The Gay Metropolis (57 page)

Five years into the epidemic, one important member of the Reagan administration finally delivered a direct attack on the criminally irresponsible attitude toward AIDS education which the president's religious allies had encouraged. In October 1986, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop issued a blistering report.

“Many people, especially our youth, are not receiving information that is vital to their future health and well-being because of our reticence in dealing with the subjects of sex, sexual practices and homosexuality,” the surgeon general wrote. “This silence must end. We can no longer afford to sidestep frank, open discussions about sexual practices—homosexual and heterosexual. Education about AIDS should start at an early age so that children can grow up knowing the behaviors to avoid to protect themselves from exposure to the AIDS virus.”

Koop said AIDS education should begin “at the lowest grade possible”
in elementary school and be “reinforced at home” by parents. And he made it clear that anal intercourse—described in explicit detail in his report—had to be one of the activities young children were educated about for their own protection. But neither Reagan nor George Bush nor Bill Clinton would ever do anything significant to implement these extremely sensible recommendations.

The refusal to educate the young about the specifics of how this disease was transmitted was one of the worst scandals of the early years of the AIDS epidemic—and it persists, twenty-five years after the epidemic began.

Another unconscionable mistake was the fierce opposition of the American Red Cross and other leading blood bankers to what they considered expensive tests, which could have protected the blood supply much earlier and prevented many AIDS infections through transfusion.

The miracle was that hundreds of thousands of men
did
change their sexual activities dramatically beginning in 1983—and that those changes saved their lives. In big cities and small towns across the country, there were sharp drops in the rate of anal gonorrhea infections—the most reliable indicator of safer sex practices. And after the HIV test became available, the rate of new HIV infections among gay men declined for several years in a row.

As Kramer pointed out, the tragedy at the beginning was that so many people believed “that giving up careless sex until this blows over is worse than death.” In the
New York Native,
he wrote, “How can they value life so little and cocks and asses so much? Come with me, guys, while I visit a few of our friends in Intensive Care at NYU. Notice the looks in their eyes. … They'd give up sex forever if you could promise them life.”

Students of the epidemic assumed that once it became clear that most kinds of sex were relatively safe, while only one—unprotected anal intercourse—was frequently fatal, it would be fairly easy to convince the vast majority of gay men to abstain from that singularly lethal act. It was disheartening to discover that this kind of lifesaving behavior modification would be much more difficult to accomplish than anyone had suspected—because the emotions surrounding sex and survival are so complicated, especially during a sexually transmitted epidemic.

AS MORE AND MORE
of their friends fell ill, the gay identity of some men began to merge with an AIDS identity, to the point where they felt that they weren't really gay unless they had also been infected. Charles Gibson was one of those men.

Gibson had grown up in Louisville, and fell in love with New York City when he was twelve, during his first visit in 1964. Even at that age, he figured
out how to take the subway by himself and how to use the Empire State Building as his “compass.” He came back to live in New York seven years later and went to work for the Children's Television Workshop. There he met Richard Hunt, who was one of the original Muppets. Soon they began a long on-again, off-again affair.

“I met Richard the first year I worked at ‘Sesame Street,”' Gibson remembered. “I worked in the mail room and after six months I was able to move into a position in the production department, as a script typist. On one of my first trips to the studio, I was distributing the scripts and I looked up and there stood Richard: the wonder boy from New Jersey.

“He was one of the principal Muppets: he was the back end of Snuffleupagus, not a speaking part. He had a lot of roles. He was Gladys the Cow. He did a lot of the minor Muppet characters.

“What I remember is Richard calling me in the wee hours of the morning, most of the time waking me in my sleep, inviting himself down with a quart of orange juice and whatever drugs he had at the time. Probably pot. At that time I don't think cocaine was part of it. So he would arrive on the scene, and we'd get high and we'd drink our orange juice. And we'd go to bed, which was where we belonged. Richard and I belonged together in bed. We were
right
together in bed. The less said the better. He looked great. He was wonderful. All those basketball games: they did him good.

