Hold Tight Gently (11 page)

By this point in his life, Mike had had lots of sex, but never a lover. For brief periods, he’d had a boyfriend—the psychologist Richard Pillard in Boston, and in New York City a cop named George. With Richard, sex became something of an issue. Labeled terminally ill due to sexually transmitted infection, Mike now began to associate sex with disease and death, not love. He also had very specific health issues, like anal fissures, which in these early days of AIDS and the widespread fear of contagion, doctors were reluctant to treat surgically. The result, as Richard put it, was that “our sex life was not everything I wished it could be.” Mike said the same and more to close friends like Abby Tallmer, a young lesbian and recent graduate of Vassar who began working full-time in Sonnabend’s office in May 1983. She became especially close to Mike, with whom she shared a campy wit, a relish for sexual candor and gossip, and a deep concern for social justice. According to Abby, Mike expressed sadness and regret that he and Richard couldn’t indulge fully in the anal sex both preferred.

Adding to the problem was Mike’s image of himself as essentially nonmonogamous. “I’m really a whore,” he told Abby. “I am built to be a whore—or fate and circumstance made me a whore. Once a whore—always a whore.” Richard seemed to be exactly the sort of man he thought he’d been looking for: “He’s really nice, he likes to fuck, and he’s a musician, and there are all these reasons why I should stay with him. But I also was on the lookout for reasons to
not
stay with him.” Mike decided that the problem was his, and he had “a couple of intense weeks—almost psychotic—of ‘I don’t really love him.’ ” But the feeling passed.

Besides, Mike was dumbfounded that Richard, who was in good health, would choose to get sexually involved with someone possibly contagious and probably fatally ill. With typical directness, Mike simply asked him—and was amazed at Richard’s matter-of-fact response: “I’m a gay man living in New York City. I’m going to have to deal with this disease sooner or later. I may as well begin now.” Richard, too, had had numerous partners in the past—though he couldn’t match Mike’s high numbers—yet he’d had few sexually transmitted diseases and didn’t have a compromised immune system.

It was at just this critical juncture—July 1982—that the CDC released new findings that further muddied the waters. Within a two-week period the CDC announced three cases of PCP among hemophiliacs and thirty-four cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma among Haitians living in the United States. The CDC offered no commentary to accompany the figures, but obviously the “gay disease” had now been found in several other populations and wasn’t strictly confined to gay people. Reactions ranged from excitement to rage. The excitement was mostly felt by gay men relieved of the singular onus for the plague (the term “GRID” quickly gave way to acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS) and hopeful that a substantial rise in federal funding and research would follow. The rage was felt among hemophiliacs who had previously assumed that the blood supply was uncontaminated, and among Haitians for being unfairly singled out for discrimination. AIDS had also been found in Denmark in 1981, but that was all but unmentioned, as Haiti—in a clear case of racism—was highlighted. Within a few months, the Haitian Coalition on AIDS was founded to challenge, successfully, the designation of Haitians as a risk group.
¹⁰

With Mike’s health improved, he and Rich Berkowitz set to work on the Sonnabend-inspired article. It took three months to complete and Mike, ever the perfectionist, was ready for yet another rewrite until Rich called a halt by pointing out that the number of diagnosed cases in New York City had doubled from three hundred to six hundred during the time they’d been at work. They entitled the piece “We Know Who We Are,” and it appeared in the November 8–21, 1982, issue of
New York Native
with a byline that added “with Richard Dworkin” to Callen and Berkowitz. It minced no words: “Few have been
willing to say it so clearly, but the single greatest risk factor for contracting AIDS is a history of multiple sexual contacts with partners who are having multiple sexual contacts.”

“Other factors may contribute,” they acknowledged later in the piece, but went on to insist that to date “no evidence supports” speculation about a new or mutant virus. It was true that the CDC had found a cluster of nine gay men who’d had sexual contact only with one another over a five-year period, and yet each man had developed Kaposi’s—thus suggesting that a virus, not promiscuity, was centrally involved. Yet in a footnote, the CDC had acknowledged that the nine “tended to report having more sexual partners in the year before onset of symptoms (median: 50).” As for hemophiliacs, the U.S. blood supply comes of course from many different donors with many different viruses, and “continual re-exposure and re-infection” over the years may have weakened the recipients’ immune systems. In regard to the infected Haitians, CDC scientists reasoned that in the course of frequent visits to and from the island, with its poor sanitary conditions, they may have picked up “a variety of tropical viruses.”

