Hold Tight Gently (9 page)

In regard to both the National Coalition of Black Gays and Lesbians and the meeting about the gay pride celebration, Michelle has made the important point that “there wasn’t so much of that social separation, that hard-core, entrenched kind of division between lesbians
and gay men” in D.C.’s black community as was found among white gay activists during this period. Additionally, during the 1980s there was a kind of cooperative New York–D.C. connection among artists, performers, and writers. Isaac Jackson, for instance, the New York City experimental videographer—who was also managing editor of the
Blackheart
collective that included writers David Frechette, Assotto Saint, and Colin Robinson—helped Michelle out with the research for her film
Stormé
(about Stormé DeLarverie, the only female member of Harlem’s legendary drag “Jewel Box Review”). “Not that women didn’t have their own spaces and the brothers didn’t have theirs,” Michelle says, “but we were more or less together.” Occasionally, allied white people also became involved—like Mary Farmer, who ran Lammas Books, or Deacon Maccubbin, who would offer his Lambda Rising bookstore as a place to have book signings.

Michelle sums up the mounting fervor and excitement in black gay circles: “We were beginning to put flesh on the bones of our gay identities . . . our black gay identities . . . and seeing those as primary voices from which we wrote, spoke, and were politicized.”

2

Reading the Signs

H
aving made some friends and begun psychotherapy, and in general feeling far more settled in New York than earlier, Mike decided to take the initiative and try to set things right with his parents. He wrote them at length and with the kind of blind candor that he characteristically admired in others and aimed for in his own close relationships: “My primary purpose is to
communicate
. To clean up our relationship.” He made it clear at the top that he had no intention of “trying to prove worthy” of their love. He already had his mother’s—that much he knew—and it was to his father that he mostly addressed his complaints. Clifford, his son felt, was by nature a loner, reluctant to express affection. Mike wanted more from him. He wanted his father to talk openly—“talk to me about your joys; your terrors; your plans for a happy future” (Clifford was in the throes of thinking about retirement). Above all, he wanted a more extended dialogue with both his parents about the pivotal fact of his being gay.
¹

Mike did his best to approach the subject with a straightforward sharing of his own feelings. He’d been hurt, he made clear, that when his parents recently visited him in New York and Mike had tried to broach the topic, his father had pointedly said that he did not want to discuss it, nor—when Mike suggested a book or two on the subject—did he wish to read about it. But Mike, ever persistent, wanted to share
with his parents the exhilarating joy he’d felt during the National Gay March on Washington, the sense that change was happening “at a mind-boggling pace. The eighties,” Mike presciently predicted, “would be the out decade”—it would, but for reasons Mike could never have imagined.

He wanted his parents to know, too, that he was about to quit his job at Bradford “and risk all to try to make a go of it as a singer.” He’d saved up enough money to buy a piano and some sound equipment for his new apartment on Jones Street in the West Village, had made a few tapes that had impressed people, and had already hooked up with a musical director who believed in him.

In response, Clifford made an effort to meet Mike’s entreaty that he be more expressive and honest about his feelings. He admitted flat out that he’d felt “anxiety, anger, hurt, and disappointment” when Mike revealed his “choice of lifestyle.” And Clifford used the word “choice” deliberately: “You consciously and freely chose your lifestyle with the full realization and knowledge that the relationship of family and most friends would be adversely affected” and, moreover, that “conventional religious practices” would be “precluded” and “any service toward your nation would be severely limited.”

And that was for starters. Clifford felt that no conflict need arise when the family gathered, since he felt it “unlikely we will spend large blocks of time together.” When they did see each other, furthermore, he didn’t feel that it was “asking for the moon” to expect Mike to “play it straight.” If Mike felt the effort would be too “draining,” then the solution Clifford suggested was to “minimize contact. . . . I shall continue to try to prove ‘worthy’ of
your
love; if you do not wish to reciprocate, then do not.” He ended with his version of an upbeat note: he thought Mike talented and intelligent but he, Clifford, wasn’t “comfortable with the public, physical expression of love.”

