“By being black, I’m separated from the white gay community, and being gay, I’m separated from the African American community,” is how Broyles puts the black gay predicament. The black press rarely deals with gay men with AIDS: recent issues of Emerge and Spin, guest-edited by Spike Lee, for example, focused on the threat to women and children. According to gay black men I interviewed, there is even a belief among many young blacks that only whites are gay, and therefore AIDS is irrelevant to blacks. Lies about the cause of early deaths merely perpetuate this myth. The truth is, a generation of young black men is disappearing in a silence broken only by the occasional, sparsely attended church service.
Take Kevin, for example, although that’s not his real name. He lives on a run-down street in the middle of Spanish Harlem, the only black man on the block. He hasn’t seen any family members for nineteen years, and most of his friends are white. Few neighbors know he has the disease, although some know he’s gay. He has heard women whispering “faggot” on the street as he walks by. It’s a term that can be more than psychologically wounding. A man with AIDS on Kevin’s block got badly beaten up recently when his neighbors found out he had the disease.
The walls of Kevin’s dilapidated apartment are lined with classical music tapes, the floors cluttered with dumbbells, a reminder of the days when he was a bodybuilder. Twirls of flypaper hang from the ceiling like garlands. Kevin got really sick two years ago. He found he couldn’t make his second shift as a security guard because of acute chills. He ended up in the hospital with tuberculosis. Since then he’s had pneumonia, herpes, and KS. As we talked he scratched the KS lesions repeatedly, and had recently taken to picking at them with needles to relieve the itching. Halfway through our conversation, he suddenly said, quite calmly: “I can’t see your face. I can’t see you. I’ve got these spots in front of my eyes. Strange little horizontal lines.” He was probably in the early stages of going blind.
His isolation is triple: race, sexuality, disease. In his first stay in the hospital, for TB, the three had come together: “A doctor came in and said would I like to go to the tenth floor? I said no, and he said wouldn’t you like to be with your own kind? And I never knew what that was.… So two doctors came in and they said to me like I was getting a Christmas present, they said, yes, you’ve got it. And I said, got what? And they said, you’ve got AIDS. I said how much longer have I got? And they said three years at the most.” That was two years ago.
When black gay men are visible, and the real cause of their deaths acknowledged, the reaction is often vicious. “All we’ve ever had is the power of the dick, the power over women,” one young black gay man told me. “So if one dick likes another dick, that’s a problem. They think: This faggot is in my community. I can’t have that.” The younger generation seems to be getting more—not less—bigoted. Black role models, like Eddie Murphy, crack jokes about people with AIDS. Rap spews antigay venom across the airwaves. As the black family has disintegrated, the pressure on middle-class gay men to get married gets stronger. One man told me the worst comments he had ever had were from women, resentful of a “good man” refusing to have a family.
It’s no surprise, then, that the AIDS activist groups are overwhelmingly white. What’s odd is their silence about the homophobia affecting minorities. ACT UP, while protesting the white Catholic Church’s stance against safe sex education, has failed to attack black churches that follow the same policy. The Minority Task Force on AIDS (MTFA), the only black group fighting AIDS on the streets of Harlem, holds safe sex workshops in black churches, which are required by pastors not to mention anal sex, condoms, or homosexuality, unless specifically asked about them. According to activists I spoke with, many pastors in Harlem are themselves closeted gay men, who mask their own homosexuality by refusing to acknowledge it in their congregations. Yet ACT UP has not “outed” these men or even protested their negligence. Such an act, activists explain off the record, would be racist.
A large part of the minority gay predicament is the result of whites’ reluctance to face a problem that does not affect them. But just as problematic as white neglect is homophobia among healthy, heterosexual blacks. One black AIDS activist I spoke with lamented that if the minority groups fighting AIDS were to disappear tomorrow, nobody but a few white people would care: “Our white allies drive us crazy, but they’re still our allies, and our racial compatriots don’t give two shits about us.” Broyles of the Black Leadership Commission on AIDS complains that elected officials never see blacks lobbying on AIDS, and so it is hard to attract funding. Ronald Johnson, who runs MTFA, blames minority officials as well: “There’s not one black or Hispanic legislator who has done a goddamned thing about AIDS in this city, state, or country. And that’s disgusting.”