“This was probably 1972, the first year I moved to New York. Richard lived an exciting life. He knew celebrities. He was high, he was up and he was on. Things were happening. The Muppets were emerging. They were novel and exciting. They were big.”

Once Rudolf Nureyev made a guest appearance on the Muppets. The first time he met Richard Hunt backstage, Nureyev looked him in the eye and introduced himself this way:

“You love to suck cock, don't you?”

Gibson was blond and good-looking and boyish, and he was completely open to the new world around him. He loved the New York men of the early seventies: “They were all unique,” he recalled. “There were no clones at the time”—mustachioed men who wore identical uniforms of T-shirts and blue jeans. “They looked independent. They looked assertive. They stood their ground. They looked confident.”

He was also in love with adventure: “the thrill of living, and the thrill of discovery. A feeling of being at the center of the universe: discovering a new planet. Extending the frontier. New York was energized. It was an education; it was like a university of life. It was a place where every person
had something to say—and no matter how simple, whatever they were doing, it seemed exciting to me. Everybody was remarkable.

“There was nothing risky about sex that I can remember. I suppose there was some chance of falling in love, or it being one-sided. But you didn't think about those things. They always seemed to work themselves out. There was always the prospect that even if it didn't become something serious, that you stood to make a friend.”

Gibson first found out about HIV sometime in the early eighties. By now he was living in California, and when he began to read articles about the virus, “It didn't make much sense to me. It was happening somewhere else: it wasn't happening in Sacramento. It wasn't happening in the Grand Canyon—or Death Valley [where he had also lived]. It was something that I read about that was happening somewhere else.” Then he saw the picture of an old friend from New York, Mark Feldman, in a gay newspaper in San Francisco. The picture accompanied his obituary. Feldman was the first person he knew who had died of AIDS.

“What I remember is that I knew at one point that there was a risk of exposure, and I remember sort of making kind of a conscious decision not to take any precautions. I think I did bring it on myself. I don't know why I did that. It was almost like I was trying to beat the odds, perhaps. I don't know. I think that at that time I probably could have avoided exposure if I had … if I had really, really thought about … if I really had … if … if … if I had taken the time to, to really think about it. If I had, if I had talked to people, if I had listened. If it had somehow come home to me in a very dramatic way. I just didn't realize.

“I found out I was positive in eighty-six or eighty-seven. I had a pretty good idea that I was. I had a friend who was living in Sacramento at the time, a fellow I had become friends with when I was living in the Grand Canyon and we were going to get tested. I thought about it and I decided it was better knowing than not knowing. And I found out.

“My friend was negative. His name was Joe. We got tested together at a clinic and they did it anonymously. When we went back for the results, Joe went in to get his first. After having been taken out to be told the results of his test, he came back and he sat down. He told me he was negative.

“Then it was my turn, and I went in. And instead of coming back to my seat I was instructed to [go to] another room. To a counselor. Whose job it was to cushion the blow.” Gibson laughed at his memory of that moment: “Some cushion. I didn't want to be cushioned. I thought I was probably positive because I knew what the risk factors were. And I knew that I had taken those risks.

“It's painful sometimes to find myself in a crowded bar [in 1991] and to look around me and to imagine myself ten years ago in that same place in those same circumstances, knowing how different it was. And the very dramatic differences for me. My perspective today, the realities.

“I've avoided intimate situations where you would feel an obligation to tell someone. If it was sex I was looking for, I would put myself in a situation where I could have sex without any commitments. Sex where I would be able to remain anonymous. And yet safe. But without feeling the same obligation to be forthcoming about my HIV status.

“Hopefully, you know, something will turn up. But it's hard to go on living with a smile, or go on living with any real enthusiasm, or any real joy. It's like with the frequency of people dying it's almost—it's so temporary: the pleasure, the joy, the thrill, the excitement, the enthusiasm.

