German filmmaker Rosa Von Praunheim brought me and Michael and Robert Hilferty to Germany to try to start ACT UP. We traveled around trying to get things going, but it was too early in the German crisis. They just didn't believe it was coming. In town after town we heard arguments against safe sex. “Why is it my responsibility if someone else gets infected?” was a very common response. It was quite a performance watching customs agents attempt to understand Michael's gym bag filled with pills. At that time he was into shark cartilage as the treatment of the future, and he also confided to me that dextran sulfate, a failed cancer drug that AIDS activists wanted to have tested at the time, “worked.” Michael and Robert and I talked a lot on that trip. It was hard to know what the future would bring to these young men before us: Germany did, eventually get an ACT UP, but only after more people had died. One night Michael told me that for the first few years when he came to New York, every evening after work he would go to the baths. He had a little kit of items he would bring, including clean-up wipes for himself and for his trick. He said that he had three thousand penises up his rectum, but that he was sure he knew exactly the person who infected him. He could remember the man's face and was mad about it. Sadly, by the time Scott Heron saw this footage of him in the basement of this porn theater, Michael had already been dead for a couple of years. In the summer of 2009, Robert Hilferty committed suicide, leaving me the last of the three of us still alive. Neither of them lived to be fifty. Today I am fifty-two.
I first met Robert in 1986 right after his lover Tom had died of AIDS. He made two short films that Jim and I showed in the MIX Festival: Cirque du SIDA, which was an intercutting of Cirque du Soleil and ACT UP. And one was a portrait of the empty apartment Robert was forced to vacate after Tom died. I remember him telling me about Tom's last moments. Robert held his hand, looked into Tom's eyes and said, “I love you, I love you,” until Tom was dead. Robert had had a pretty privileged life before AIDS. He'd grown up in Teaneck, gone to Princeton. He was good looking, well trained, and smart. The death of his lover and his eviction from his own home was not the way his life was supposed to have gone.
Robert became very active in ACT UP, and continued to work in film. He was one of the principal organizers of Stop the Church, when ACT UP disrupted mass at Saint Patrick's Cathedral. He was one of the only people with the foresight to film inside the church during the demonstration. He edited that footage, along with scenes of ACT UP preparing for the action, into a film also called Stop the Church.
It was on a walk with Robert across the Brooklyn Bridge that he confided in me about his plan for the film. A short time before, Jesse Helms had denounced a show at Artists Space, curated by photographer Nan Goldin and called Witness To Our Vanishing, about the AIDS crisis. Helms was furious that some public funds had gone to the space, and particularly singled out work by David Wojnarowicz. Ironically this attack from the Senate floor brought an enormous amount of national and international attention to the show and to the artists in question. In David's case, it enhanced his profile and reputation significantly. Robert, like many other artists, was acutely aware of this process and had devised a plan to tap into this potential source of free publicity. He was sending anonymous postcards to right-wing organizations—one I specifically recall him mentioning was the Catholic League—informing them that Stop the Church was going to be shown on PBS. Well, his plan worked. The right-wing groups behaved exactly as he had hoped, protesting the scheduled broadcast, which resulted in the film first being censored and then finally shown with accompanying debate. It brought Robert the attention he craved and he spent the next few years traveling around the world showing the film. Unfortunately it was also a Robert Johnson-esque pact with the devil, because he never completed a work of art again.
In a state of very high anxiety about a head injury he had suffered the previous spring, Robert impulsively decided to commit suicide in July 2009. His boyfriend, Fabio, reported that he was “with Robert through his final moments of life.” When I read that, I couldn't help but remembering the image of Robert holding Tom's hand, twenty-three years before. He had recreated his AIDS trauma, the unnecessary death of the young beloved, holding the hand of his grieving partner, saying good-bye. Only now Robert was on the other side. The consequences of AIDS on one person's life are very complicated, but as time passes, they prove irrepressible. Ironically, in 2010 the Catholic League surfaced again to demand that David Wojnarowicz's piece in the National Gallery show Hide/Seek, curated by Jonathan Katz, be censored because of an image of ants crawling over a crucifix. David had been dead for so long, and yet, repulsively, he was still being censored. Still having his reputation enhanced by the notoriety. But Robert Hilferty was pretty much forgotten as an artist.
