Hold Tight Gently (12 page)

Nor was funding for research on AIDS remotely keeping pace with the exponential rise in case numbers. During the 1982 Tylenol scare, in which seven people died after taking cyanide-laced pills, the federal government allocated—within two weeks—$10 million to investigate the contamination. In New York City, it was the theater community, not city or state officials, that led the way with fund-raising efforts. As early as 1982, cabarets like Don’t Tell Mama, the Saint disco, and the restaurant Claire did small-scale benefits for AIDS research, and the pace quickened in 1983 when Mike Callen, along with Tammy Grimes, Rex Reed, and others, performed
Pal Joey
as a benefit for GMHC at Town Hall.
¹²

During the first year and a half of the AIDS crisis, Washington did little—other than indulge in repetitive, homophobic speeches from congressmen like Jesse Helms and William Dannemeyer in which they applauded the Lord’s righteous punishment of homosexual immorality and recommended a large-scale quarantine program. In these early years of the epidemic, Representative Henry Waxman was nearly alone among congressmen in declaring himself “very disappointed with the government’s response.”

On the state and city levels the record varied somewhat. New York had more than one-third of all AIDS cases in 1982 but reacted more lethargically in the early years than San Francisco or Los Angeles during the same period. Mike and the GMHC leadership had their differences, but they thought and acted on parallel lines when it came to trying to activate city officials. Mayor Ed Koch, though widely rumored to be gay, had essentially disassociated himself from the epidemic. He assigned Herb Rickman as his “liaison” to
both
the gay and the Hasidic Jewish communities—an action akin to sending the same ambassador to Iran and Israel.

Earlier in his career, Koch had positioned himself as an ally of the
LGBT movement; on his very first day in office as mayor, January 1, 1978, he’d issued an executive order banning sexual orientation discrimination in municipal employment. But when he moved in 1985 to extend the order to cover city contractors, his good friend and ardent homophobe New York’s Catholic Archbishop John O’Connor threatened to go to court to block gay people from working with children. Koch agreed to let the courts decide—and they overturned the order.

Koch did testify yearly on behalf of New York City’s gay civil rights bill—introduced annually until finally passed in 1986—but he failed to use his position to exert pressure for passage from behind the scenes. And nearly two years passed after the onset of the AIDS crisis before GMHC or any AIDS group succeeded in getting a meeting with the mayor. Koch did subsequently establish an Office of Gay and Lesbian Health Concerns, under which AIDS was subsumed—but it lacked the funding needed to develop a coordinated citywide response. He also seemed oblivious to the ravages AIDS was inflicting on minority communities. It would be the Manhattan Borough president David Dinkins, not Koch, who in 1986 would sponsor a special meeting of elected minority officials to apprise them of the mounting and disproportionate toll AIDS was taking in their communities.

Moreover, the Koch administration consistently resisted implementing any AIDS curriculum in New York City’s schools. It wasn’t until 1991, under Mayor David Dinkins, that such education was mandated in the city’s schools. (Dinkins brought down the wrath of many AIDS activists, however, with his appointment of Woodrow (Woody) Myers Jr. as commissioner of New York’s Health Department; Myers had a conservative record on issues like quarantine while health commissioner in Indiana.) Koch did no better with regard to the adoption of a needle exchange program, an essential tool in any effort to lower the infection rate among intravenous drug users. Even Margaret Thatcher, the deeply conservative British prime minister, early embraced both needle exchange and AIDS education.

Given the mixture of hostility and apathy that characterized the public response to AIDS in general, it became clear to Mike, just as it had to the founders of GMHC, that the stricken would have to form their own organizations and rely on their own ingenuity to stay alive. GMHC was the only service agency in the city at a time when even
AIDS patients with health or disability insurance were unable to secure benefits. By the beginning of 1983, GMHC, remarkably, had put in place a hotline, crisis counseling, and a volunteer “buddy” system to visit and assist patients. Soon after came an array of additional services, including financial assistance and support groups—all of which Mike admired and applauded. Yet he continued to feel that GMHC’s basic message to gay men to have sex with fewer partners and only “healthy” ones was both vague and dangerously misleading at a time when the HIV virus hadn’t been discovered and “healthy” wasn’t easy to spot or define.