“It's like my future consists of appointments to see doctors. I Just see this progression. But who knows? Some part of me—that survivor part of me—likes to tell myself that somehow or other some miraculous thing is going to help me to come out of this relatively unscathed.”

DAVID BARTOLOMI
was born in Boston in 1965, which made him part of the generation that followed Charles Gibson. Bartolomi had fooled around with his best friend when they were both nine and again when they were twelve, and he had also had a couple of fleeting experiences in camp. But his first serious sexual encounter occurred when he was seventeen.

Bartolomi believed the main reason he avoided the epidemic was because his father always sold pornography in his smoke shop in East Boston. “Thank God,” he said, “because it really did save my life.

“Hustler
ran before-and-after pictures of this incredibly handsome man who looked like a model—one where he was young, beautiful, and healthy; the other one, emaciated, sickly, and old. The article didn't have a name for this ‘gay disease' because AIDS still wasn't talked about in eighty-one. But it was enough to scare the life out of me. It burned its image into my brain. I knew there was this disease out there that affected gay men. I didn't know what it was called. And it seemed to be a sexually transmitted disease of some sort. I don't think I knew what kind of sex; I just knew that having sex with gay men was becoming risky. Maybe it did say anal sex because I knew it was anal sex. I wasn't that much in the closet about what was happening in the world. But if I'd never picked up those magazines, I never really would have been aware.

“In 1983,1 met a guy in Filene's Basement,” Boston's famous discount
department store. “This handsome man—he was thirty-two—it turns out he was cruising me. I thought he can't be interested in me—I'm in my sweatpants and T-shirt. I haven't shaved. I look like a total slob. And I just had no idea that I could be attractive. And we exchanged phone numbers, and he called me, or I called him one night. I was still living at home. And we arranged for me to come over. I told my parents I had a night class—I was directing a show and I had to work on some scenes. He had a little railroad flat by the train station right at the bottom of Beacon Hill. It must have been the Red Line. I walked in the door, dressed like some greaseball kid from Brooklyn, with greaseball taste, with a guinea T-shirt on and a pair of tacky Jordache jeans. It turned out he was from my hometown—he was from East Boston. He was Italian. His name was Felix DeMarco. I walk into his place and we talked for a minute, and the next thing I know, he grabbed me. He kissed me—threw me down on the couch and had my clothes off so fast my head was spinning. And then he had my feet in the air.

“And I was like, ‘Whoa! This is just happening way too fast.' He was fighting his way inside me. Trying so hard to get inside me. And I was just like, ‘No, this ain't going to happen.' Like I'm not ready for that act yet. Psychologically I'm not ready for that. I know that there's this gay cancer. I just tightened up all my muscles until he finally gave up. Thank God. He said, ‘Okay, you can be inside me.' He was fine with it. He let me fuck him twice without a condom. Which leads me to believe that he didn't know he was sick. Because he didn't say, ‘Put a condom on.' I was in and out, no problem. After sex, he said to me, ‘I'd love to see you again.' And I was all nervous, and not ready to handle any sort of relationship with a man even if it was just sexual. But I had had the night of my life.

“So I pull in about eleven o'clock to my parents'. And I'm thinking, I pulled it off, I'm pretty cool, you know. And my father comes into my room to check on me. While we're talking, I begin to get undressed and ready for bed. As I'm hanging my shirt up, he says, ‘Don't think I don't see that hicky on your neck! And I got one word for you: you just better be careful, mister!' And he walked out of the room.

“I froze. I'm
so
caught! What hicky on my neck? I didn't even know I had a hicky on my neck. But my dad saw through it all. He didn't know if it was a boy or a girl. He just knew obviously I'd had sex that night.

“So that year I moved to New York to attend NYU for film. One night my best friend from high school called to verify the name of my Filene's Basement one-night stand.