Hold Tight Gently

by Duberman, Martin

  Mike felt the same about rimming and fisting and called for their removal from the list of high-risk activities; both carried health risks, of course, but AIDS wasn’t one of them. He knew from painful past experience that “the safe sex circles will shout from the rocks that I’m a ‘murderer,’ that I’m complicit in the deaths of anyone who is ‘confused’ by my raising ‘irresponsible’ doubts about safe sex. Well, I mince, but I don’t mince words: fuck them. I had a hand in the invention of safe sex! I’ve paid my fucking dues! In the Spring of 1983 . . . Joe Sonnabend, Richard Berkowitz and I first officially proposed that cumbersome concept of ‘avoiding exchange of potentially infectious bodily fluids.’ Let’s just say that the AIDS establishment didn’t immediately embrace safe sex. In fact, we were initially attacked for ‘promoting promiscuity,’ which in fact we were happy to do, provided everyone rigorously avoided the exchange of bodily fluids. The best advice the AIDS establishment had been able to come up with was pathetically, perhaps murderously, useless: ‘try to reduce your number of sexual partners and try to limit your sex to people you ‘know.’ ”

  Mike didn’t pretend to have definitive answers about the potential danger of oral sex; what he was railing against was the refusal of the “authorities” to present convincing data that it was risky. He was pleased that private sex clubs had begun to open again: the Glory Hole Church in San Francisco; the basement of the Christopher Street bookstore; the Meatrack in L.A. The fog was lifting, “life-affirming sex-positive sunlight” was reappearing. He himself had never been a fan of cock sucking; he was part of the first gay sexual revolution based on anal sex—“which, after all, is both an art and a skill.”

  The second, post-AIDS revolution, he felt, was “based almost entirely on oral sex.” Why? Because the authorities had irresponsibly equated getting fucked with getting cum up your butt. It was the latter, not the former, that dangerously exposed one to AIDS—which the inserter’s use of a condom mitigated (though condoms did sometimes break). And thus it was that they’d thrown out “the baths with the bathwater.” Whenever Mike told someone that he still liked to get fucked—with condoms, of course—“they often literally gasp or take a step back” as if he was a “diseased pariah . . . an apparition from the past. ‘You still do that?’ they ask, their voices quivering with barely contained disgust. Yes,” he’d say, “getting fucked and sugar are my reasons to live.”

  And unlike many others, Mike had no problem getting fucked with a condom—“after a few seconds, it heats up.” But he acknowledged that “physiologically there has to be a difference between skin on skin and skin on latex.” Still, he added philosophically, “This is the time in which we live. I’m OK with that. I can eroticize that. . . . I’m an adult. Life is precious.” He thought that gay men on the whole had done a remarkable, even unprecedented job in achieving behavioral modification—a much better job than, say, smokers or dieters had ever been able to do. He pointed to the recent 50 percent increase in heterosexual syphilis and compared it approvingly to the lack of any increase among gay men.

  Mike liked to joke that he was becoming known as “a safe-sex bag lady”—the reason being that when he went out on one of his investigative sex tours, he’d fill every available pocket with condoms and water-based lube. “Whenever I see two men about to fuck, I shamelessly approach to look for evidence of a condom. I’m not averse to reaching my hand down and feeling for the rubber-band-like end of the condom near the base of the top’s penis. If I don’t see or feel a condom, I wordlessly reach into my pocket, produce one, rip open the packet, shake out the condom, produce some lube, tap the top on the shoulder, smile, and offer him the condom.” Nine times out of ten, Mike claimed, the top took it and thanked him. “If I’m feeling bold,” Mike added, “I whisper: ‘it matters to me whether you both live or die’; I smile, and move on.”