The present does not resemble the past. We went through a cataclysmic disaster and then we took a break. Instead of constant morbidity there was puking, diarrhea, never-ending adjustments to toxic drug combination, a lot of swallowing, and a certain facsimile of robustness, everyone feeling “great.” Back to the gym. The funerals slowed or stopped and the neighborhoods were changed, a new kind of AIDS body modification came into being. No more Kaposi's sarcoma and wasting syndrome on the street—they were replaced by the Crixovan Look: sunken eyes and a pot belly. Guys with HIV could bulk up in a way that the steroid-pure never could. They became larger than that even. Some men got their power back, while most of us could not, did not face what we had really endured. Looking back at the gay dead, locked in their youth, their youth is now locked in the past. Eighties haircuts, ACT UP demonstrations, tentative first novels from defunct presses. Memories fade. Men are increasingly reduced to specific moments played over again and many are moments of dissipation.
John Bernd the dancer and performance artist. Something was wrong with his blood but he didn't know what it was. Something to do with white blood cells. GRID. Gay Related Immune Deficiency. His skin fell apart. He got sick so early in the scheme of things and seem to live on will alone. But was it truly will that made some people live longer than others, or was that a placebo for a weaker strain of virus? ARC. AIDS Related Condition. One day on the subway I offered him a sip of my orange juice. He thought twice and then refused. Who did he think he was protecting, himself or me? I've often wondered. He was one of the founders of the People with AIDS Coalition. He came into the coffee shop where I was working.
“How can I get better if you say I have AIDS?”
I didn't know the answer because it was the wrong question and yet uncontestable. I know there is more there. We were in two shows together, all that backstage banter. I saw his collaboration with Anne Bogart on a version of William Inge's Picnic and we had a long, long talk about it. I saw him perform many times with his beloved chair, for which he built a custom carrying case. I remember his final performance with choreographer Jennifer Monson, he was so disoriented he could barely follow her. He waved at me crossing the street. I went to his funeral. There, Meredith Monk sang his favorite of her songs. His mother said, “John very much wanted to live.” His sister told a story about the time they had gone camping together as children. John became concerned that spiders would crawl into his sleeping bag. His solution was to surround the bag with stones, and then stand up, clapping and singing “Out, spiders out. Out. Out. Out.” This is the world before protease inhibitors, clearly the past. The helpless well watching the ill fade, suffer, and then disappear.
Of course memory is a reflection of the self. I recall the moments that meant the most to me, they are unrepresentative and historically subjective. Massaging Phil Zwickler's feet in the hospital while he explained to his mother that, “that's what we do for the dying.” I crossed David Wojnarowicz coming to visit Phil as I was leaving, and later saw him retching with pain on a chair in Estroff 's Pharmacy on Second Avenue, waiting for his prescription to be filled. Asotto Saint's family was at his funeral. He was a poet and editor of The Road Before Us: One Hundred Black Gay Male Poets. His mother knew all his frie
nds' names. His lover, Jan, died before him, and they'd bought a double funeral plot and engraved a marble headstone with the words “Nuclear Lovers.”
“When he received an award from the Black Lesbian and Gay Leadership Forum,” said a young Haitian woman with straightened hair and a conservative pink cotton dress, at the podium of his memorial service, “I was so proud of my cousin.”
I had never before seen the family of a person who died of AIDS be comprehending enough to make that statement. Usually it was quite the opposite, as when Donald Woods, director of an organization called AIDS Films, died of AIDS and his family had his cause of death listed as “cardiac arrest.” Asotto himself had to go to Donald's funeral to stand up and say, “Donald Woods was a proud gay man.”
