrange a hierarchy of things that are virtuous in your character and say, ‘This is more important than that.’ Realize that both are equally important; they both inform your character. Both are nurturing and nourishing of your spirit. You can embrace all of that lovingly and equally.”
In a powerful essay of his own (“Black Macho Revisited: Reflections of a Snap! Queen”) in Brother to Brother, Riggs expressed his belief that at the heart of black America’s “pervasive cultural homophobia is the desperate need for a convenient Other within the community, yet not truly of the community, an Other to which blame for the chronic identity crises afflicting the black male psyche can be readily displaced.” For black men struggling with discrimination and ostracism, poverty and powerlessness, self-doubt and self-disgust, the �
��faggot,” Riggs suggests, is an essential Other, a despised Other not to be helped even during as desperate a trial as AIDS.
“Because of my sexuality,” Riggs wrote, “I cannot be Black. A strong, proud, ‘Afrocentric’ Black man is resolutely heterosexual, not even bisexual. Hence I remain a Negro.” “Contemporary proponents of Black macho,” Riggs added, converge with white supremacists “in their cultural practice, deploying similar devices towards similarly dehumanizing ends.” He offered the comedy routines of Eddie Murphy as an example. Murphy unites “Negro Faggotry, ‘Herpes Simplex 10’—and AIDS—into an indivisible modern icon of sexual terrorism. Rap artists and music videos resonate with this same perception, fomenting a social psychology that blames the victim for his degradation and death.” Riggs, like Essex, rejected an essentialist vision of race, including the nationalist version that argued a historical (before the arrival of whites) narrative featuring strong, noble African men. “And women—were women. Nobody was lesbian. Nobody was feminist. Nobody was gay.”
Essex wrote Barbara Smith that despite all the hard work and travel on behalf of Brother to Brother, his health was “good and stable” and he’d put on eight pounds. He added that in the coming year he’d have to make more money somehow or “find myself returning to the work environment.” In a separate letter co-signed by Dorothy Beam, the pair warmly thanked Barbara for her multiple efforts on the book’s behalf: “The historical moment will show that concerned individuals such as yourself and others were there in the way communities are supposed to be there for one another.”
6
Drugs into Bodies
The situation for black gay men and lesbians wasn’t notably different in New York City than in Washington, D.C. Black and Hispanic elected officials offered little leadership on the issue of AIDS, and although three new organizations—the Hispanic AIDS Forum, the Minority Task Force, and the Association for the Prevention and Treatment of Drug Abuse—had been formed in the eighties, none had gotten widespread community support or sufficient funding. The established media were also of little help. On the first page of its Metropolitan section, the New York Times published an article (“Homosexuals Detect New Signs of Friendliness Amid Bias”) in the late eighties that failed to make a single reference to the situation of black lesbians and gay men, thereby reinforcing the long-standing invisibility of both. For good measure, the Times mentioned that antigay violence had been decreasing (i.e., “New Signs of Friendliness”)—a claim the New York Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project directly contradicted with figures that proved an increase in violence.1
Nor did the Times bother to mention the numerous antigay comments increasingly emanating from the city’s white male leadership. In that regard, his eminence Cardinal O’Connor had long led the pack, denouncing homosexuality, as early as 1983, as “sinful and unnatural.” He thereafter regularly reaffirmed the Roman Catholic Church’s insistence that same-gender love and lust were iniquitous. (Other churches, it should be added—and especially the Unitarians and Episcopalians—were more benevolent.) When for a short time (before reversing itself) the National Conference of Catholic Bishops decided to allow condom use for the limited purpose of avoiding HIV, Cardinal O’Connor thunderously opposed the decision and helped to overturn it, even as he continued to denounce any form of safe-sex education. For him, the solution to the crisis was simple: abstinence. Though students in high schools went right on having sex and using drugs, O’Connor, denying reality, insisted on withholding from them the information and tools that might save their lives.2
New York City mayor Ed Koch, a great friend of the Cardinal’s (they even published a book together, His Eminence and Hizzoner), did declare a “state of concern” about AIDS, but the mayor’s “concern” wasn’t great enough to warrant significant outlays of money to help fund education, treatment, or housing for homeless people with AIDS. When a candlelight vigil and a demonstration of protest both failed to budge the mayor, a group of angry GLAAD members formed the Lavender Hill Mob to stage “zaps” designed to disturb Koch’s equanimity. But Koch was nothing if not stubborn. Even after it became clear by the late eighties that drug addicts in the city had high rates of HIV infection due to shared needles, Koch refused—in direct opposition to the recommendations of his health commissioner, David Axelrod—to allow needle exchange.