MTFA’s offices are a few connected rooms in a dilapidated apartment building on 115th Street. MTFA has a handful of staff, and doesn’t even have the word “AIDS” written on its door, for fear of reprisal. The contrast with the gleaming, five-story office block of GMHC—with its designer logo and color-coded office suites—could not be more acute. According to Johnson, the plight of black gay men with AIDS is dire not simply because of all the other problems affecting the sick—crime, poverty, drugs—but because AIDS has not even begun to enter the collective consciousness. Changing behavior is virtually impossible when the very people at risk don’t acknowledge that they are at risk. A bathhouse still operates in Harlem. Denial by gay men of their own homosexuality is the norm. Drug use is commonly related to sex: “For black gay men who are still struggling with guilt over their homosexuality, drugs help them get over that guilt hump in order to be able to have sex at all,” Johnson explains.
The group most able to help—the educated black middle class—is made up of the very people, according to Johnson, least willing to confront the taboo of homosexuality. The Dinkins administration, he claims, is more comfortable dealing with Tim Sweeney, the white head of GMHC, than with Johnson, who is black: “I broke one of the unspoken rules of the black community: if you’re a homosexual, keep it to yourself.”
Among Hispanics, the situation is more acute. The rate of infection is growing fastest in this population, yet if anything, the denial is greater than among blacks. Homophobia is arguably more profound among Hispanics than other ethnic groups, but gay sex may be more common. According to gay Hispanic men I interviewed, anal sex is very prevalent among “straight” Hispanic men. One now openly gay man said he’d had far more sex with his straight male friends when he was in the closet than he’s had since. The deep taboo, he argued, is not against sex between men as such, but against admitting it and forming relationships. This is exactly the toughest scenario for AIDS education: those most vulnerable to the disease are those least likely to admit they’re vulnerable.
The gay Hispanic population in New York is concentrated in Queens and isolated from white gays. There are Hispanic clubs—Studio 88, La Escuelita, The Love Boat—and a Hispanic gay culture, which, according to the few Hispanic men prepared to talk about it, is more close-knit and monogamous than white gay life. This isolation makes access to help difficult, as does the immigrant experience: “Their families don’t know; they don’t have legal papers; they don’t have good access to treatment,” explained Luis, an HIV-positive Hispanic man in his twenties. “A lot don’t speak English. And they’re afraid that if they go to the hospital, they will get deported.” He plans to tell his mother about his condition when she visits from the Dominican Republic this month: “It’s kind of sad,” he points out. “She said one day that if I ever got sick, she would die. The pain will be something like that. So you see how scary it is for me to tell her. Of course, she will not die. She will live.”
Among the varieties of gay death, the minority experience is the least accessible. Often the first thing the broader society sees of it is an emaciated black or Hispanic man in a hospital, adamantly claiming he’s an IV drug user. And it’s no accident that as the disease has shifted to these
populations, it has become less visible. In the pew in front of me at the Salem service, a thin young black man stood on his own. From time to time he left to go to the rest room. Throughout, he mopped his face and neck with small pieces of brown paper, and clutched his body with his arms, cradling himself into temporary comfort. I didn’t know whether to talk to him. Those around looked through him, caught in that awkward gap between patronizing and addressing his pain.
After the final hymn, we talked. When his illness became intense, he was forced to live with his mother and give up work. He lived in the South Bronx but was still here at 11:30 p.m. because he wanted “to do something.” And besides, he couldn’t stand being trapped in bed any longer. He was in touch with GMHC and was supposed to go to a clinical trial for a new experimental drug that day in New Jersey. He had felt too sick to go.