Mike especially tangled with Mel Rosen, the first head of GMHC. In the fall of 1982, Rosen became GMHC’s executive director—his “field placement” as a graduate school student in social work. Rosen’s congressional testimony in 1983 to the effect that AIDS was “a steaming locomotive aimed at the general population” was in Mike’s view a dishonest attempt to extract more money for research. Berkowitz reported to Mike that when one of Sonnabend’s new patients contacted Rosen at GMHC, he’d warned the young man that “Dr. Sonnabend is not to be trusted.” Mike himself readily acknowledged that Sonnabend had “the eccentricity of genius” and could sometimes come across as “bizarre,” but that hardly meant that his scientific credentials weren’t superlative or that his multifactorial theory shouldn’t be taken seriously. The problem was that Rosen and the GMHC board had decided that they didn’t want Sonnabend’s theory taken
too
seriously. In the name of improving the public’s attitude, GMHC had made the conscious decision to avoid or downplay any disclosure of gay male sexual “excess” for fear such behavior would be blamed as the “cause” of AIDS. They wanted to emphasize instead that it was
not
a gay disease but rather an imminent threat to everyone, regardless of age, gender, or sexual orientation. As Berkowitz reported to Mike: “They don’t like what we’re saying about promiscuity. . . . They’re well-meaning but they’re misguided. . . . It’s like a club: you’re in or you’re out.”

GMHC’s first president, Paul Popham, was a former Green Beret, a decorated veteran of the war in Vietnam, a businessman, a Republican, and a person of traditional values who was trying to remain in the closet. He wanted GMHC to remain strictly a service organization and not to become entangled in political advocacy of
any
kind. Larry Kramer—who had scorned gay politics throughout the seventies as
not “chic,” denouncing the movement’s “pitiful marches” as consisting entirely of “loudmouths, the unkempt, the dirty and unwashed”—now, ironically, was the person in GMHC most strenuously calling for aggressive advocacy. Kramer also believed—as he’d already emphasized in his novel
Faggots
—that gay men piggishly “fucking their brains out” would, if it turned out that AIDS was transmitted through a virus, further decimate the community.
¹³

Kramer was essentially thrown out of GMHC, which had rapidly become the largest AIDS organization in the country. Ideologically, his insistence that promiscuous gay men change their behavior ostensibly aligned him with the Sonnabend-Berkowitz-Callen axis, but that wasn’t an alliance either side particularly wanted. Kramer condemned
all
gay male promiscuity as unseemly and immoral, whereas Rich and Mike had celebrated sexuality, including sluthood, as a source of personal and political liberation—though fearing that the onset of the epidemic promiscuity had become too dangerous medically. Mike appreciated all that Kramer, who he personally knew, had done to alert the community and felt that “his heart’s in the right place.” But he also felt that Larry suffered from “ineptitude or tone problems” and that “ineptitude can actually be responsible for killing people. . . . The trust of a person is really a weighty thing.” As he put it to Berkowitz, “what’s making Larry frantic and sputter, is that no one is taking him seriously”—which was surely an exaggeration.

Mike wanted GMHC to pay for safe-sex posters to be put up in bathhouses and bars—posters that described in more detail which practices among gay men, like being the recipient in anal intercourse, were riskier than others. It should be remembered that in these early years of the epidemic Mike seemed to more established members of the organized gay community as a nobody who’d come out of nowhere—a legal secretary and part-time cabaret singer with no specific medical or scientific expertise (though he was in fact becoming far more knowledgeable than many of the self-proclaimed “experts”). GMHC did contribute a little money to the safe-sex posters but balked at the suggestion of explicit language warning against anal intercourse. The GMHC board feared it would be generally misread as “airing our dirty laundry in public” as well as interfering with individual decision making in particular. That didn’t satisfy Mike. He was in favor of the revolution and of individual choice, but also in favor of staying alive
and helping others to do so as well. He and Rich were friendly with Howard Cruse, the gifted gay cartoonist, and Cruse volunteered to do a poster with more concrete graphics.

Along with his other activities, Mike got involved with the AIDS Network—an umbrella organization made up of representatives from various groups, including GMHC—that formed in the summer of 1982 to deal with a variety of civil rights issues; it was headed by the gifted, forceful Virginia (Ginny) Apuzzo, current head of the National Gay Task Force. Mike thought that Ginny, an ex-nun and ardent feminist, had “tremendous political savvy” and regretted that the same wasn’t true of the leadership at GMHC. He enthusiastically applauded GMHC’s army of volunteers but thought much less of its public representatives.