After he died, I received a letter Asotto had prepared for me, delivered by his friend Michelle Karlsberg. He wrote, “Thank you for your support of Black Gay Men.” I was amazed at how focused and accepting he was, dying with every detail in place. Bo Houston, the novelist, died angry at me for living and continuing to publish while he knew he would never live to reach his potential. All his books are out of print, despite the imploring title of one, Remember Me. I visited Vito Russo at New York University Medical Center, he lay in bed with a Silence = Death button on his striped pajamas. He wanted to know everything that was happening out there in his beloved world. Others couldn't bear to think about what they were missing. When he died, the message on his answering machine said, “This is Vito. I'm sorry I'm not here.”
There are two guys in particular whom I think about a lot. The one who was my real friend was a writer named Stan Leventhal. All of his books are out of print now. And the harsh truth is that Stan never really became a great writer. But he wanted to be one. My favorite of his works was a short story in his final book, Candy Holiday, where he remembers the last man he knew for sure he could have infected. Stan was kind of a hippie—back-pack, relaxed, jean-jacket type. He liked to have a Jack Daniels and a cigarette. He took his AZT with bourbon sometimes. Stan read everything and was the first man I met who actually read lesbian fiction consistently.
He lived in a filthy apartment on Christopher Street overlooking the park. It was packed with books and CDs, his guitar and TV. He'd come to the city from Long Island to be a singer and started out on the folk circuit. He'd broken up with the love of his life right before we made friends, and plunged himself into the creation of Amethyst Press, which was probably responsible for the most interesting collection of gay male writing published post-Stonewall. He published books by Dennis Cooper, the late Bo Houston, the late Steve Abbott, Kevin Killian, Patrick Moore, Mark Ameen—all important, underappreciated artists. He edited a porn magazine, Torso, for years, and ran it like a low-rent gay Playboy. Beefcake photos and one interesting work of fiction per issue. I even had a story published in Torso. Stan had a formula. He'd publish a highly intellectual, formally innovative novel by a gifted writer and then slap a piece of beefcake on the cover so that it would sell. His favorite writer was Guy Davenport, on whom he'd written a comprehensive and adoring monograph.
Near the end of his life, Amethyst got wrested away from Stan in a power play and then the new bosses destroyed and folded it. This depressed him deeply. He was filled with anger. I remember one lunch at a Chinese restaurant when I saw tears splash onto his food, only to look up and discover it was sweat, he had such a high fever but was still running around. His true love died. At my final visit to his apartment, the place stank. The toilet bowl was black. Stan gave me one of his books, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man by Denis Johnson, which unfortunately I didn't care for. I was surprised actually, usually we agreed on books.
I saw him in Beekman Hospital right before his death. He was bald and shaking and could barely sit up. That was the first time I met his mother, Pearl, whom I thought of at the time as “uncomprehending,” but now I guess was just out of her element and lost.
“There's so much to say,” Stan told me. Then he told me something I am not going to repeat here. I stepped out into the hallway as the doctor fiddled with his body and Pearl followed.
“Stanley always wanted a hardcover,” Pearl said. Then he was dead. Stan's best friends were Chris Bram and Michelle Karlsberg.
“Should I ask Stanley if he wants to be buried in Florida?” Pearl asked Michelle.
“Stan doesn't give a shit where he's buried,” Michelle told her.
Like all the living and the dead, I think I see him everywhere, but it is just new versions, young versions of guys like Stan. Most of us seem to be recreated every fifteen years. I see a twenty-year-old me almost once a month, and a twenty-year-old, forty-year-old, sixty-year-old Stan passes by on the street often enough.
