About half the crowd was now standing and yelling. The assemblyman urged peace and harmony. A woman shrieked: “My peace and harmony went out of the window on August 24 when they arrested eight Italian boys and told all the black and Hispanic boys that they had nothing to do with it.” It was Mrs. Mondello, the mother of Keith Mondello, one of the convicted boys. Abbate responded, “I know how you feel, Mrs. Mondello.” “You can’t know how I feel,” she yelled back. “No one knows how I feel.” “Let them march without the cops!” shouted a man at the back of the room. “Don’t take away the rights of the people!”
A few residents went up to the microphones to appeal for calm. An older man said, “We’re all minorities. We should stick together. They’re just going to pick us off one by one.” A young, nervous girl ventured, “There is racism in Bensonhurst,” and the place erupted once again. The grievances went on and on. How much was this costing us? How come you can’t get a permit for a block party with a month’s notice and Sharpton gives the police two days’ notice and the main high street shuts down? “Tell me,” yelled one man. “Why are we afraid to walk the streets on Saturday? We should not be held hostage in our own houses.” The only hush was for Mrs. Mondello, whose main point was that Gina Feliciano “is now and has only ever been a low-life, drug-using prostitute whore.” At this, the meeting exploded into menacing cheers.
It’s not clear whether this is the Bensonhurst that will emerge from the agony of the last few months. Certainly the maximum sentences handed down last week to Fama and Mondello will likely take the sting out of Sharpton’s marches. But whatever happens, another Bensonhurst clearly exists. It’s difficult to spend much time in the neighborhood without being more impressed by the honesty with which people discuss their problems and their awkward attempts to deal with them than with the fear and suspicion lurking beneath the surface. It may, of course, all explode into the rage of that Thursday night. But if it does, not all of Bensonhurst will be behind it. Some even seem to grasp the larger symbolism of what is at stake. They ended the meeting, in a desperate bid to avoid complete chaos, with a clumsy invocation to sing “God Bless America.” I thought it would be a fiasco. As it was, everyone stood and awkwardly held hands. And when they sang, “My home, sweet home,” they raised up their arms.
Gay Life, Gay Death: The Siege of a Subculture
December 17, 1990 | THE NEW REPUBLIC
In the living room of a friend of mine, there’s a coffee table crammed with photographs. One stands out: four young men in tuxes taken three years ago. They’re all grinning, in classic college-buddy group-shot mode. Of the four, two are now dead. One died two years ago, the second in early November, when Kaposi’s Sarcoma (KS), the cancerous lesions common to people with AIDS, entered his lungs. Tom, the third of the tuxes, was diagnosed with the AIDS virus (HIV) five years ago. He found out his status soon after burying his lover of four years, who also died of AIDS.
Three years ago, despite treatment with the antiviral drug AZT, Tom came down with his first major AIDS-related infection. His skin is now covered with KS. Because of an intestinal infection that doesn’t enable him to digest food, an intravenous drip feeds him fourteen hours a day. His immune system is so weak that the plastic line keeps getting infected, so he has to go into the hospital from time to time to have it replaced. His lover of the past five years, Steve, the fourth tux, is HIV-negative, and is preparing for a new life on his own. Five in their close circle of friends have died in the past month alone.
This kind of familiarity with death is unique in modern times. With the advent of effective hygiene and medicine, death has long since ceased to be common among young people. If anything, death has grown more distant for the majority, a tragedy occurring either very occasionally in the otherwise healthy or among the old and frail, who are safely hospitalized beyond our immediate awareness and responsibility.
But for gay men in America in 1990, none of this applies anymore. Death is less an event than an environment. One hundred thousand people have now died of AIDS. This year almost as many have died as died in all the previous years put together. Ten times as many will die as have died. More young men have lost their lives to AIDS than died in the entire Vietnam War. Forty percent of these deaths have been among IV drug users and others of both sexes. (Nothing here is designed to diminish their predicament.) But 60 percent have been among gay men. While the outside world thinks the worst is over, eight hundred thousand people, on the lowest estimates, now face the hard task of actually dying.
