Hold Tight Gently

by Duberman, Martin

  Meanwhile in L.A., Mike was using every last ounce of his extraordinary willpower to try things that almost anyone else might have considered out of their—and his—reach. Like joining the O Boys (as in “Oh boy!” or “Orgy Boy”), a group of gay men who had started to organize safe-sex orgies; one of the party notices mailed out to the “Orgy Boy Network” captures the group’s flavor:

  Some of you have said that the O Boys as a group should not be political. Wake up and smell the hot, ripe cum! This group’s very existence is a political statement, and every time you attend a party, you are telling those sex- and self-hating idiots that we will do what we want with our bodies and they can never legislate our morality. Before getting started at a party, or between orgasms, talk to each other! Introduce the new guys around, exchange phone numbers, become friends! Social politics can be as powerful as electoral politics—and it’s always more fun. NOW, grab a dick and pop it in your mouth. Congratulations, you are now a sexual revolutionary!

  The O Boys seized on Mike as (to quote Richard) “a sort of goodluck charm, a talisman, a fairy godmother, a patron saint of post-AIDS panic, post sex-negative, post-fear-driven gay male promiscuous behavior.” They enjoyed having Mike around, and Mike enjoyed at least some return of his once expansive sex drive.

  Mike felt that the O Boys, after a decade of sexual shell shock in the gay male world, represented “the exciting emergence of a new up-in-your-face radical, creative, friendly, hot, group-based sexuality” reminiscent of the pre-AIDS period but also dissimilar from it. This second sexual revolution, in his view, was more realistic about the body’s physical limitations, and much more aware that the body wasn’t an indestructible pleasure machine “requiring little more than a monthly shot of penicillin to keep it in good running repair.” The O Boys were well aware that unsafe sex could kill you and were comfortable in enforcing safe-sex guidelines—of being their brother’s keeper, if need be—thereby rejecting the view of the 1970s that it was basically every man abiding by his own guidelines.

  They rejected, too, the 1970s tendency to view sex as a serious business, substituting the notion of sex as play; the central image Mike had of the O Boys was that of “week-old puppies in a cardboard box, playfully wrestling with each other for the sheer exhilaration of it.” As Mike saw it, the O Boys emphasized friendliness over macho competition, throwing over the 1970s taboo of having sex with friends. In the 1970s the pattern was “to fuck first and then become friends,” which inversely meant that once friendship was established sex was no longer an option. As Mike saw it, in the early 1990s, “the new sex radicals move with extraordinary ease from friendship to hot sex and back again.” At one orgy he attended, he saw a group of five close friends “go from giggling to sucking and be-condomed fucking . . . [and] when the tidal wave of hot sex had passed, they adjourned upstairs to giggle some more over beers.”

  The O Boy emphasis on group-based sex gave actual life, in Mike’s view, to that oft-cited but infrequently practiced axiom of the 1970s—the “brotherhood of lust.” He knew that jack-off clubs had been founded in some urban areas at least as early as the late 1970s and acknowledged that “an important goal of the original sexual revolution was to explore creative alternatives to the heterosexual, monogamous dyad.” With the second revolution, he felt that sex and sentiment—even love—were reunited. He also understood that outside of the larger cities, most gay men were scandalized by what they viewed as the “excesses” of the urban gay male ghetto. Yet the cutting-edge minority in the metropolises did set the tone—both for the generation of the 1970s and for that of the 1990s. Mike also acknowledged that the O Boys of L.A. were not alone: PRISM and the Jacks of Color, among other groups, were elsewhere roaming down the same paths.

  None of this led Mike, despite all his fey effeminacy, to become a follower of Harry Hay’s “third gender” theory or to join the group of Radical Fairies that exemplified it. He could flaunt his gender nonconformity, and his campy wit embodied gay “differentness,” but he didn’t believe in gay separateness. Rather he felt that gay people had the responsibility to share their unique subcultural values with the emotionally staid and ritually starved mainstream—gay and straight. Nor was he sympathetic to Hay’s view that gay men and lesbians had little in common. At the least they shared a common enemy—homophobia. And ideally, in Mike’s view, they could all benefit from the egalitarian values of the feminist vanguard.

