The Gay Metropolis (54 page)

The men who have been stricken don't appear to have done anything that many New York gay men haven't done at one time or another. We're
appalled that this is happening to them and terrified that it could happen to us. It's easy to become frightened that one of the many things we've done or taken over the past years may be all that it takes for a cancer to grow from a tiny something-or-other that got in there who knows when from doing who knows what. … Money is desperately needed. … This is our disease and we must take care of each other and ourselves. In the past we have often been a divided community; I hope we can all get together on this emergency, undivided, cohesively, and with all the numbers we in so many ways possess.

The attacks he received for this sensible appeal set the tone for the debate within the gay community during the first few years of the epidemic. On one side were those like Kramer who believed
“something we
are doing is ticking off the time bomb that his causing the breakdown of immunity in certain bodies,” and therefore “wouldn't it be better to be cautious, rather than reckless?” On the other side were writers like Robert Chesley, who immediately skewered Kramer in the letters column of the
Native:

I think the concealed meaning in Kramer's emotionalism is the triumph of guilt: that gay men
deserve
to die for their promiscuity. In his novel,
Faggots,
Kramer told us that sex is dirty and that we ought not be doing what we're doing. … It's easy to become frightened that Kramer's
real
emotion is a sense of having been vindicated, though tragically. … Read anything by Kramer closely. I think you'll find that the subtext is always: the wages of gay sin are death. … I am not downplaying the seriousness of Kaposi's sarcoma. But something else is happening here, which is also serious: gay homophobia and anti-eroticism.

Kramer later credited Chesley's attack with turning him into an activist. Kramer was the founder of two of the most important gay organizations spawned by the epidemic. The first one was Gay Men's Health Crisis, which grew out of a fund-raising meeting in Kramer's Fifth Avenue apartment on August 11,1981, where he raised $6,635. Philip Gefter attended this first gathering with Jack Fitzsimmons; then Gefter volunteered to organize a follow-up fund-raiser on Fire Island over Labor Day weekend.

“Larry made this impassioned plea for us to focus all of our attention and our energy on this because this could become a major crisis,” said Gefter, who was working as a picture editor at
Forbes
magazine at the time. “We went out to dinner after that meeting, and I remember Jack was panicked. I'd never seen him so panicked. He was a very controlled person
and very even-tempered. But he was really scared, much more than I was. I asked him, ‘Why are you so scared?' And he couldn't answer. For six years he had an obsession about AIDS. Every time there was anything in the paper about it, he would call me and read me the story.”

Gefter used the Xerox machine at
Forbes
to make several thousand copies of a six-page brochure about the epidemic, and a copy was placed at the front door of every house in the Pines and the Grove in September. The response was tepid.

“Nobody cared,” Gefter remembered. “Nobody was interested. They'd just walk by us. I was profoundly disappointed in my community at that moment in time.” A paltry $769.55 was collected during the whole weekend.

“They thought that this had nothing to do with them,” Gefter continued, because “they were good clean middle-class men who in fact were the very men who hung out at places like the Anvil and the Mineshaft and the baths, so it had everything to do with them. But they just denied it. I didn't have a clue, but I thought it was sexually transmitted. I know that I had had syphilis, gonorrhea, and hepatitis in the previous six years. I thought it was a breakdown of the immune system. I didn't know how or why. I remember there were some kind of black comedic conclusions we had arrived at. At one point we thought it was the deer on Fire Island; years later we found out that the deer
did
carry Lyme disease. That was kind of a tongue-in-cheek conclusion. We thought it might have been the drugs we had been taking; we thought it might have been what we had been doing to our bodies; we thought it might have been just the general erosion of our immune system. Drugs, sex, the various illnesses we had had.

“Never once did I think this was some kind of divine retribution for what most of the world thought of as our sins, and what I thought of as a celebration. Partly, my conclusion about why I was a survivor may have to do with the general makeup of my body, for sure, but I also think that I never felt guilty about sex. I always thought that sex was a kind of celebration. That's not to say that there are not a lot of people who also felt that way who have since died. Guilt was never involved for me when it came to sex. I felt guilty about other things, but not sex and not about the amount of sex I had.