This fact is transforming life for an entire section of America. Largely invisible and almost incomprehensible to outsiders, gay men and their families now live lives alien to modernity’s rhythms. Death is ubiquitous. Friends and lovers die with random, rapid consistency. Time horizons shorten. Death is mentionable again. Indeed, it is unavoidable. Gay men now live essentially as medievals among moderns: habituated to mortality in a world of health, besieged by death in the midst of oblivious life.
The gay cities within cities in America are in this sense medieval communities. The dying coexist with the living, and the dead clutter the address books of the dying as bones once festooned the charnel houses of medieval city dwellers.
There is a further twist. Gay men must not only live as medievals among moderns, but also live as moderns, still wedded to the contemporary alienation from mortality, yet forced into encounters with extinction that the broader culture finds strange, distasteful. This dichotomy—modern and medieval, living and dying—is creating divisions among and within gay men, too, divisions as hard to acknowledge publicly as they are privately unavoidable.
It is a commonplace that AIDS has united the gay “community” in newfound fraternity. But this is at best a half-truth. There are, of course, countless stories of reconciliation and courage in the face of the virus. Nothing here is meant to slight the truth of those experiences. But AIDS has also unmistakably widened the rifts among gay men. There are those with the virus, and those who are free of it. There are those who know many who have died, and those who do not. There are those who are dying and those who are not. In this crucible of solidarity, the divisions already in gay society are being cruelly exposed.
I
Phil Zwickler is a fiery, stocky, fast-talking former filmmaker who has AIDS. He now runs a newsletter for people with AIDS and recently made a gripping short film called Fear of Disclosure, about relationships between people who test positive for HIV and people who test negative. I met him in his small, ramshackle office in downtown Manhattan. His lover, Jimmy, died a few years ago. Zwickler was barred from the funeral by Jimmy’s family, and lived with the fear that he would die, too, and the guilt that he may actually have infected a man he loved. All this I learned within minutes, a function of the candor many people with AIDS display. After a few minutes of questioning, Zwickler’s candor grew. “I’m angry at you,” he said. “I know you won’t have sex with me, not because of what I look like, not because of who I am, but because of a virus in my blood.”
Perhaps the commonest misconception about the impact of AIDS among gay men is that it is restricted to the sick and the dying. In fact, its impact may be just as powerful among the well and the living. The vast majority of HIV-positive men are healthy and asymptomatic. And no HIV-negative gay man has lived without the risk and fear of HIV infection. Gay life and gay death are not separate issues, meeting occasionally at the bedside or the grave. They are wedded to each other.
The points of contact generate friction, of which Zwickler’s passion is a sign. The divide between healthy HIV-positive men and healthy HIV-negative men has not yet been broached in the mainstream gay press. But it’s evident in the personal columns: “HIV+ seeks same”; “Fun bright, passionate GWM, 41, 5' 8", 148, HIV-, wants to meet similar quality men”; “GWM, 40, 6' 200lbs, looking to meet younger GWM 20-29 for a lasting monogamous relationship. Disease-free as I am.” This subtle, pervasive segregation among gay men is a growing feature of gay life. It
has its roots in fear, although, paradoxically, not so much the fear of actually contracting HIV anymore. It’s quite clear now that the virus is extremely hard to catch. Most gay men assume that kissing, oral sex, and anal sex with a condom are permissibly safe activities. So the phobia of sex with someone who is HIV-positive has an element of the irrational about it, as far as medical risk is concerned. “Fear” merges with stigmatization of the sick. “They’re the biggest hypocrites in the world,” a positive man told me of wary negatives. “They hide behind this knowledge of safe sex and go to bed with anybody. But as soon as they find out you’re positive, they drop you like a stone.”