Last week I saw a young queen walking by. Coiffed hair, eye makeup, tight stretch pants, scarves. Maybe nineteen. This was the most endangered type of man in my generation, the kind most likely to die. For years whenever I saw a really nelly queen, I felt frightened for his safety. Being so tough and brave about how they looked on the street showed they were bold about their desires. At one point they seemed to have disappeared, to have been wiped out. But then new ones were created. Do they know their own history? Do they wonder why there are so few sixty-year-old versions of themselves passing by on the sidewalk? What do they want to be when they grow up?
Another man I think about a lot is David Feinberg. He was legendary for being the guy who was so creepy to his friends that when he died they were all mad at him and never got over it. He forgot that people have responsibilities to others until the moment that they are dead. He felt absolved because he was cheated out of life. David's books get more interesting as the years pass. He wasn't sentimental at the time, when a lot of people were, and that made the books seem acerbic and special. Now times have changed and the rest of us who care at all have caught up with the sarcasm, hatred, and resentment by the dying. I mean there were two competing aesthetics at the time: the people who favored candlelight vigils with the release of white balloons, and the kind of PWAs who published a zine called Diseased Pariah News. David was so angry it was funny, until it became just pure pain. I think the thing about gay people in that era was that we were not really especially caustic or campy, we just were so far ahead of the regular culture that we got bored very easily, and moved on to the next thing just to keep ourselves interested. Although they are out of print, David's books Queer and Loathing, Eight-Sixed, and Spontaneous Combustion have become documents of justifiable rage and the guts it took to have it.
There are famous stories about David, famous lines. “You can't wear a red ribbon if you're dead.” Or the time he hauled himself out of Saint Vincent's Hospital and wheeled his IV across the street to the ACT UP meeting to tell everyone that we had failed because he was dying. He used to stop people in an elevator and tell them that he had AIDS. He went to a department store, covered in Kaposi's sarcoma lesions and asked for a free makeover. Now, occasionally I see a movie in which a character has “KS” but it looks like the makeup man drew it on the actor with a magic marker. Actually these were flesh-eating sores that started out as splotches, little raspberry dots, and then took over a person's legs and arms and face and devoured them. David went to see Terrance McNally's Love! Valour! Compassion! with that same portable IV. As each person died they would pass on their IV stands, shower chairs, bedpans so that others would not have to buy them new again each time. It took so much energy for David to get to the theater that night that he slept through the show. This was his direct action for the day, making the audience see what a person with AIDS looked like in the phase when most just disappeared into their apartments until they died.
I remember when David threw a “dying party” in his Chelsea condo. He invited his closest friends and had us standing around eating and drinking while we watched him, emaciated, lying on the living room couch, dying in front of us. Then he had diarrhea accidentally on the couch and ran screaming to the bathroom. Stan Leventhal was there, very sick. After Da
vid shit his pants, Stan left. That's when I realized the cruel nature of David's act. He wanted to force everyone else who had this in his future to stare it down right now. No denial. No mercy. He forgot that we have responsibilities to other people until the moment that we are dead. Or as Jim said, “David didn't realize he wasn't the only one losing something.”
I visited him in the hospital, it was like a community Center filled with friends of ours dying of AIDS. Sarah Petit, who later died of cancer, was playing chess with the guy in the next room. While I was there, Carrie Fisher called David. He had put out on the grapevine that one of his final wishes was to meet Carrie Fisher, so she called his room. After that he phoned his mother and asked her to send him some cookies. She sent them parcel post. Another time when I was there American Express called. They wanted to report some extraordinary activity on his credit card. Someone was buying pairs of plane tickets to places like Brazil and charging hotel rooms. No, David was busy dying. It was his ex-boyfriend who was ripping him off.
This is a story I heard, so I'm no witness, but after he died his parents decided that they wanted him to have a Jewish funeral. The friends were so shell-shocked by his abusive behavior that they lost all judgment and went along with it, getting a lesbian rabbi. The whole works. But the parents got caught in traffic coming from upstate and were hours late, so the lesbian rabbi had to leave and the house rabbi was called in to take her place. When the family finally arrived, he started the service.
The Gentrification of the Mind Page 6