When I spoke at the unveiling of Stonewall Place in Sheridan Square in June 1989, Koch was the other speaker. Preceding me, he read the official proclamation aloud. Even though I was standing next to him I was unable to hear a word he said—thanks to the large crowd of some five hundred intense young demonstrators shouting their disgust at his complacency and jabbing the sky with their “Koch Is Killing Us!” signs in the shape of tombstones. Hizzoner’s smug, fixed grin never left his face, but he was smart enough to leave the platform the moment he finished reading the proclamation. I then extemporized my own opening line—“I take no pleasure in sharing a platform with Ed Koch”—to gratifyingly clamorous applause.3
I assumed the crowd—young, intense, engaged—consisted mostly of ACT UP members. Certainly they’d pilloried Koch before, and would again; he, in turn, referred to them publicly as “fascists.” Fascists they were not. But they were, by design, tactically neither respectful nor “respectable”—to the disgust of the more conservative members of the gay community. ACT UP was designed to replace normative channels for change (electioneering, lobbying, petitioning) with disruptive, direct-action street demonstrations commensurate with mounting gay desperation at the ever-climbing number of AIDS cases and the deaths of many young people in their prime. As ACT UP’s ranks swelled in the late eighties, it carried out a series of public protests that galvanized the media, gave hope to those with AIDS, and roused the retaliatory scorn of the stand-patters. And it did so with theatrical panache. It plastered the city with provocative posters and daringly designed materials from one of the dozen or so ACT UP affinity groups, Gran Fury, a bunch of professional artists who volunteered their services (they even managed to sneak their famous parody of the New York Times—which they called New York Crimes—into hundreds of newspaper vending machines).4
No direct-action event better exemplified ACT UP’s growing impact than its 1988 demonstration in front of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in suburban Washington, D.C. The demonstrators had prepared well. ACT UP’s Treatment and Data Committee had prepared a forty-page pamphlet, FDA Action Handbook, and had also held a series of teach-ins to guarantee that the demonstrators were well informed about current research issues. A savvy media campaign also preceded the action, ensuring that it would be well covered. The action itself centered on well-thought-out demands, primarily that the drug-approval process be shortened, that the “unethical” practice of double-blind placebo trials be ended, that people “from all affected populations at all stages of HIV infection” be henceforth included in clinical trials, and that Medicaid and private health insurance companies “be made to pay for experimental drug therapies.”5
The civil disobedience action at FDA headquarters was determined, prolonged, and raucous. A variety of costumes, props, T-shirts, and posters was employed—“We Die, They Do Nothing”; “The Government Has Blood on Its Hands”; “One AIDS Death Every Half Hour.” The D.C. police, wearing masks, rubber gloves, and riot gear, some on horseback, reacted with brutality and arrested nearly two hundred of the activists. But much of the police action was captured on film and aired on the TV news that night, which ensured the message would be heard. In the year following the demonstration, officials at the FDA and the NIH began to include activists in their deliberations, and double-blind placebo trials were replaced by ACT UP’s suggestion of parallel tracks, whereby different doses of the same drug were given to all participants.
All that was to the good. But certain stark facts remained true: there was still no reliable treatment for AIDS, let alone a cure; no one was willing to predict when efficacious drugs might emerge from a seemingly empty pipeline
; no one was quite sure which sexual activities, if any, were truly “safe.” Did kissing, fellatio, and cunnilingus qualify? What about condoms? Were they usually safe or did they tear or leak with some regularity? Were some condoms better than others in providing protection? Was it true that the partner on “top” during anal sex was much safer than the “bottom”—and if so, just how much safer? It’s no wonder that in unknown numbers, some gay men were choosing celibacy or monogamy, though often neither suited their temperaments or their sense of what “gay liberation” actually meant.
Consuming worry over such questions seemed to the gay writer Darrell Yates Rist obsessional. To the astonishment of many—since Rist was himself HIV-positive—he published an article in The Nation early in 1989 denouncing ACT UP, and by implication all AIDS activism, as “fashionable hysteria” and, further, theorized that such “keening” reflected a “compulsive . . . need to partake in the drama of catastrophe” (apparently akin, in his mind, to the gay male worship of diva tragedians like Judy Garland). Rist’s article struck many as a shockingly misguided piece of invective. I was one of those who responded in The Nation, writing that “the legions of the young in ACT UP who’ve stationed themselves on the front lines deserve something better than being characterized [as Rist had] as ‘clones’ and ‘chic street protesters.’ ” Rist had further denounced the ACT UP demonstrators as “immoral because they are panic-mongering”—which was tantamount to saying that no one need fear dying of AIDS, that profound fear (“panic”) was illegitimate. Nor did Rist even once in his article implicate governmental apathy or the straight world’s general indifference as causal factors that had necessitated the formation of ACT UP and its nervily audacious actions.6
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