  One of the reasons Mike had given for moving to L.A. had been the need finally to concentrate on his music—both as part of the Flirtations and on his own. He said he wanted to write new songs and work on a new record, but for the first six months in L.A. he did little beyond settling into substandard subsidized housing. For four and a half years he hadn’t missed a single Flirts gig, but for now he was slow to pick up again with the group. Its four other members, Mike felt, were being “extremely generous and accommodating”—they even kept him on salary. They also suggested that he skip minor engagements and save his strength for the major ones. During the summer and fall of 1992, he was particularly active with the Flirts. And the gay critics continued to adore them, especially their gay-positive message—never delivered polemically but rather through witty asides and updated verses, such as “Give him two lips like Pagliacci / But not as closeted as Liberace.”3

  Periodically, though, his health would take a dive, and he’d have to retreat from the Flirts and return to the hospital for additional tests or treatments. He scribbled notes under the title “Dinosaur’s Diary” (a few months later, under the same title, he’d publish a brief series in QW, which had become New York City’s leading gay weekly). His first such column, handwritten while still in the hospital, is dated 1991:4

  5:40 a.m.: “. . . the news that “Danny” [Sotomayor?] had died this morning—died primarily of KS of the lungs and its treatment—that same disease that everyone bustling about me here in the hospital appears to think I have but wouldn’t say out loud . . . I kept saying to myself as I went in and out of my sleeping pill haze, this should depress me, this should be an ominous sign. But the cynic in me just couldn’t convince the optimist that Danny’s final freedom could possibly be bad for anyone, including me . . .

  “A Hispanic, bearded man comes to wheel me down to OR [Operating Room] . . . I am a slab of meat which must somehow be defrosted and delivered to another floor . . . he’s a man and . . . doesn’t carry the burden of the expectation of caring . . . He’s not mean or cold. I’m just a job, not an adventure. I don’t take it personally and . . . when he delivers me into the hands of OR receiving, he makes one surprising, noble attempt to connect, mano a mano. He doesn’t touch me—God forbid—but he says, ‘Take care, man’ . . . I very much want to acknowledge his attempt to connect—even if it’s on a gendered bridge I do not like to cross. ‘Thanks,’ I whitely muster, and he’s gone . . .

  “My chest X-rays are missing. I’m made to feel vaguely responsible. Didn’t I know that the procedure could not proceed without those X-rays? The head nurse phones up to my other nurse and firmly demands that my X-rays be brought down . . . The other two women have fallen on my chart and are devouring it . . . they cluck and sigh as they sort thru it. Ah ha! Papers are missing. They turn to me—on me?—‘where are your CBC results? Did you give a urine sample?’ . . . My bad diagnostic Karma continues . . . . My pulmonary specialist casually informs me that I’ve been ‘bumped’ to 1:00. ‘Sorry,’ he says, not being . . . I’d . . . more or less made a grumpy peace with the 4 hour delay when my main nurse mentions casually that she’d be back at 3 to prep me for my transport . . . I know with a sinking certainty that I’ve been unceremoniously bumped to 3:30 without so much as a thought. Courtesy, that’s it. That’s what gets lost in the shuffle of American health care delivery. Strangers come and go from your room, without knocking; you’re handed pills to take without explanation; buzzers go off just as you’re finally dozing off. It’s a factory—a conveyor belt. It’s not good will that’s missing. Mo
st of the people mean well . . . but you’re expected to be sick by shift—on their rhythms . . .

  “The women lost interest in me . . . One by one they exited until I was ominously alone—abandoned—and without my X-rays . . . Just as my anxiety was beginning to mix with my stomach acids, two black women entered chatting breezily . . . the older black woman noticed me. She stopped instantly . . .’Honey, you all alone here?’ she asked. In an instant she was by my side. ‘What’s your name, sweetheart?’ She was so soothing. She actually took my hand and started gently rubbing my right forearm, the one without the IV needle in it. She stage whispered to her companion that they’d have to stay . . .’It’s not right to leave patients alone,’ she said, with profound dignity and authority. We continued to make meaningless but meaningful chatter till the nurses returned . . .

  “Entry of my doctor. Completely casual . . . I’m wheeled in and put happily out. I wake up one hour later in recovery. Groggy and hung over, throat sore, but ravenous.”