  Mike tried to interview various government epidemiologists and AIDS educators with the goal of pinning down the actual rate of rectal gonorrhea among gay men—which was astonishing, given the declining state of his health and his limited energy. His assumption was that rectal gonorrhea would prove the best surrogate marker to evaluate the current level of unprotected anal sex among gay men (though it was possible, as he recognized, that it might be easier to contract AIDS than gonorrhea). “Well, kids,” he reported—his wit intact, even if his stamina wasn’t—“you’d think I was asking for classified state secrets.” The few AIDS educators who’d agree to take his call were “arrogant and supercilious,” declining to provide any information. A few government officials were more forthcoming, though cautious. A staff person at the New York Department of Public Health sniffily told him that no such data were being kept, and to do so would be offensive. A second New York official revealed that such data did exist and promised to phone Mike back. “Surprise, surprise; no one has,” Mike wrote.

  But he struck pay dirt with his calls to the San Francisco and Seattle Health Departments, both of which confirmed his hunch that very little unprotected anal intercourse among gay men was occurring. In both places, according to a 1990 census, the annual rate for rectal gonorrhea in gay men had gone down steadily, year by year. For Mike that was cause not only for celebration but also for pride: gay men had done an unprecedented amount of self-policing, of behavioral modification, and had done so in “a virulently homophobic, violently sex-negative atmosphere in which it was difficult, if not impossible, to get federal funding for explicit, no-nonsense safer sex education.” The gay male community had real cause, Mike felt, for self-congratulation—“if never complacency.”3

  Having produced the Flirtations’ first record, Richard Dworkin did little with the group subsequently. He and Mike in fact came from different worlds, musically: Mike from piano/vocal cabaret—his heroes were Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler—and Richard, though he enjoyed some of the female singers that many gay men of his generation liked—Joni Mitchell, say, or Laura Nyro—had gotten into music through the very different route of rhythm and blues, of Motown. After he’d moved to San Francisco in the 1970s and started playing music professionally, Richard had also been drawn to free jazz groups and was part of a collective that had organized a loft-jazz space. But if Richard’s basic taste in music differed from Mike’s, he continued to encourage Mike’s involvement with the Flirts. In the years 1990–92, Mike started to edge away from PWA activism, thus freeing him up to tour more with the Flirts and to rehearse for their second record, which would appear in 1992.

  His gradual withdrawal from activist work after a decade of intense involvement was a carefully considered move; he summed up his attitude toward activism as “bitter, burnt-out and soul-weary.” He recognized that he’d lost the fight against the “free-for-all philosophy” implied by the ACT UP rally cry of “drugs into bodies”—which he sardonically reduced to “any drug into any body.” As someone who had AIDS, he well understood the kind of desperation that led many to clutch at any straw. But he continued to regard the practice as ill-advised, as likely further to compromise already weakened immune systems.

  ACT UP’s Treatment and Data (T&D) Committee, that small circle of activists composed primarily of middle- and upper-class educated white men, had by 1990 gained considerable access to AIDS scientists and researchers—even to the point of designing clinical trials together. This “old/new boys network” provoked considerable resentment, especially among women and people-of-color activists within ACT UP, who felt their special needs continued to be insufficiently addressed. The charges of sexism and racism brought against T&D were, arguably, overstated, but there was growing resentment over what some considered a merely pro forma acknowledgment on T&D’s part of issues relating to women, poor people, and people of color. (Mike had never joined ACT UP, but his primary sympathies were with its detractors.)4

  By 1990 the division had grown into a serious internal conflict between those whose concentration was centered on treatment issues and those who were deeply concerned as well with other aspects
of the AIDS epidemic, like health care insurance and housing, that most members of T&D never had to worry about. But if their locus of desperation was different, it was no less intense; most T&D members were HIV-positive and feared that delving too far into “side” issues might somehow cause delays in the scientific research on which so many lives depended. Ultimately, T&D would break away entirely from ACT UP and would set up independently as the Treatment Action Group.

  The mounting toll of deaths and the continuing failure to produce effective drug therapies deepened the level of fear and desolation throughout the AIDS community, as did the attitude of the federal government. Reagan’s Supreme Court twice refused to entertain constitutional challenges to allow openly gay people to serve in the military. Draconian sodomy laws still remained on the books in twenty-four states, with only two states (as of 1990) passing laws that barred discrimination against gay people and only seven cities adopting “domestic partnership” legislation. At the same time the amount of violence against gay people soared, a shadow companion to the ever-rising toll of AIDS deaths.

