Hold Tight Gently (3 page)

One day Mike picked up a copy of the alternative weekly the
Boston Phoenix
and was astonished to read about an organized gay and lesbian group on the BU campus that was planning a picnic by the Charles River. On the given day, he circled warily near the picnic site and was spotted by a member of the gay group, who called over, “I think you’re looking for us.” (Mike fit the “loose-wristed” stereotypical view of what a gay man was supposed to look like.) Three months later, Mike, verbal,
smart, and archly, campily funny, was elected president of the group. But that first foray into gay politics proved disillusioning. As is often the case with political groups, especially college ones, people would sign up to help out on a committee or at an event and then not show up at all or fail to follow through. This ran directly counter to Mike’s highly organized temperament. He’d drive himself, even under difficult circumstances, to complete whatever he’d promised to do; he had little patience for sunshine soldiers. Yet his overall experience with the BU group convinced him that politics was antithetical to his personality. He’d dutifully march in the gay pride parade once a year, but as an individual, not as a member of any group.

Looking back on his college years later in life, Mike would describe himself as “paralyzed by regret.” He’d had to hold down a job nearly full-time while going to school and could “barely remember classes. A time that should have been joyous was not.” Part of the problem was that it felt “DEVASTATING . . . to plop down into completely unfamiliar territory.” He felt like a “social cripple. I discovered that the way I did things—dressed, ate, talked, etc.—was NOT the way others did them and I got very embarrassed and shy and insecure.” Mike perhaps overstated his devastation—as any drama queen would. He excelled at school and, thanks to a few of his professors, became a lifelong, voracious reader.

In his senior year, Mike came out to his family. His brother, Barry, took the news in stride and they remained close and supportive. The news was received badly by the rest of his family—Mike and his father didn’t speak for two years. It hadn’t helped that Mike had also declared that he was a nonbeliever, an atheist. His deeply religious mother, despite having thoroughly internalized the Baptist view of homosexuality as sickness and sin, nonetheless reiterated her love for Michael (“You can expect that to remain steady, regardless”) and even wrote him that she would “respect your right to believe what you choose to believe.” Younger sister Linda maintained a cool distance, cowed perhaps by the vehemence of the family dynamics.

Michael had dated girls in high school and had several close female friends; they told him that his gentleness and respect attracted them (he would soon in fact become a pronounced, outspoken feminist, later on somewhat campily branding himself a “lesbian feminist”). But he’d never “done anything” with a woman, unless kissing Maria Lingley
inside the abandoned A&W Root Beer warehouse counted. The girl he dated longest was Lisa Gaylord, and she later explained to Mike “the agony” she went through because he never made any sexual moves on her: she blamed herself for not being pretty or smart or talented enough; later in life Mike apologized to her and to another young woman he’d dated for “fanning such flames of self-doubt.” When his parents suggested that “before locking himself into a dead-end lifestyle” he seek counseling, he dutifully presented himself for the eight free sessions the university provided, but no spark of sexual desire for women resulted. He was a confirmed Kinsey “6,” exclusively attracted to his own gender—a status he’d proudly embrace throughout his life.

Following graduation, Mike moved to New York with the goal of becoming a singer, a cabaret performer, but he arrived with minimal financial reserves. After paying his first month’s rent on a dingy apartment, he had a mere $20 to his name. He haunted the employment agencies, but it was the late 1970s: New York had been hit by the national economic downturn and Mike’s hard-earned secretarial skills failed to land him a job. When the twenty dollars went, he made the practical decision to head up to Times Square—then a hustling mecca—where he gave some guy a blow job for $4 (he didn’t feel in a position to haggle).

That enabled him to eat, but he began to feel “really helpless, like ready to cry,” fearful of “a nervous breakdown.” He’d initially seen the move to New York as a gutsy risk, but relocating to a very tough city to break into a very tough profession—during a recession, no less—now seemed like a mistake. In his early twenties, broke and jobless, he was also without friends, let alone contacts in the entertainment field. While still in college, he’d done a few auditions and had been told that he “had the stuff to make it”; he’d even had a nibble from a manager that didn’t pan out.