  Mike’s hospital stay confirmed the diagnosis of extensive KS of the lungs. Essentially that meant, in his words, “I am, literally, breathless. I am drowning in my own blood. ‘They’ say a year, maybe two at best, which jibes with my own experience: I’ve never known a PWA who survived KS of the lungs much longer than that . . . Of course, the [Robert, the prominent NIH scientist] Gallo—or should I say [Martin] Delaney—miracle KS drug might yet save my life. Yeah, I’ll hold what’s left of my breath!” Mike’s skepticism was understandable; Gallo’s claim that the retrovirus HTLV-III caused AIDS had been disproven, and Delaney’s Chinese cucumber (Compound Q) had also bitten the dust. (A reporter confided to Mike that when he contacted Delaney’s Project Inform for Mike’s number, he was told not to bother interviewing him—he was “an AIDS fraud.”)

  Mike of course regretted the failure of the assorted drugs and nostrums that for a decade had been periodically hailed as likely cures. Yet he didn’t sink into the despairing state that so many others did in the early 1990s. Even some of the ACT UP vanguard began to lose confidence that the tactics of angry confrontation would yield medical dividends. Ironically, the plight of the dead and the dying had led to a greater acceptance of gay people than previously, but fear of jeopardizing that increased sympathy led the more conservative members of the gay community, and even some members of ACT UP, to urge an end to “excessive” direct-action tactics. The feeling spread that confrontational politics was played out, had outlived its usefulness.

  The well-known gay conservative Andrew Sullivan wrote in the New Republic that the radicals of ACT UP did not represent the vast majority of gay people, who had assimilationist goals. And Randy Shilts, in an Advocate cover story, insisted that militant activism was no longer relevant. Of course, it never had been relevant to either Shilts or Sullivan. As well-positioned white men they could afford to champion “civility,” confident that folks like them were well on the way to becoming full partners in the inner circles of American life. After all, hadn’t Bill Clinton promised in his 1992 campaign for the presidency to overturn the ban against lesbians and gay men serving openly in the military, to make them equal-opportunity killers?5

  Yes, he had. And though Clinton failed to follow through after winning the election—settling instead for the bizarre “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which wasn’t rescinded until 2011—surely, many argued, his nod in the right direction was far preferable to the exclusionary disdain of the Republicans, to the harsh homophobia of the Reagan-Bush years. In the minds of many gay people, mainstream acceptance was gaining “obvious” traction, and ACT UP’s bristling rage seemed to them largely irrelevant, if not downright counterproductive. Yet what that view failed to take into account was the fact that the search for effective treatments for AIDS had still come up empty-handed, and that the toll from the epidemic was still rising. In 1992 alone, the figures were staggering: 78,000 new cases, and some 41,000 people dead; worldwide the death toll had exceeded 200,000, with the World Health Organization estimating more than 13 million affected. The only treatments thus far had been the so-called nucleoside analogues—AZT, ddC, ddI—with a fourth, d4T, expected soon. But the 1993 Concorde study would soon conclude that these did little if anything to prolong life.

  Where was the evidence that traditional forms of political action like electioneering and lobbying—or relying on mainstream sympathy and morality—were more likely than direct-action tactics to produce greater research energy and results? If Americans knew more history, they might have realized that if it hadn’t been for thirty years of confrontational pressure from the abolitionist movement—to give but one example—slavery might well have expanded across the continent and become permanently entrenched.

  The growing breadth of the AIDS crisis and the growing despair over its failure to produce efficacious treatments, in combination with internal divisions, led to ACT UP’s slow decline and ultimate disintegration. In 1992, its Treatment and Data Committee, deeply knowledgeable about the science of AIDS and well connected to the world of establishment research, broke off from the parent group and refocused on treatment activism, leaving behind the social activism of the original ACT UP agenda—racism, classism, and sexism—to those primarily interested in them. Sentiments of solidarity weakened and then disappeared. Mike had pursued his AIDS activism outside the ranks of ACT UP, but his feelings of being overwhelmed by years of conflict, and his decision to leave New York, paralleled the decision of many in ACT UP to retreat from the fray and pursue individual salvation. What they shared was the sense that the struggle to save lives had come up empty.