III
So much has been written about ACT UP that it’s easy to overlook its most compelling characteristic. Perhaps a majority of its youthful members will be dead in a few years’ time. They are, of course, not alone in this. About 30 percent of GMHC’s staff, for example, is thought to be HIV-positive. But the combination of nearing death and political activism makes for a unique phenomenon. ACT UP is not merely a brigade of gay-rights activists. It is not even a countercultural crusade for the rights of others. It is a movement primarily designed to prevent the demise of its own.
Most are candid about this: “For me, it’s therapy,” a wiry, HIV-positive former Wall Streeter told me. “I’ve always admitted that. But it’s not the therapy of comfort. It’s the therapy of seeing that change can happen. It’s self-empowerment in its true form. It’s a sense of power.” He said this last word with the curious intensity of many ACT UP members. They are high on power, a high intensified by the liberation of coming to terms with one’s own mortality.
The high has a drawback. It generates what can only be called fanaticism. Artfully crafted slogans baldly state the message: “Silence = Death,” “We Die. They Do Nothing.” One poster shows a picture of New York’s commissioner of health, Stephen Joseph. The slogan: “Deadlier than the virus.” Designed by graphic artists and advertising executives, they have a sharpness that echoes the look of mass advertising and throws it back in the face of its complacent consumers. Stretched across the chests of men who would look at home in Soloflex ads, the logos come close to morbid camp. The result is a kind of designer revolt, an AIDS aesthetic. Halfway through an ACT UP meeting, the shout goes up: “The merchandising has arrived!” and there’s a rush to the T-shirt counter.
This aesthetic is allied to intelligence. The Treatment & Data Committee—a subgroup of ACT UP—has helped revolutionize federal procedures for the testing of experimental drugs through scrutiny of the bureaucracy and science of AIDS. It has engendered respect and admiration—as well as frustration—among scientists and bureaucrats. Its latest campaign is to make five major opportunistic infections treatable within eighteen months, by speeding up the drug-trials process. In stark contrast to the sometimes-hair-raising antics of the rest of ACT UP, T&D is coldly rational—and effective. T&D pressured Burroughs Wellcome to halve the price of AZT, the only effective (but flawed) treatment for HIV.
Still, there’s something unsettling about ACT UP that is not easily allayed by understanding its context or its success. The intelligence is sometimes distorted by the Manichaean vision of those confronting death. It’s a matter of dogma to ACT UP members, for example, that there’s no moral difference between negligent complicity in the AIDS crisis and the act of murder. Yet there are clearly complex arguments about levels of AIDS funding that won’t fit into this framework. Cogent arguments also exist for “outing” powerful closeted gay men who are actively homophobic, but in the hands of Outweek, a new magazine closely allied to ACT UP, outing has become a way of enforcing ideological conformity on illiberal lines. Articles in Outweek have backed taking away free speech from anyone alleged to be homophobic and have urged the use of violence against straight “oppressors.” A recent cover featured a lesbian pointing a gun at the reader, with the headline: “Taking aim at bashers.” Another proclaimed: “We Hate Straights.” That some of this material is presented as camp merely heightens the ugliness of the message.
The ACT UP meeting I attended in New York was held in a theater, the drama taking place as much in the auditorium as on stage. Unlike other radical groups, ACT UP is, internally at least, democratic—sometimes painfully so. The meeting went on for hours, accommodating loquacious bores who were each allowed their say. There seemed no moral pressure on dissent, or even on tedium; merely ecstatic cheering to greet the elect.
The meeting’s main agenda was a forthcoming day of action that would shut down the major traffic arteries in New York on December 10. Activists were going to raid the subways, lie down on bridges, clog the freeways, descend into tunnels—all to press the case for socialized medicine. The objections from the floor were ones any sane activist would make: The demo would backfire; it would enrage commuters, alienate potential supporters. It might affect sick people, caught in traffic jams, even cause deaths. And the date clashed with another planned demonstration for national health care.