There is also simply the gulf of experience between those with the virus and those free of it. Coming to terms with being HIV-positive is, for many, a transforming experience, and it becomes difficult to form relationships with people whose lives are untouched. “Ultimately,” an HIV-negative who’d had a failed relationship with an HIV-positive told me, “that person is having an experience you’re not having, and you’ll never know him, however hard you try.” Another HIV-positive with an HIV-negative lover spoke of the broader difference in attitudes the virus generated. Daily, petty squabbles, which obsessed his lover, seemed irrelevant to him: “I once screamed at my boyfriend, ‘There are times when I wish you were positive, because none of these things would mean anything to you at all.’ ”
This dynamic of mistrust, fear, and stigmatization has further complications. One man whose lover became ill with AIDS told me he found it hard to take the HIV test, not just because of his own fear of death, but because of the barriers it might have erected between them. He waited until his lover died, and discovered that he was negative. With that, he also saw the real reason for his earlier avoidance: “At the back of my mind, I guess I was afraid that I might have given it to him. That I might have killed him.”
The danger of mutual transmission is a constant source of friction, and there is no escape from it. Even an HIV-positive man can be made sicker by reinfection with the virus, whether from his own lover or from someone else. The result is a curious turn of fate. Far from bringing couples closer together or encouraging monogamy, AIDS has actually pushed people apart. It has made intimacy harder, trust less tangible, selfishness more acceptable. It may not be what some have called sexual apartheid, but it does amount to a kind of sexual and emotional zoning, an invisible wall between men who are themselves walled off from an outside world.
The effects of this can be seen everywhere in gay life, from the cult of the healthy body in bodybuilding to the nervous inquiries on the second date about health. The divisions between HIV-positives and negatives are also reflected in politics. Queer Nation, a radical offshoot of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, concentrates on countering homophobia with a range of actions from kiss-ins to marches urging gays to bash back against antigay violence. To outsiders they seem just one more gang of gay activists. Among some AIDS activists, however, they’re known as “ACT UP for Negatives,” people for whom the fight against AIDS is not so personal and therefore not so desperate. San Francisco’s ACT UP recently split between a faction focused entirely on AIDS and another more concerned with other gay issues. Behind the split lay positive-negative tensions. Alongside the usual rifts in any activist group between radicals and moderates, assimilationists and separatists, in today’s gay politics there’s the added factor of who has HIV and who doesn’t.
These tensions inevitably lead to a raising up of the drawbridge of emotional commitment, to a retreat in the face of fear. In some ways safe sex is the apotheosis of this self-isolation. Safe sex can be the outcome of a life in which certain risks—of love, commitment, selflessness—are less likely to be taken. It’s revealing that, according to safe sex counselors at Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the premier AIDS-care organization in New York, the most common “relapsers” from safe sex are not promiscuous, anonymous experimenters, but couples in long-standing, healthy, monogamous relationships. By protecting themselves against the virus, gay men also find themselves protected against intimacy.
This has led not to an abandonment of sex, but to a revival of it. As sex has become not merely physically but emotionally safer, it’s become more popular. The back rooms, bathhouses, and compulsive anonymous sex of a decade or so ago may have gone. But so, too, has the terrified celibacy of the first stage of the epidemic. “Sex is completely glorified and accepted. A seventies culture has come back,” a young gay journalist told me.
The club scene has also experienced a revival. Two of the more popular New York bars these days are The Men’s Room and Sod-O-Mee. The former is a pounding cavern, with sixty-foot ceilings, slides of nude men on the walls, and go-go boys, steroid-pumped to bursting, gyrating on boxes amid hundreds of mainly shirtless men. The latter looks like any small dance club, with one difference. Above the dance floor there’s a giant video screen showing pornography as the somewhat conventional crowd below bops to Madonna. All along the bar, video screens show the same genital images. Go-go boys in cellophane jockstraps sway in front of them. It’s a symbol of a new sexuality: sensual, garish, safe, for the first time a full reflection of the phrase “mutual masturbation,” in which emotions, as well as bodily fluids, are kept carefully apart.