  Unlike many others, Mike didn’t feel suicidal; what he felt was more like sadness and weariness, which he was entitled to, given how long he’d been pushing himself to the brink. His reduced lung capacity now had him huffing and puffing, further sapping his energy. He’d seen countless friends reach the late stage where he now was of KS of the lungs. Sometimes he even thought that “having some sense of WHEN one is going to die can be a blessing, if you work it right. It allows one to pace and prioritize and make peace.” He’d long preached that PWAs should “listen to the wisdom of their own bodies,” but he’d always been too steadily on the go to heed his own advice as much as he might have. As he put it, “I was too busy living at a furious pace to pay much attention to the aches and pains, fevers, rashes and diarrhea that constituted what I called my ‘AIDS normal.’ ” It wasn’t until he started to cough up blood and been diagnosed with KS of the lungs that he finally decided to “pamper” himself.

  He started to shop, go to the movies, take a class to learn how to make puff pastry—he was already a wonderful cook whose repertoire included baking his own bread and making fresh strawberry sorbet. Then there was the “ecstasy” of ordering “a quintessential minestrone” at Café Benvenuto; of delighting in his collection of Betty Crocker fifties kitchen utensils; and of visiting his “favorite spot on earth”—the Huntington Gardens—the estate that contained seven different botanical gardens. Plus he read, and read, and “read some more.” “I’m in HOG HEAVEN!” he wrote a close friend. He still felt “raw and bloody from selling my soul to the movement” but now he let sixty-five phone messages that “should” have been returned go unanswered and didn’t go near—well, not for a while—the stack of correspondence and bills that had piled up. In retrospect, he couldn’t imagine how he’d done all that he’d done for so long. He hoped he’d one day be able to return to the hectic life, and even developed a very clear image, should he get lucky, of what he’d look like as an old man—“cantankerous, opinionated, frisky.”6

  Despite his lack of energy, those first few months in L.A. seem to have been something like a genuine honeymoon for Mike. But his doctors made it clear that it would soon end, that he would have to start chemotherapy if he was to last even the year or two that they’d predicted. His first treatment, in the spring of 1992, was largely uneventful. He had some “vague, flu-like symptoms which were completely manageable with aspi
rin and anti-nausea medication.” That made him totally unprepared for the trauma of the second treatment. It took only fifteen minutes and he left whistling, went to the gym and did yoga, soaked in the Jacuzzi while watching “all the naked gods walk by,” came home and fixed himself a feast of fresh fruit and vegetables, went to a movie, read, and went to sleep thinking it had all been a “piece of cake.”

  Then—wham! He woke, at two a.m., with a high fever, teeth chattering, disoriented, and “with joints and muscles so aching that I literally couldn’t lie down or sit up. It was sheer torture.” Eventually he fell back to sleep, had a series of frightening dreams, and woke up thirteen hours later drenched in sweat and again disoriented. He called Joe Sonnabend in New York, who warned him that the effects from chemotherapy were cumulative and that from here on in he’d probably feel still worse. That shook Mike up. He didn’t know if he could face “the geometric progression of traumatic side effects.” Since the treatments were spaced two to three weeks apart, he decided to hang in for the time being. He did let his mother know about the chemo, and although she was terrified of flying, she told him that should he need her she’d be on the next plane.

  Yet he realized that—to his own surprise—he still did want to record another album, or maybe even two. If, that is, he could manage it physically and financially. He had a friend in Chicago who swore he’d be able to find the money somewhere, somehow, to produce at least one of the albums. Mike thought of declaring bankruptcy in order to avoid paying some of his bills, and he missed Richard’s practical-minded advice on such matters. He missed Richard, period. But he was also deeply angry at him, for what he saw as Richard’s rejection. When Richard failed to return a phone call, Mike called again and accused him of having turned his back on the news that he had KS of the lungs, of not wanting to deal with it. According to the account Mike sent to a friend, he yelled at Richard that “the point is, if you’d wanted to speak to me, you’d have called back or written or found some way, and you didn’t. I can no longer suffer such abuse, especially at this point in my life. I have my hands full. . . . You must sort out whether or not you’re up to being involved in my dying process. If you decide not, I’ll be sad, but I’ll be fine.”