  No gay person had to look very far to find cause for despair. Though I was of an older generation, I saw the growing desperation firsthand, initially as a volunteer phone operator at PWAC, then as increasing numbers of younger friends and acquaintances died. The person I most admired and felt closest to at PWAC abruptly came down with advanced lymphoma. He was (as I wrote in my diary) “the most vibrant and energetic of all the people at PWAC. . . . I thought of him as an encouraging example of how one can be HIV-positive and yet uncompromised in health. He turns out instead to be an example of how suddenly and unexpectedly the virus can impinge.” When I visited him in the hospital, he was full of confidence about the prospects of recovery.

  The health of other friends and acquaintances—like the writers Allen Barnett, Paul Monette, and George Whitmore, the organizer Greg Kolovakos, or Damien Martin, co-founder of the Harvey Milk School—was beginning to slide precipitously. Closer to me personally were Vito Russo, Ken Dawson, and Tom Stoddard. Though I wasn’t an intimate friend of Vito’s, when his health began rapidly to deteriorate in 1990 I became part of his caretaker team—of which Arnie Kantrowitz and Larry Mass were the mainstays. In June Vito was still (as I wrote in my diary) “a bundle of positive energy,” yet within weeks he became “fiercely sealed off,” as if putting himself in “an ice-cold deep freeze” to survive the grinding hell he was going through.

  By late July he was in the hospital getting chemo, then in and out for more of the same, though the treatments seemed to make him weaker, not stronger. If anything, the chemo seemed to be heightening his suffering, and by mid-September he was noticeably fragile and thin. But Vito wasn’t the self-pitying type. A tough Italian American born and raised in New Jersey, he had a strong, resilient will and “faced every crisis in a resolutely positive way.” Still, when I was helping him pack up for yet another trip to St. Vincent’s Hospital, he seemed to me for the first time “obviously frightened . . . he kept gulping the fear down, concentrating on the tasks at hand: ‘Do you think I should pack a sweater?’ etc. He bravely managed a smile when he asked me if I thought “he could sneak out of the hospital one day to see the film ‘Postcards From the Edge.’ ” Vito died on the morning of November 7, 1990.

  Ken Dawson was the executive director of Senior Action in a Gay Environment (SAGE), the gay seniors organization, building it from a small-scale operation into a leader in the field of geriatrics. He was a remarkably handsome man, and, what was much more rare, a warm and genial one as well. He and I had briefly dated in the early eighties, and we’d become friendly. Socially I saw Ken and his lover, Todd, fairly often, and the slippage in his health became steadily more apparent. At dinner one night, Ken (as I wrote in my diary) “looked drawn and ill, and spoke in a low, energy-less voice light years from his vibrant self—though he bravely stayed the full evening.”

  We celebrated his forty-fifth birthday in his hospital room in 1991. The literary agent Jed Mattes (who later also died of AIDS) brought a cake, Eli and I party favors, and seven or eight people lifted their seltzer water to toast him. As Ken was about to blow out the candles on the cake, Jed said, “We’re all wishing just what you are.” Ken told us that all his tests had improved, and he seemed to actually enjoy the party. “This is more than WASP training,” I wrote in my diary, more even than a saintly disposition; it’s genuine optimism.” It didn’t last. A collapsed lung had him in and out of the hospital, and his stoic spirit began to sag. Ken died in April 1992. “Why,” I scribbled in my diary, “does it seem to be mostly the decent ones.”

  Tom Stoddard served for six years as the executive director of Lambda Legal Defense, the well-funded legal arm of the gay movement, and during his tenure the staff grew from six to twenty-two. He authored the gay rights bill that had (finally) passed the New York City Council in 1986, and, handsome, telegenic, and articulate, he became one of the country’s best-known advocates for gay civil liberties. Tom had an enormous zest for life—sex, food, travel, you name it—and eagerly pursued all of it, which made his slow decline all the more painful to watch. He held on until the “miracle” protease inhibitors became available but was one of those unlucky people who didn’t respond to them, and he died in 1997.