Little of this carried any weight. At the worry about the sick came a shout from the back:
“We’re sick.” At the chance of deaths: “We’re dying every day.” A young woman spoke from the balcony: “This is a great action. This is my fantasy action.” Someone yelled from the stage: “Desperate situations require desperate means. It’s not going to get better. It’s going to get worse. If Larry Kramer’s sermons haven’t moved you, move yourselves!”
Kramer, an HIV-positive playwright in his fifties, founded ACT UP. Sitting on the stage in a large smock, he smiled quietly throughout, like an old, wise child. His presence among the largely young men and women was a little like that of a guru, except, unlike most gurus, his influence was not to moderate the passion around him, or to direct it to more contemplative ends. It was to intensify it. He began the meeting with a soft-spoken announcement that he wanted to set up a group to do target practice, to learn how to use guns against the police and gay bashers. His point in the demo debate was to back the radicals. He mentioned last year’s demo that broke up a Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and provoked a storm of hostility: “We couldn’t have gotten worse publicity than the church action, and that put us on the map.… Don’t use the backlash argument as an excuse. They’re not going to like us. They hate us anyway.”
ACT UP, as Kramer’s brainchild, is not about rational persuasion. As the meeting overwhelmingly approved the action, it was clear it was not supported despite its possible drawbacks, but because of them. “Oh, of course it’s a nightmare. That’s what I like about it,” remarked the man sitting next to me. ACT UP members wish as much to express a contradiction, to give vent to desperation, as to achieve any particular end. Their politics wills the rejection it courts. “They hate us anyway,” as Kramer succinctly put it. In any other group of people, this would be called a death wish. But among the dying, a death wish is also a curious way of staying alive.
It’s no exaggeration to say that this wish, the experience of it, the feel of it, has changed a segment of gay life permanently. It has replaced strategies of pleading with those of demanding. It has substituted candor for apology. It has absorbed the momentum of the post-Stonewall gay sensibility and gone on the desperate offensive. But at the same time, ACT UP has inevitably alienated a whole group of gay men—those whose own view of their sexuality is more opaque, whose politics is more complex, whose lives are not so transformed.
“Outing” is the most obvious feature of this rift, a declaration of war by some gay men upon others who are less committed in the struggle against death. Not so long ago the closet was sacred territory. No fellow gay would invade its sanctuary. Now every closeted gay man has to fear the animosity of his fellow gays as much as straights. This is a conscious strategy of intimidation, one that most ACT UP member
s willingly celebrate. And when it isn’t manifested in hate, it finds expression in scorn. “They’re just being left behind,” one angry ACT UP member told me of closeted and apolitical gay men. “They’re just not relevant anymore.”
By breaking the taboo against aggressively candid homosexuality and the greater taboo against aggressively candid death, ACT UP has not only strained understanding between gays and straights. It has also torn apart the code of security among gays. In the long run this may turn out for the best, as more gay men acknowledge their sexuality and refuse to be patronized by society as a whole. But in the short run another threat has emerged to the rhythm and unity of gay life. And this one comes from within, and in the rhetoric of transfiguration.
IV
There is a metaphor in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych that sticks in the mind. At the very end of his life, Ivan struggles against death until finally becoming reconciled: suddenly some force struck him in the chest and side, making it still harder to breathe, and he fell through the hole and there at the bottom was a light. What had happened to him was like the sensation one sometimes experiences in a railway carriage when one thinks one is going backward while one is really going forward and suddenly becomes aware of the real direction.
Since almost the beginning of the AIDS crisis, gay men have had an acute sense of going backward. At first it seemed as if the worst would happen, but there was no massive public backlash, no branding, no quarantine. Then came the more difficult challenge of mass death, often unnoticed and almost always misunderstood. Gay lives quietly and increasingly attained a brutalizing concentration as the number of deaths mounted. As the crisis deepens, it’s hard not to concur with one man with AIDS I met in New York: “How strong can we be? How much ‘empowerment’ does it take? How many support groups do I have to attend to talk about my ‘feelings’? Sometimes I feel weak and afraid, and no one can help do anything about it. I hate it when that happens, but it does.”
Out on a Limb Page 4