Read Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings Online
Authors: The Century for Young People: 1961-1999: Changing America
Tags: #History, #United States, #Juvenile Nonfiction, #20th Century, #Historical, #Biography & Autobiography
Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings (8 page)
Fear was also stalking America in the form of a new and deadly disease. For years medical science had been scoring one success after another. Its achievements promised to make human life better than ever. Then came the AIDS epidemic. AIDS stands for “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.” First detected in the early 1980s, it was believed to be a “gay disease.” Homosexual men were being struck down by a mysterious onslaught of unusual infections that their bodies could not fight off. Before long, AIDS was also diagnosed in intravenous drug users, prostitutes, hemophiliacs, and some immigrants from Haiti and Africa. Because there was no clear understanding of what this deadly disease was, how it spread, or how to treat it, fear and hysteria quickly swept much of the nation.
For more than a decade, activists had been struggling for gay rights, and they had made considerable progress. But the arrival of AIDS brought a backlash against the gay community. Some conservative critics went so far as to claim that AIDS was God's revenge against “immoral” people. All the
finger-pointing and name-calling often hid the sad fact that real people were dying, including babies who had gotten AIDS from their infected mothers. By the late 1980s the death toll was climbing toward a hundred thousand, and just about everyone in America knew someone whose life had been affected by the disease.
Bruce Woods Patterson, born in 1953, saw the devastating effect of AIDS on the gay community in New York City and pitched in to help.
G
MHC [Gay Men's Health Crisis] had hired me on full time to work with Jerry Johnson on the AIDS hot line. What I didn't know at the time was that I had changed careers forever. We were all nonprofessionals back then, working by the seat of our pants and just trying to get GMHC's name out there. [Johnson's] instincts were what we call “client-centered” and “nondirective,” which means that you accept the caller where they are, and you support them where they are, and you do not judge them, whatever you do. And you don't tell them what to do. You ask what they want to do and you ask them how they think they can do it, and in the end you help them figure out the options.
One of the great challenges of a hot line is that you get one chance to make a
difference in the lives of the callers. In our case, we had to do that in under ten minutes, the prescribed time limit on most calls, and you have to maintain your anonymity, another requisite. It's really the only way to stay emotionally distant from the caller, although there are calls I carry around with me to this day. People called who were bed-bound, crying and sad with no hope. They'd start talking about how they used to be young and beautiful and had a future and how they had lost their identity, independence, and pride. A lot of people called and said, “I'm not afraid of death. It's getting there that scares me.” Being stripped of all your dignity and losing half your body weight and having friends turn away just because they're in such pain they can't stand to see you that way is just horrible.
The level of ignorance and homophobia from some of the callers was just amazing. And the indifference was overwhelming. When I first started, prank callers would just say, “All you faggots should die!”
Click
. Thank you for sharing. It was bad enough all these people were dying and there was nothing that we could do about it, and then you've got people hating you for being sick or for helping sick people. Of course, you wanted badly to be able to say, “Where's
your compassion? Who do you think you are? What's wrong with loving someone?”
My friends and I often talk about the community of infected and affected people. I am HIV-negative but have been affected deeply. We're all living with AIDS. I often wonder why I have been so lucky when so many of my friends and colleagues have died of AIDS. When I look back at the pictures of the early days at GMHC, it hits me every time that the majority of the people in them are no longer living. In the end, I have to be philosophical about it. I guess my job is to be there for everyone else. The best thing that I can do is just stay HIV-negative.
Throughout the 1980s, President Reagan maintained an iron-hard posture toward Communism. And this posture led to yet another government scandal. Nicaragua, a country in Central America, was led by a Communist government. Reagan wanted to help the “contra” rebels, who were fighting a guerrilla war against the government, but Congress had passed a law banning military aid to the contras. In a bizarre scheme to sidestep the law, American ammunition, spare parts for tanks, jet fighters, and missiles were sold to Iran to make money to fund the contra rebels.
Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North ran the secret
operation that eventually became known to the country as “Iran-contra.” A decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, North was a patriot with an unshakable loyalty to the president. In testimony before Congress, North said that he believed he had acted “with authority from the president” in carrying out illegal operations in Central America and the Middle East. For America to be negotiating with the Ayatollah Khomeini's government was astonishing enough. But for illegal weapons sales to be linked to the White House was shocking. Just as they had during Watergate a decade earlier, Americans now asked, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” Iran-contra suggested one of two possibilities: Either the president himself was involved in an illegal international operation, or else he was a weak leader who did not know what was going on under his own nose. Neither possibility was flattering to the president who had promised a return to America's glory days.
As Americans faced their problems at home and abroad, it was comforting to know that at least the economy was still booming. That changed dramatically on October 19, 1987, Black Monday, when the stock market crashed. In one day the market lost 508 points, or 22.6 percent of its valueâapproximately $500 billion, an amount equivalent to the gross national product of France. Black
Monday reminded Americans of the stock market crash of 1929. But what really frightened them was the memory of what had followedâthe miserable years of the Great Depression. For the next year, people watched and waited, but the depression never came. Slowly the market bounced back, and Americans breathed a sigh of relief.
In spite ofâor perhaps because ofâPresident Reagan's hard-line policy toward the Soviet Union and the renewed nuclear arms race, Communism was beginning to crack. In the late 1980s the Soviet Union was going through its most dramatic change since the 1917 revolution. Under the leadership of fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985, the Cold War began to thaw.
Even the crusty old members of the Politburo (the Soviet Congress) knew that their country had reached rock bottom. Industrial output was pitiful. Alcoholism was rampant. Workers were absent from their jobs much of the time. Housing shortages forced nearly a quarter of city residents to share bathrooms and kitchens. Food was scarce. Something drastic had to be done.
