The Martin Duberman Reader (42 page)
Read The Martin Duberman Reader Online
Authors: Martin Duberman
It's true that political involvement requires some detachment from self-obsession. But the process is paradoxical. Participation in a common struggle with others opens up opportunities that feed the self in unexpected ways. Though political work
does
demand that we concentrate on the common purpose at hand, it simultaneously
provides the individual with the comfort of community and newfound security and confidence. That, in turn, can lead those long suffering from the corrosive effects of oppression to self-discoveries and assertions that previously felt too “dangerous” to experience or express. And these discoveries often, for the individual, transcend in value any of the public gains won by the political struggle itself.
In any case, when I received early in 1977 a bulky packet of materials to read through for yet another upcoming, talk-laden meeting of the NLGTF board, I knew I had come to a divide. As I wrote Betty Powell, then serving as co-chair, the planned agenda “seems to me so top-heavy with organizational matters and so little concerned with substantive issues that I simply can't face sitting through the meetings anymore.” This wasn't to say, I added, “that I no longer value the work of NLGTF. It
is
to say that my own association with it feels increasingly lifeless, perfunctory.” It was, I wrote Betty, time for me to resign.
Perhaps, at bottom, my perfectionist temperament gave a certain inevitability to that resignation. I had a lifelong malcontent's way of overemphasizing what was wrong, and losing sight of or undervaluing what was right. Perhaps that's what “burnout” comes down to: that not all expectations have been met; not all old wounds magically healed; not all hopesâsuch as complete transformation of the worldârealized; not all secondary gainsâlike finding a bevy of intimate new friends or one mateâsecured.
For a few months I tried to fill the void by sitting in on meetings of the tiny Committee of Lesbian and Gay Male Socialists, but its protracted and fractious doctrinal debates very quickly grated on my activist nerves. I considered myself a socialist in the sense that I believed that the amount of suffering in the world could and must be reduced, that neither “human nature,” as conservatives claimed, nor the “mysterious intentions of the Deity” mandated its continuance. I was a socialist of ends, not means: priority had to be given to the needs of the
least
fortunate; how we established that priority was unclear, though I didn't view state monopoly of the means of production
and distribution as
necessary
preconditions to a classlessâor at least more justâsociety.
As my politics waffled uncertainly and remained unaffiliated, the jaws of Reaganismâand AIDSâwere closing down hard and fast.
âfrom
Midlife Queer
(1996)
D
igging on my terrace one day, happily debating whether impatiens or dahlias would look better in the planters, I was interrupted by a phone call from a friend. Had I heard the strange news? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had announced that a handful of young, previously healthy gay men in Los Angeles had been diagnosed with an unusual form of pneumonia called pneumocystis.
No, I hadn't heard. But soon other reports came filtering in. An equally rare form of cancer, Kaposi's sarcomaâwhich usually attacked only older men of Mediterranean ancestryâwas being seen among homosexual men in their twenties and thirties in several large cities.
By the end of 1981, the reports were no longer a handful, and it had become abundantly clear that a devastating new illness was upon us. The
New York Times
didn't think the news worthy of a feature articleâthough it put a story about the outbreak of a viral illness among the much-beloved Lippizaner horses on the front page.
But pastor Jerry Falwell immediately saw the significance of what came to be called AIDSâand its usefulness in whipping up antigay hysteria. He heralded the new disease as “the judgment of
God,” insisted that gay men deserved no sympathy for a plight their own “sick” lifestyle had brought down on them, publicly rejoiced that the sickness seemed incurable and “hopeless,” and warned all good Americans to stay away from these foul creatures, these “disease carriers” called gay men.
JANUARY 22, 1985:
The moral bigots are constantly citing “God's will”âi.e., punishmentâto explain the AIDS scourge and its concentrated incidence (in this country) among the gay male population,
Is the famine in Ethiopia, then, God's will?
The chemical explosion in Bhopal?
The Holocaust?
If so, God has a penchant for using savage weaponry to heap pain among those already heavily afflicted. If this is the definition of a “just God,” it's time to topple divinity and redefine justice. If inclined to assist the moralists in this ethical dilemma of their own making, one might suggest a variant theologyâthe one ministers cite at the funeral of an angelic five-year-old. To whit, “We cannot know His inscrutable purposes.” But to risk a guessâHe strikes down the most innocent and promising among us in order to underscore His displeasure with the rest of us. By that variant interpretation, gay people would be elevated from the status of moral lepers to that of the Chosenâdoomed saints of physical beauty, supernal gifts, psychic precocity.
FEBRUARY 28:
The
Wall Street Journal
(Feb. 8, 1985) has raised a “bemused” question about the “curious” lack of public debate over possible quarantine measuresâthereby helping to provoke such measures. All gay aliens are being detained, not merely deported, on the West Coast. The cry to force gay men to submit to the new blood test mounts.
The vote in Houston is 4â1
against
a gay civil rights bill. The disease and the citizenry seem to be descending in tandem over the gay population.
APRIL 20:
Bruce [Voeller, founding executive director of the National Gay Task Force; he later died of AIDS] called on his way home from the AIDS conference. He reports continuing horrorâand indifference. Says Margaret Heckler [Secretary of Health and Human Services] gave a speech so overtly homophobic that the three hundred (out of two thousand five hundred) openly gay participants caucused and submitted a formal protest. Bruce says no money is being made available for testing new drugs of
possibly
therapeutic value, and the Centers for Disease Control is secretly sending (limited) funds to France in order to support the needed scientific work.