But Mike had a tenacious streak and an internal strength that belied his scrawny looks, histrionic ways, and a less than validating upbringing. He refused to throw in the towel and crawl back to the Midwest—not even when he was awakened by a rat crawling over him in bed one night, or when a fire broke out in his apartment. Developing insomnia, he turned to sleeping pills. But then the symptoms that he’d initially ascribed to “food poisoning” began to proliferate—mysterious fevers, weight loss, night sweats, fatigue, and relentless diarrhea.
Ever since his arrival in New York, Mike—enchanted with the multiple opportunities for sex—had freely indulged. He made no connection, initially, between his superactive sex life and his burgeoning list of physical ills. Finally, after he’d begun to hyperventilate, he got scared and crawled over to a gay men’s health clinic in the West Village.

The doctor on duty happened to be Joseph Sonnabend, a South African–born specialist in infectious diseases who’d trained at Edinburgh’s prestigious Royal College of Physicians, done his medical field-work in South Africa’s shantytowns and impoverished villages, and then gone to work as a laboratory virologist under Alick Isaacs, one of the discoverers of interferon, the antiviral agent, at London’s famed National Institute for Medical Research. The field of molecular biology was just coming into its own, and Sonnabend shared in the discovery that cellular protein synthesis was needed for interferon to work. He’d moved to New York City in the early 1970s to work with the noted virologist Rostom Bablanian at Downstate Medical Center, and became an associate professor and associate attending physician at medical centers in Brooklyn.

In 1977 Sonnabend began working for the Bureau of Venereal Disease Control, part of New York City’s Department of Health, and then, in 1978, he opened a private practice in Greenwich Village specializing in infectious and sexually transmitted diseases, with a mostly gay male clientele. With the arrival of a perplexing cluster of symptoms in a growing number of his patients, Sonnabend’s background as a microbiologist, virologist, and infectious disease specialist, as well as his experience in the South African townships, proved ideal for coping with this mysterious and mounting phenomenon. As early as 1982, he created a network of experts, independent of government agencies, to run tests on the samples he’d regularly send them from his patients. He also continued to do basic research on the properties of interferon both at Jan Vilcek’s lab at New York University and at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital Center.
³

When Mike Callen arrived in his office on West Twelfth street in the Village, Sonnabend took one look at him and said, “You’re very, very sick. Who is your doctor?” “You are,” Mike croaked in response. That was the beginning of a relationship that would have profound consequences in the years ahead, not only for the two men but for the gay community and what would become the AIDS movement. Sonnabend,
at age forty-eight, was already well along in his career, having been an assistant professor of microbiology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine before opening his private practice. Though he’d fathered three children (with three women) and been briefly married, Sonnabend openly self-identified as a gay man.

At this point in time, the gay liberation movement was still in swaddling clothes, though following the Stonewall riots, its initial thrust had been radical. In the early seventies, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), the most visible and active organization, had called for substantive social change, had denounced oppression of all kinds (not merely of the antigay variety), and had tried to form alliances with the Black Panthers and the Latino Young Lords. But as is typically the case in this country with protest movements, GLF had run into the centrist roadblock of American ideology and had given way in short order to the less radical Gay Activists Alliance. That group, in turn, had been superseded by the National Gay Task Force, which confined its agenda solely to what it defined as “gay rights” and adopted the traditional tactics of electoral politics and lobbying as its chosen means. These organizational transformations involved only a small fraction of the gay community. Most gay people remained closeted and apolitical.

What did attract hordes of adherents were the slogans and practices of
sexual
liberation. A segment—according to most estimates, about 20 percent—of the gay male population redefined “promiscuity” as “adventuring,” and the baths, the “trucks,” and the back rooms of bars and bookstores became jammed with the tangle of eagerly experimenting bodies. Many of those bodies came down with hepatitis, herpes, syphilis, gonorrhea, shigella, amoebiasis, and an assortment of other sexually transmitted diseases. The stricken multitude kept Sonnabend’s waiting room packed.