“Tom Johnston was the first person I knew who got sick. He was a friend of Jack's. He had a real gym body. He wasn't beautiful at all, but he had that Fire Island look. We shared a house in Water Mill in eighty-three or eighty-four. And I remember not knowing how to talk to him about
having this disease. What did we call it then? GRID?
^*
And just being terrified of it: any glass in the cabinet was somehow home to the virus. I was afraid to use the same toilet paper. Tom was trying all kinds of alternative treatments even then. I remember seaweed in the refrigerator. It was all so new and all so terrifying. We didn't know enough about the virus then, so that even though I assumed on some level that it was sexually transmitted, that didn't exclude the possibility of being exposed to it in any number of ways. I had also had parasites in the seventies, and you can get parasites from somebody else's water glass. So I thought that was possible with this virus.

“But I never thought this was moral retribution. I also bought into the conspiracy theories to some extent. I thought the world was hostile to this community and this is a concentrated community and here is some new disease kind of revolving within this community. I entertained the possibility that somehow something was planted by the government. I can't be more specific. I still think that's possible. It was too concentrated a community and too threatening to our society. Gay culture was becoming so visible at that moment in time. It was a period of time when being gay in New York was very chic—all these fashion designers, Studio 54. That whole nexus was written about in magazines and it seemed very exotic and appealing; ten years earlier it was still this hideous aberration. And that was very threatening to America: the established order.

“The party didn't stop for several years. By 1985 the party had stopped; but from 1981 to 1985 I don't think the party stopped at all. People were more and more terrified. I knew people who were afraid to go out and have sex. But I remember going to the Boy Bar in eighty-three or eighty-four, and it was packed. I remember going to The Bar from eighty-one to eighty-five, and it was always packed. And I continued to have sex. I did change it to some extent. I don't remember really using condoms until later. But I believe that one reason that I am a survivor is that whenever I was entered I came first, and the person who was inside me had to come out before he came. I would say that was true at least ninety-five percent of the time. They may have perceived me to be a selfish lover, but in the long run it turns out that that may be why I'm alive today.”

ONE SCIENTIST
outside the government was more important than any other heterosexual in New York City in sounding the alarm about the growing crisis. Her name was Mathilde Krim, and she was born in Italy in
1926, the daughter of a Swiss father and a mother of Austrian descent who had grown up in Czechoslovakia. When she was a child, her family moved to Geneva. In 1945, she made her first Jewish friends at the University of Geneva, and she was appalled by what Hitler had done to the Jewish population of Europe. To the dismay of her parents, she converted to Judaism and began to run guns to Menachem Begin's underground in Israel. After the Israeli War of Independence, she moved to Jaffa. Then she became a cancer researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science. In 1956, she gave a tour of the laboratory to Arthur Krim, the chairman of United Artists, and a longtime Democratic party activist. In 1958, Arthur and Mathilde were married and she moved to Manhattan.

After playing an important role in the passage of the National Cancer Act of 1971, Dr. Krim continued to work as a cancer researcher. In 1980, Joseph Sonnabend, a former colleague who was now practicing medicine in Greenwich Village, told her that some of his patients had strange symptoms including swollen lymph glands. Three years later, Dr. Krim founded the AIDS Medical Foundation, which merged in 1985 with the National AIDS Research Foundation in Los Angeles to form the American Foundation for AIDS Research. From that platform she fought for funds to perform basic research.

With Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen and Warren Beatty among her allies, Dr. Krim played a pivotal role in making the cause of AIDS respectable within the heterosexual community. People she knew “felt that this was a disease that resulted from a sleazy life style, drugs or kinky sex,” she told George Johnson of
The New York Times
in 1988. They felt “that certain people had learned their lesson and it served them right. … That was the attitude, even on the part of respectable foundations that are supposed to be concerned about human welfare.”