Mike responded with a generosity bordering on sainthood. “I was overcome with emotion,” he wrote back. He felt that his father had given him exactly what he’d asked for: “honesty and directness”—two qualities that Mike held most dear. “For the first time,” he went on, you “articulated your feelings for me.” That, Mike felt, was grounds for hope about their future relationship. However—Mike was about to demonstrate just as much steel as Clifford—there could be no question about trying to act “straight.” To do so would be to deny who he
was and, further, to corroborate the common view that there was something wrong with being gay—“as if there is something to admit—something hidden and dark and secretive and dirty.”

He asked his father to imagine “a society where [his own] love was viewed as a ‘strange and unnatural act,’ or a ‘crime against nature.’ . . . Since you don’t know what ‘caused’ your sexual direction, I suggest you stop flailing about trying to figure out what ‘caused’ mine. . . . Quite frankly, I just like to think I was lucky. . . . gay people are clued in at an early age to the duplicity in all things . . . [and] have a unique perspective that make us particularly adept at art.” Mike wasn’t merely defending his gayness as normal, he was suggesting that it might well be superior—politically, intuitively, and aesthetically. Overstatement was a common ingredient in the early rhetoric of gay liberation, a trope Mike indulged in with glee, viewing it as necessary compensation for the disparagement of gay lives that had long been common currency. After the extended reign and deep internalization of homophobic self-hatred, affirmation for Mike and others surfaced in the form of strenuous counterclaims. Hyperbole was a strategy for liberation, not itself liberation.

Joe Sonnabend wasn’t the only doctor in the early 1980s puzzling over some of his patients’ unusual symptoms. Alvin Friedman-Kien, a virologist at New York University Medical Center, was so surprised when the biopsies from two of his gay male patients’ “bruises” came back from the lab with the diagnosis of Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) that he asked some of his colleagues if they’d seen anything comparable. Within a few weeks he learned of twenty such cases. A call to a San Francisco colleague, Marcus Conant, brought the total to twenty-six. In Los Angeles several doctors reported a slew of puzzling symptoms: diarrhea and “wasting,” chronic fevers, thrush, swollen lymph nodes, and a decline in CD4 cells. Something was clearly in the wind, something awful. But not everyone was alarmed. One member of the gay doctors’ organization Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights asserted that peculiar symptomatologies appeared more often than people realized—and just as quickly disappeared. Jim Curran of the CDC also sounded an optimistic note, and New York City’s most widely read gay newspaper,
New York Native
, initially published a piece largely dismissive of the earlier alarmist
Morbidity and Mortality
reports.
²

One San Francisco physician suspected the culprit was cytomegalovirus (CMV), a herpes virus that can produce disease in those with impaired immune function. Joe Sonnabend, on his own, had also suspected CMV and theorized that those of his patients—like Mike—with a repetitive history of STDs had overloaded and compromised their immune systems, thereby allowing the virus to take hold. Sonnabend saw a certain consistency in the personal histories of all his patients who came in with symptoms of anal gonorrhea, herpes, CMV, fissures, and warts—all were self-described “bottoms” (their primary sexual pleasure was getting fucked), and all showed signs of immune deficiency. One out of three gay men were shedding CMV in their sperm and urine—as opposed to one out of twenty heterosexual men—and CMV was known to be immunosuppressive. So said not merely Sonnabend, but in the early years of the epidemic, the most respected scientific journals, including the
Lancet
, the
New England Journal of Medicine,
and the
Annals of Internal Medicine
.

Sonnabend felt certain that it was going to take years to sort out the complex symptomologies and causative factors. He also felt early on that some people might have a certain degree of genetic protection against immunological assaults. One early finding that suggested genetic variables was that those gay men with tissue type HLA-DR3 were more prone to get Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), and those with tissue type HLA-DR5 were more likely to develop KS. Given all the variables, it seemed to follow that there would never be one formula, one explanation, for charting the progression of the mysterious new disease. Sonnabend also insisted early on—and this gave Mike a great deal of hope—that a decline in the immune system’s T4 cells was
not
tantamount to an inexorable death sentence (though it would be a number of years before the importance of a high level of T8 suppressor cells would be recognized as essential to warding off infections).