In these first few years of the epidemic, causes and treatments alike were essentially unknown, and the sharply rising number of those afflicted paralleled a heightened increase of terror. One measure of the desperation that was becoming widely felt was the increased willingness to try any sort of nostrum rumored to be beneficial. It became commonplace, as fear mounted, to volunteer for a wide array of treatments. One doctor in San Francisco started giving his AIDS patients huge intravenous doses of vitamin C, based on a Linus Pauling protocol for cancer; another experimented unsuccessfully with using DNCB (a photochemical used on warts) for KS lesions.

As panic mounted, so did internal squabbling. As usual in such circumstances, raging helplessness found its most available targets close at hand. Mike was far more sensitive to people, and more generous about their apprehensions and actions, than either Berkowitz or Sonnabend. Both of them, for example, disparaged Dr. Larry Mass. Berkowitz—and Sonnabend still more so—insisted that Mass, in Sonnabend’s words, “doesn’t have the credentials to be writing in this area. . . . It’s a highly technical subject. . . . He actually makes me angry.” When Mass told Sonnabend in one long discussion that “there’s so much epidemiological stuff for the single virus” theory, Sonnabend reported his own reaction as: “Well, like what? And we waited and he had nothing to say. Just silence . . . his intellect [isn’t] working . . . his intentions are good . . . he wants to help . . . he’s not a bad man.” Mike told both Berkowitz and Sonnabend that they were being “arrogant”
and predicted that “before it’s all over with [Mass will] be on our side.”
¹⁴

Much as Mike admired Sonnabend, at this early point in the epidemic Mike felt it important to emphasize—adapting the view from feminist health manuals like “For Her Own Good”—that in truth “there are no experts,” or if there were, then “
we
are the real experts. . . . We need to have forums on creative and medically safe ways to have sex: lovers, condoms, jerk-off clubs, closed circles of buddies are just a few of the creative and safe alternatives.” A devout believer in self-empowerment and in political representation of the disenfranchised, Mike found it shocking that no members of the GMHC board were themselves PWAs (the first PWA wouldn’t be elected to the GMHC board until 1987). Mike strongly disapproved of what he regarded as the organization’s dishonest attempt to soft-pedal the truth about gay male sexual practices and to exaggerate the threat of AIDS to the general population; Larry Kramer had at one point declared that the epidemic could just as easily have happened to housewives in New Jersey. The attempt to mainstream AIDS based on the few cases that had as yet appeared among heterosexuals was in Mike’s view mendacious. He was a consistent truth teller. He rejected the argument GMHC and others were pushing—in order to extract increased federal funding—that the spread of AIDS to the heterosexual world was imminent. (For complex reasons still not well understood, that did become true in Africa, but in the United States AIDS was and remains primarily a disease that disproportionately affects gay men.)

Sonnabend insisted from the beginning that the notion the country was on the verge of an explosion of AIDS into the heterosexual world was “rubbish.” He predicted, moreover, that spreading such a notion would have serious consequences: a significant uptake in violence against gay men as the “originators” of AIDS, a bizarre spiral of accusations within the straight world, and a woeful neglect about the true cause of AIDS transmission. Joe told the story of a call he got one day from a man who’d been with a female prostitute three months before; he wanted to know if it was safe for his daughter to drink out of the same glass as he did. Heterosexuals who
did
come down with AIDS in the coming years by and large became infected through IV drug use, contaminated blood products, or same-gender “adventuring”; for
women, through sex with an infected male partner (some bisexual men, in an effort to keep their male-to-male sex secret, would insist they were strictly straight); or, finally, a female passing the infection to a male, which would remain exceedingly rare. Since people often don’t tell the truth about drug use or sexual activity, it would be many years before panic about a heterosexual epidemic could be laid to rest. In 1984, for example, there were exactly
four
purported cases of men getting AIDS from sex with women; in 1985, the figure went down to two; in the 1990s, about fifty such cases were claimed, but researchers and scientists came to agree that nearly all of them were men who injected drugs or shared hypodermic needles. Sonnabend—and Mike as his surrogate—were widely denounced for putting a damper on the notion of a heterosexual plague, but they went right on speaking the truth as they saw it. And science has largely validated their view.