The new sexuality, however, offers only the chimera of relief. In willful nostalgia, the old Saint club, a legendary gay bar in the East Village that has long since ceased regular business, has been revived. In its heyday it was the focus of 1970s erotica. The old building is now defunct, but the glamorous crowd rents out other clubs to re-create the experience. And, indeed, it feels almost the same: throbbing disco music, near-perfect torsos, omnipresent drugs, and anonymous groping in the dark corners. But the fragility of the forgetting is apparent. The Halloween costume party was held this year at Studio 54, a sacred relic of an era gone by. An HIV-positive man showed up, scantily clad, erotically beckoning, his skin revealing the telltale signs of Kaposi’s Sarcoma. He came as a court jester.
II
Salem United Methodist Church is in the heart of Harlem on 129th Street and Seventh Avenue. One evening last October it was the site of a “Service of Love, Remembrance, and Hope” for people with AIDS. The high point of the “Harlem Week of Prayer for AIDS,” it involved several local pastors. Perhaps because of the rain outside, it was a small congregation, with almost as many people up front as in the pews. The music was from the Addicts Rehabilitation Center Choir, the first hymn: “On Christ, the solid rock, I stand; / All other ground is sinking sand, all other ground is sinking sand.”
We were called to prayer. The readings were read. A few people paid tribute to those who had died of AIDS. A young man in African garb recited a poem, calling upon all those black men who had died of AIDS to return to the fold of black history: “Jesus is calling, for you and for me. Death is coming for you and for me. Come home, all you who are weary. Come home.” A large woman shuffled forward, dressed in a checked cardigan and a flattened black felt hat: “In my little corner of the world,” she said, “I saw my son slip away. But I looked to the hills whence cometh my strength. And we kept the faith.” Tentative amens echoed through the building.
The service was faintly unreal: a scattering of embarrassed people focusing on death as if it were still an occasional, tragic intervention in normal life. The point of the evening, it turned out, was to force the assembled pastors, who had done very little to acknowledge the scope of AIDS in their congregations, to listen to the Rev. James Forbes Jr., the pastor of Riverside Church.
His text was the parable of the Good Samaritan. His aim was to confront the pharisaism of today’s Christians toward those with AIDS. He spoke of a gay parishioner. “He asked me, as he lay there dying of AIDS, he said, ‘What’s God’s attitude toward me?… Don’t tell me something just to cheer me up. Just tell me the truth.’ ” The church went silent. For the first time that evening, the subject of homosexuality—not AIDS, not IV drug use, not poverty—was addressed.
“What he wanted to know was not whether God would forgive him, not even whether God would love him, but whether God would affirm him.” Forbes turned to look at the pastors: “I wonder very much what you would have told him.” After an awkward pause, he continued: “There is a part of the Church that can only deal with respectable problematics. But grace is able to deal with any problematic.” People shifted in their seats. “We have to deal with sexuality. Why do we have to allow Oprah Winfrey to tell the truth before we do?” A handful of people walked out.
AIDS is now affecting black and Hispanic New Yorkers more than it is affecting whites. In 1986, according to New York’s Health Systems Agency, 30 percent of AIDS cases were black and 23 percent Hispanic. Now that’s 31 and 26 percent, respectively. By 1993 the percentages are forecast at 35 percent and 30 percent. Thirty-seven percent of black and Hispanic AIDS cases are due to gay transmission; and experts believe this is an underestimate, since many black and Hispanic men would sooner admit to being a junkie than to being gay.
This, perhaps, is the most alarming feature of black gay life. In addition to the familiar problems of urban minorities, poor black gay men also have to deal with extraordinary homophobia. In talking to minority men with AIDS, it was hard to avoid the impression that the level of denial is measurably greater, the pain more intense, the isolation more complete than among whites. Stories of hushed burials, of families collecting sons’ bodies from hospitals and not allowing friends or lovers to pay tribute, of bashings and neglect are commonplace, and usually told by people who request anonymity. Even among elites—perhaps especially among elites—homophobia is intense. Of the fifty-nine board members of the Black Leadership Commission on AIDS, the core minority group in New York confronting the problem, only one, project director Gregory Broyles, is openly gay. He’s had to fight hard to get the fact of homosexuality acknowledged at its meetings.
Out on a Limb Page 3