Gorbachev did not set out to bring an end to Communism in Russia. On the contrary, he saw himself as saving the Communist state. He started a three-part program to revitalize his ailing nation:
glasnost
(openness),
perestroika
(restructuring), and
demokratizatsiya
(democratization). And he presented this program not as a break with Soviet tradition,
but as a way of reconnecting to the original principles of Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state.
It wasn't only in the Soviet Union that Communism was teetering. In Poland, a trade union called Solidarity had begun to challenge the Communist government in 1980. Although Solidarity had been shut down by the authorities in 1981, it still fought secretly for greater freedom in Poland. But in the late 1980s the world's attention was riveted on Mikhail Gorbachev. Within the Soviet Union itself, the excitement was building. Newspaper articles revealed corruption and mismanagement. Electionsâreal electionsâwere held. People began to talk openly about the past and the terrible things that had happened during Stalin's brutal regime. The truth about their own history had been forbidden to the Russian people. Gorbachev promised that there would be an end to secrecy and deception, the government's strongest weapons against its own people.
Marina Goldovskaya, born in 1941, is a filmmaker who took part in the new openness of the Gorbachev years.
I
n the mid-eighties I was working at the central television station in Moscow, making television programs on politics, on literature, art, social life, public affairs. This took half of my year, and the other half of the year I was a filmmaker for Ekram, a special film
studio within the television station. All media in the USSR was heavily censored, and television was probably the most censored of them all. Everything we did was controlled by our administration. Every year we had to submit several proposals for the films for the next year. All of the proposals and concepts had to go through what was known as the “council of editors.”
In early 1985 I submitted a proposal for a documentary film version of a book called
At My Mother's
, by Anatoly Streliany. He was a talented writer with independent ideas and a point of view that was not in line with the Communist Party. Because of his views he had a difficult time getting his works published. But this particular book was not overtly political. It described a visit he made to his mother's home in the village he grew up in, and it gave a very interesting portrait of the village. We got this proposal through all the censors, and it was put into the plan for 1986.
Even before we started working on
At My Mother's
, we got a sense that somehow things were changing. For a long time it had seemed as if something just had to change, because the whole country was stagnating. For so many years, the people who had ruled our country were old and outdated. We were so ashamed when we saw these old faces
reading their speeches. They were not able to even read them properly, they were so old.
When Streliany and I started working on this film, I thought that we could take advantage of the changing atmosphere to do something more useful, more interesting. Something that could somehow help to push this process of change. So instead of making a documentary film based on his book, we decided to make a film about farmers and the struggle between the individual and the communal. We knew that our new idea would never be approved by the censors, but we decided to go ahead and make it anyway. We just acted as if we were still making a film based on our original approved proposal.
We traveled around talking to farmers and doing research, and we ended up in this little village called Ust-Vanga. And there I met this farmer named Nikolai Sivkov, who had been a member of the local collective farm but who had left in order to start his own little farm, belonging to him and his family. From the minute I met Sivkov, I understood that he would be a perfect character for a film. He was eloquent. He was witty. He was biting. In him, you could see all the controversy of our system. This man, who only had about two years of education, stood before the camera and talked about
the advantages of private property and the inefficiencies of the collective, and how the Soviet farming system was preventing him from succeeding. The story of this man and his little farm was the perfect metaphor for the evils of the Soviet system. As I was shooting, I became so afraid. I understood that this could be the end of my career. The things that he was saying would never be shown on television. You just couldn't attack the collective like that. It was impossible. I was scared to death, but at the same time, I didn't have the strength to say to myself, no.
By the time I finished the film, which I called
Archamgelskiy Mujik
, which roughly translates to
A Real Peasant from Archamgelskiy
, Gorbachev had been in power for about a year, and he was such an inspiration for all of us. He was like fresh air. He was young, brave, and brighter than anybody else. It was something completely new to us; suddenly there was a lot of hope. We were all absolutely euphoric about Gorbachev. We thought that a new time was coming. Finally it seemed that people would stop telling lies. We were fed up with the lies we read in the newspaper. Everything we read was all fake, all lies. And everybody understood it, but nothing could be done. And suddenly there was somebody, Gorbachev.
When he started talking about
glasnost
, “openness,” it was exciting. But change came very slowly at first, step by step. And while we were excited by everything, it was a very unsure time. Gorbachev still had a lot of opposition on the Politburo; there were still many of the old rulers around. So it was in this environment that we presented our film to a consultant from the Central Committee of the party. He was one of the members who was behind Gorbachev and who was ready for change, so he decided to take a chance and approve the broadcast of the film.
Archamgelskiy Mujik
aired on a Thursday night. The next day the whole country was talking about itâin the buses, on the subway, in classrooms. I became famous in one minute. The television station wanted to repeat the film two weeks later, but suddenly there came an order to stop the broadcast. And the film was banned. Ultimately, because of the new policy of
glasnost
, they decided to air the film again. The fact that this film survived was a sure sign that Gorbachev was winning against the old guard. The feeling that we all had was that now we can start building a new life without lies and with good intentions. We felt that everything would go very quickly in the right direction,
that the new life was very close. It took Gorbachev to make the first step, then everyone else just started to push the train.
In 1989 life in the Communist countries of Europe was transformed. No one, maybe not even Gorbachev himself, quite knew what he had started. Once reforms began, they took on a life of their own. When Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would no longer interfere with the governments of the eastern European countries, the threat of brute force that had kept the Communist regimes in power turned hollow. Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania overthrew their Communist leaders. Even in China, students began protesting for democracy, although the Chinese government put down the uprising.