One day when Mike was in Sonnabend’s office, legs in the stirrups so Joe could check for anal warts, his assistant came in to tell him that he had a call from a scientist in Japan. Mike was impressed and dutifully waited for Joe to come back. And waited. He was used to Joe’s delays but not when his legs were up in the air. Finally pulling on his pants, Mike started to wander around the office. When he bent over the
typewriter, he saw the final page of an article in progress that Joe had been working on—a “multifactorial model” to explain the bizarre and mounting number of gay men who were falling ill. At least two other infectious disease researchers were tentatively suggesting that a bombardment of sexually transmitted infections might be responsible for the drastic weakening of the body’s immunodefensive capabilities.
³

Mike sat down and read the entire article. As he later wrote, with characteristic hyperbole, “it changed my life.” When Joe finally returned, outspoken Mike told him straight out that he had to publish the article in the gay press, had to get it out quickly so that people could be warned; it was “a moral imperative.” Joe halfheartedly protested that it was a highly technical piece, and besides, he had no journalistic contacts. Mike volunteered to write up the material in everyday language and also to get it into the
New York Native
. Ethically, he insisted, it was essential to reach people with the double message: if you stop having multiple sexual encounters and change your behavior, you’ll stop getting STDs—and you’ll save your life. Joe thought for a second, then said, “I have another patient who feels the same way you do. Maybe if the two of you meet, you can do something.” It was August 1982.

The “other patient” was Richard (“Rich”) Berkowitz. Born the same year as Callen, he’d grown up in a working-class Jewish family in New Jersey and had come out sexually in his early teens. Hard up for money, and blessed with Italianate good looks that fueled his self-confidence, Rich had started to hustle while still in college at Rutgers. Though he came on as “know-it-all arrogant,” he was well aware that his strutting, “I’m in charge” machismo covered over the fear of being called a “faggot” even as it served as a magnet for the increasing numbers of paying customers who came to him for S/M sex.
⁴

Berkowitz’s bank account was growing nicely and his apartment was filling up with the harnesses, cock rings, studded belts, and boots that his adoring customers lavished on him. He was good at what he did, and he understood “why it was difficult for men to reveal the human desire to relinquish control in sex because it transgressed our culture’s definition of what it meant to be a man in much the same way that homosexuality did.” Rich was rarely bored, rarely broke, and rarely at a loss to come up with an erotic fantasy that would satisfy his multiplying list of loyal, repeat clients. He loved the easy money and the flexible hours.

Better still, his customers rarely asked Rich himself to reach climax, which freed him up after work to enjoy his own sexual revolution, to cruise the bars, prowl the abandoned piers off West Street in the Village for outdoor sex, and, when the famed Saint disco opened in 1980, to dance with several thousand other muscled, shirtless, drugged young men under the laser lights of the “planetarium-like” ceiling and then to fuck until dawn in the balcony overhanging the dance floor. But Rich was smart as well as hot; he did his best to come only at the baths—where at least you could shower between partners, thus reducing the risk of catching STDs and passing them on to his partners or his regular clients.

He did sometimes wonder what had ever happened to his belief in the early gay liberation ideal of androgyny—men and women sharing the traits that society arbitrarily parceled out to one gender or the other—or to the little kid who’d been frightened of any suggestion of violence, or to the initial movement slogan he’d joined in chanting about “men
loving
men.” He felt certain that S/M and love could coexist and were not mutually exclusive, but he did wonder what the consequences would be of having let the hunt for sexual pleasure eclipse the activism he and many of his friends had been involved in before they let themselves become demoralized and cynical about politics following Reagan’s election in 1980.