A caring and compassionate man, Sonnabend was widely admired for his brilliance as a diagnostician but was no less notorious for his disorganized, eccentric ways. He was devoted to his patients but not to keeping a tidy or time-efficient office. When Mike would refer friends to Sonnabend, he’d tell them to “take
War and Peace
because you might finish it in the waiting room before you get seen.” Mike himself had to wait four hours on one day and was then subjected to watching Sonnabend eat his lunch in front of him during their consultation—some of the food dripping into his beard, while the loud, ancient air conditioner
drowned out part of what he was saying. Mike decided it was time to look for a different doctor. But one visit to another well-known gay physician, “Phil Williams,” sent him fleeing back to Sonnabend. Williams proved not only “imperious” but moneygrubbing. When Mike called him back into the examining room to ask a belated question, the good doctor added $25 to his bill. Sonnabend, by contrast, saw his patients as part of an unfairly ostracized community—“the health and well-being of gay men were of little concern to society at large”—not customers to be bilked for maximum profit, and he would often forget to bill them—to the admiration and irritation of his beleaguered staff (according to Abby Tallmer, who worked there for several years).

By then Mike had finally landed a job doing office work for the Bradford National Corporation, and he’d switched to a more livable apartment as well. He kept reminding himself that he had to make contacts, find an agent, get his singing career going. But he
loved
sex and spent much of his spare time hunting for and having it. During his first two years in New York he took to heart the popular gay lament “so many men, so little time” and cheerfully referred to himself as a “slut”—a label he would proudly proclaim all his life. Disliking alcohol and disdaining the chitchat of the bars, he opted for the gay baths (St. Mark’s was his favorite) and the stalls at the Hudson Street Bookstore in Greenwich Village.

At all times—who can predict a street encounter?—Mike carried with him a jar of lube, 25-cent packets of K-Y to ease entry, a bottle of poppers (amyl nitrate, which produced a disinhibiting rush), two (before and after) five-hundred-milligram pills of tetracycline as anti-STD prophylaxis, and Handi Wipes for the cleanup. Though Mike hardly resembled the muscled gym-built physique then coming into fashion, he had no trouble attracting partners. He was delicately, willowly, handsome: six feet tall, olive skinned, green eyed, and thin (around 135 pounds), with naturally curly dark brown hair—through the right kind of spectacles, something on the order of a Renaissance cherub (minus the wings). Mike wasn’t interested in most of the “extreme” sexual practices then in vogue (fist fucking, water sports, scat, or S/M). His single-minded focus was on getting fucked. When he totted up his sexual scorecard in 1982, at age twenty-seven, he figured that since coming out, he’d been “penetrated by an average of 3 men once every 3 days.” Deducting for sick days, that put him in gold medal contention
with a total of 2,496 partners, of whom he professed to know the first names of no more than a hundred.

He was outspoken and unashamed about his “sluthood.” Not every fuck had been magical, but the vast majority, he insisted, had given him pleasure. And what, he wanted to know, was wrong with that? No coercion had been involved, no pederasty, no exchange of cash, no pretense at faithfulness or romance. Like other gay male sex radicals of the day, Mike denounced the puritanical fuzziness that sanctioned multiple monogamous orgasms in order to produce children but frowned on a comparable number with multiple partners to produce pleasure. He did “not accept the concept of sexual addiction at all.” A bit later, after he’d become a spokesperson for a segment of the People with AIDS (PWAs) movement, he’d read his sexual history somewhat differently, referring to his generation of sexual liberationists as “predatory, shame-based, dark, use-once-and-throw-away, no contact sex—[all of which went] deep into our wiring.” Later still—in part as a result of reading books by “sex-positive” feminists—he’d reclaim and celebrate his “slut” years.

There was one hitch: the escalating number of STDs. Mike was in and out of Sonnabend’s office so often that they eventually shifted to a first-name basis. Mike was fond of saying that “if it isn’t fatal, it’s no big deal,” but Joe was less nonchalant about his multiple, incessant infections. When Mike contracted hepatitis for the third time and developed fevers, night sweats, and bloody diarrhea, Joe hospitalized him. Consommé and a battery of tests were his diet for a week. His acne and hemorrhoids improved but a firm diagnosis remained elusive. Sonnabend called in a tropical disease specialist, but the best he could come up with was “atypical malaria.” Mike had never been to the tropics, and the paracytology tests failed to confirm that diagnosis or any other. The doctors were back to where they began—scratching their heads.