NOVEMBER 10:
Discussing AIDS in my class on Thursday, the students split over the issue of whether to close down gay bars and baths, with some shocking venom expressed about the danger of gay people contaminating the general population. Then Friday [the writer/psychologist] Helen Singer Kaplan's letter to the
Times
rang a change on that theme: gay people somehow
owed
it to the general population to submit themselves for blood testsâwith no awareness shown of the moral hypocrisy inherent in treating gay people like scum for generations and then demanding that they behave like saints, of the victims being told they should sacrifice themselves for the greater peace of mind of their oppressors.
If any doubt remained of the malignity of the heterosexist vision of us, the last few issues [1985] of the
Post
have laid it to rest. Their inflammatory defamation sickened me. One article reported the trouble nurses are having in preventing AIDS patients in the hospitals from having sex. Another excoriated the gay bars for evading taxes. A third gleefully detailed the “sick” sex rituals of the Mine Shaft's [the famed gay male orgy bar]
“animal” habitués. The last time the media felt entitled to use the term “animal” was in justifying the lynchings of blacks. . . .
AUGUST 11, 1986:
I read of Davey C.'s death from AIDS at 28. . . . He had so many qualitiesâwas so physically beautiful, smart,
and
politically hip. Plus he was a sweet and generous man; soon after I came out of the hospital following my heart attack [in 1979], he came to visit me. We talked a while, he then offered me a blow jobâthought I “needed” it. I did, psychologicallyâsome connection with the possibility of getting pleasure out of my body, out of life, again. He sucked me off on the couch, a gesture of generosity, not lust. To my surprise, I came. We were both pleased. What is there left to say about this gruesome, senseless killer AIDS? Except that the wrong people are dying, those who gave themselves incautiously to experience, to life; the risk takers, the inventive ones. The fearful ones who literally sat on their asses still sit.
OCTOBER 14, 1987:
Epidemics always lay bare the rudimentary attitudes of the culture in which the epidemic occurs. The government and the public alike used the syphilis scourge of the early twentieth century as an opportunity to reassert traditional valuesâjust as with AIDS today. And in the United States no value is more traditional than being uptight about sex. As one moralist put it in regard to syphilis, “perfect inhibition is the only guarantor of perfect health and perfect morality.” Just so today. The emphasis is being put on returning to monogamy, not succoring people attacked with a virus; on altering behavior and further stigmatizing the already marginalized rather than ameliorating their suffering. . . .
Since the AIDS crisis began, many gay men have drawn back from their previous erotic pattern of multiple sexual partners, but the more radical among them insist that they've done so from necessity, not because they now view sexual variety as “immature” or as inimical to a satisfying life; in other words, they've put a hold on the sexual revolution, neither rejecting
it nor their own past histories as having been morally (or even medically) misguided. Radical gay men (and in recent years, some lesbians) continue to affirm, even in the face of AIDS, the rightness of a sexual revolution that insists human nature is not monogamous, that a variety of sexual experiences are essential to self-exploration, and that these experiences do not compromise and may even reinforce the emotional fidelity of a primary relationship. . . .
In its February 13, 1989, issue, the
Nation
published [gay activist and writer] Darrell Yates Rist's article “The AIDS Obsession” and invited various people, myself included, to respond to it. In his piece Rist denounced the gay community's single-minded focus in recent years on fighting the AIDS scourge, characterizing it as “fashionable hysteria” and theorizing that our “keening” reflected a “compulsive . . . need to partake in the drama of catastrophe.”
But the catastrophe, I wrote in response, was real “and the legions of the young in ACT-UP who have stationed themselves on the front lines deserve something better than being characterized [as Rist had] as âclones' and âchic street protesters.' ” If the straight world, I argued, had shown more than a modicum of concern and involvement, gay people would never have had to rely so entirely on their own resourcesâwhich they've marshaled with heroic determination.
Rist had further denounced the ACT-UP demonstrators as “immoral because they are panic-mongering.” To me that was a shocking mischaracterization of young men fighting for their lives, especially since Rist never paused to denounce a federal government whose indifference made such a fight mandatory. That was blaming the victimâand excusing the oppressorâwith a vengeance. “The paradox,” I wrote, “is that as a result of the successful mobilization of our own people in the fight against AIDS, so many have for the first time discovered their anger at heterosexist oppression that we may emerge from this crisis with the needed legionsâat lastâmilitantly to insist on an end to our persecution.”
By 1990, gay activism surrounding AIDS had galvanized the community, heightened visibility, and produced some measurable political progress that would have been unimaginable a decade earlier. As late as 1986, President Reagan had refused even to utter the word AIDS, let alone allotted any resources to combat it, and his attorney general, Edwin Meese, had sanctioned firing anyone who co-workers merely
perceived
as having AIDS and causing them to fear contamination. That same year, William F. Buckley published a piece advocating that gay men with AIDS be tattooed on the rear end (and drug users on the arm). Three months after that pitiless prescription, the Supreme Court, in its notorious decision
Bowers v. Hardwick,
ruled that the state could legally arrest gay adults having sex in the privacy of their own homes.
By early 1990, more than fifty thousand people had died of AIDS, with double that number known to be affected with the virus. No successful treatment had yet emerged, but what had changed was the earlier attitude of pardon-me-for-existing. It had given way to a fierce assertion, led by vanguard activists and then by ACT-UP, of the right to be alive, and stay alive. ACT-UP not only demanded that the federal government release significant sums for research but also that full access to experimental drugs and treatments be open to everyone; with a new disease, they militantly argued, the afflicted were entitled to take their chances rather than simply wait around while new drugs wended their slow way through the pipelines of traditional research.