  On and on the list goes. Every gay man alive in those years, and every lesbian or straight woman with gay male friends, has a similar, and often longer, list of beloved friends lost to the deadly disease. Everyone knows somebody—more often, many; for some, the “many” is in the hundreds—who was dead or dying. Most of them weren’t “artists” and didn’t leave behind any tangible product other than the friends they’d made, the love they’d generated.

  In May 1989, Eli and I decided to get tested. My diary picks up the story:

  May 27: Hard news yesterday . . . Eli is positive . . . my angel who has learned to expect no, has gotten an ultimate no. We cried and cried yesterday, comforting each other, assuring each other that since his T-cell count is normal & there are no other signs of active illness that only years down the road is he likely to get into trouble—and by then, surely, good drugs will be available. There’s truth to that, and it’s a truth we have to hold onto in the days ahead, but right now I can’t hold the tears back . . . I can’t stop touching him, have trouble taking my eyes off him for fear he’ll be snatched away before I can fix him inside my soul . . . I feel no relief over my own negative, as if instead we had both gotten positives . . . Maybe, just maybe, we’ll get lucky . . .

  May 29: The nobility of sweetie’s spirit makes me feel achingly close to him. He is sad and quiet, but entirely uncomplaining. He never expected life to go right for him, and then, just as it seemed it might, he’s been brought back to what he all along assumed would be a suffering fate. Perhaps he never felt entitled enough to a good life to get angry over the prospect of its being withheld or withdrawn. I worry that that could lead to resignation, and last night talked to him about how good his odds were, how much I love him, how good our life together will continue to be . . .

  June 7: Volunteering at PWAC has taken on a different meaning. I used to read the materials, field the phone calls and proof the Newsline with grateful distance. Now I read the memorials and the personal accounts of how HIV-positive turned to ARC turned to AIDS with a churning stomach, a gloomy sense of immediacy.

  July 4: I have to fight off the fear (I tell myself I’m being literary—the 19th-century sentimental novel) that goodness such as Eli’s can only be a visitation.

  Oct. 9: Dr. “Bigelow” says that Eli might stay free of major infection for years, and by then Bigelow expects a combination of drugs will have reduced AIDS to a chronic, but no longer life-threatening disease. I had been sunk in gloom before the results came back, convinced Eli looked thinner & pale, certain the news was going to be bad.

  A year later, Eli’s T cells had dropped by half, yet Bigelow’s prediction would ultimately prove accurate. No one knew, of course, that in 1995 the
protease inhibitors would arrive and dramatically change the AIDS prognosis, so when Eli’s numbers continued to drop, Bigelow for the first time suggested that he enroll in an experimental GP120 trial at the Deaconness Hospital in Boston. It would entail fifteen trips over eleven months, and Bigelow (who we trusted completely) assured us that there was no downside to participating—no side effects, no immunity created to future drugs, no negative effect on T8 cells. My friends at PWAC told me that a comparable study had shown a T4 cell decline of 6 percent in those getting the drug versus a 23 percent decline in those not getting it.

  Eli decided to go ahead. For the first few trips to Boston I went with him, thinking we could minimize the trauma by “making a kind of weekend vacation” of it, dropping in casually for a few minutes to get an injection while “cavorting” from one touristy good time to another. It didn’t work. Eli decided that the best strategy for denial was to fly back and forth to Boston as rapidly as possible—without me. He continued to make the trips, and his T cells (and weight) continued to fall. After his count went down to 240, Bigelow put him on AZT, but he couldn’t tolerate it—nausea, exhaustion, anemia—and Bigelow stopped the drug after two months. I administered daily shots of Epogen for the anemia. Then came night sweats and fevers, and Bigelow added Bactrim as a prophylactic against PCP. But Eli’s T8 number rose, and one new theory was that for some lucky people T8 cells replaced T4 cells, and were the new marker of stability . . . and on it went . . .