The reaction of many of her heterosexual friends reminded her of the stories she had heard about Jews during the war before she knew any herself, that they were dirty and evil and deserved to die. Dr. Krim was determined to prevent America from using AIDS to stigmatize homosexuals—and with the help of many of her famous Hollywood friends, she would be magnificently successful.

RANDY SHILTS BELIEVED
that a Canadian airline steward named Gaetan Dugas had played a key role in spreading the epidemic across North
America. Researchers called him “Patient Zero” because at least 40 of the first 248 gay men diagnosed with AIDS before April 1982 had either “had sex with Dugas or had had sex with someone who had.” Eleven cases could be connected to a single tryst with the airline steward. A statistician at the Centers for Disease Control pondered whether it could be coincidental that 40 of the first 248 victims were all linked to the same man. He decided “the chance did not approach zero—it was zero.”

Gay men had violently different reactions to the first reports about the epidemic. Some stopped having sex altogether: psychoanalyst Richard Isay reported that one of his patients even stopped masturbating because AIDS had made him feel so guilty about his sexuality. Other men sharply reduced their activity, but a third group continued to live their lives exactly the way they always had. Dugas was part of this third group—and like many other men in denial, he became furious whenever anyone suggested he might have a responsibility to stop having sex.

“Of course I'm going to have sex,” he told a doctor who asked him to be more careful in April 1982. Then he directly contradicted himself: “Nobody's proven to me that you can spread cancer. Somebody gave this thing to me. I'm not going to give up sex.” At the end of 1982, an AIDS hotline received repeated calls from men complaining about “a man with a French accent” who was having sex at the baths, and then calmly telling his partners afterward that he had gay cancer. Challenged again about his activity, Dugas articulated another notion that would become a popular and criminally irresponsible argument among some of those who knew that they had been infected by the virus—but remained determined to go on having as much sex as possible. “It's their duty to protect themselves,” he said of his partners. “They know what's going on there. They've heard about this disease.” Then he added guiltlessly, “I've got it. They can get it too.” A San Francisco health official who confronted Dugas thought that he should have been locked up.

Howard Rosenman was an extremely active Fire Island visitor in the summers of the seventies. He never slept with Dugas, but he did have sex with a great many of the first AIDS patients on Fire Island, beginning with Enno Poersch, who was “German and six feet four, and one of the most beautiful men I have ever seen.

“He lived in the house right across from the one I had rented for the summer in the Pines. That was the house Randy Shilts wrote about. I didn't sleep with Patient Zero, but I slept with most of Patients One through Nineteen at some time during the eleven years I had summered on Fire Island. Okay?
Most
of them. In the summer of 1980 they told us
Poersch's lover got cat scratch fever [he actually had toxoplasmosis; he died on January 15,1981]. I was in medical school for three years, right? I remember saying to myself, cat scratch fever? That's really odd. That was the end of the summer of 1980, and that was the first time I knew something was rotten in the state of Denmark. I was at the zenith of my wildest time. And then I came home to California.

“Somewhere along the winter or the spring of 19801 had a boyfriend named Reuven Levi-Proctor who was a rabbi drug dealer who Larry Kramer wrote about in
Faggots.
He was from Baltimore, Maryland, and his parents were very religious Jews. But in the summer of 1980, Reuven and I were now friends and he had a new boyfriend who came down with these marks on his body and died very, very quickly. And none of us knew what it was except Dr. Joel Weismann who treated him. Then Bronte Woodard, who was a writer who wrote
Grease.
He had been writing a screenplay for me. He was a bighearted guy from the south. He was like a big fat boy, bald. He used to give orgies that Nureyev used to attend in L.A., and he was also writing for Allan Carr. He got very, very, very sick with liver disease and other diseases.” Woodard died August 6,1980. His obituary gave the cause of death as liver failure.