Mike and Rich argued in their article that “whichever theory you accept, promiscuity is the way AIDS is being spread among gay men”; they specifically cited, as did a number of specialists in the early years, the known fact that repeated re-infection with a common herpes virus—cytomegalovirus (CMV)—“produced a mild sperm-induced immunosuppression.” Both were forthright about acknowledging in the piece their own sexually active histories and went to great lengths to avoid being misunderstood as saying that there was something inherently wrong with having a large number of sexual contacts. Not only did they still believe in sexual liberation, they argued, but they were
not
suggesting
legislating
an end to promiscuity—like passing laws to close the baths or back-room bars.
The
underlying cause of AIDS, they insisted, was homophobia: “Hatred has forced too many of us into the ghetto of the bathhouse circuit . . . disease settings equivalent to those of poor Third World nations, and junkies.”

Instead, Rich and Mike called for “sexual alternatives”—like “ ‘fuck buddies’ . . . circles of healthy individuals who can be trusted to limit their sexual contacts to members of that closed group”—until greater understanding of AIDS and treatments for it had developed: “The epidemic of AIDS need not result in abstinence or even monogamy
for everyone. Not everyone who wishes to discuss alternatives to promiscuity,” they insisted, “is sex-negative or a sexual fascist.”

Their article caused an immediate uproar. It should be remembered that in November 1982—just one year into the U.S. epidemic—a significant number of gay men were still in denial about both how extensive and how lethal the plague could become. Thanks to assorted CDC reports, there was also a fairly widespread conviction, bordering in some quarters on hope, that heterosexuals would become infected in mounting numbers. It was a message that the new organization the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) eagerly promoted in the expectation that it would prompt the federal government and the medical establishment to respond with a massive research effort and a quick cure—since heterosexual lives
mattered
.

At the time, GMHC, under the conservative leadership of Paul Popham, a Republican gay man and ex-marine, had in an “educational” brochure only gone so far as to say that the disease
might
be sexually transmitted. David Goodstein, the even more conservative owner of the national gay magazine
The Advocate
, expressed far more concern about the rise of the Religious Right than about “the gay cancer.” At the end of 1982 he listed AIDS as ninth among the top ten stories affecting homosexuals that year. As for most of the national media—the
Boston Globe
and National Public Radio were among the few exceptions—they either entirely ignored or profoundly downplayed the mounting health threat. It wasn’t until May 31, 1982, that an American newspaper, the
Los Angeles Times
, ran a front-page story about the disease now known as AIDS. And during all of that year, the three major television networks devoted a combined total of thirteen minutes to the epidemic, though 853 people had already died from it.

Not even the countercultural
Village Voice
had opened up its pages. Dr. Lawrence Mass had been consistently providing reliably sober articles for
New York Native
about the epidemic, but the
Native
had only fourteen thousand regular readers in a city with an estimated gay population of six hundred thousand to a million. Since the
Native
’s circulation was only about 10 percent of the
Village Voice
’s, Mass submitted an article there in an effort to reach a larger audience. He was turned down on the grounds that “it isn’t a
Voice
piece.”

Given the general climate of dismissiveness and denial, Mike and Rich could have logically expected little or no reaction to their own
article. But they’d been so deeply engaged with the epidemic and knew so many young men who’d been afflicted (both were members of the first AIDS support group, which met weekly) that they felt and hoped that the piece might have real impact. It did—but not in the way they intended. The response was almost entirely negative, the prime objection being that they’d turned their backs on the sexual revolution and joined forces with Larry Kramer, who in his 1978 novel
Faggots
had famously and controversially excoriated gay male “promiscuity.”
¹¹

Charles Jurrist, a dance critic for the
New York Daily News
, published a retaliatory article, “In Defense of Promiscuity,” in the
Native
accusing Mike and Rich of “the unleashing of hysteria.” Only 716 cases of AIDS had been reliably documented, he argued, and many more people than that “were injured or killed last year in automobile accidents.” After all, he wrote, “life can’t be made risk-free. . . . You can’t very well ask every man you meet to go for $400 worth of laboratory tests and give you a notarized copy of the results before you’ll go to bed with him.” He intended, Jurrist went on, to lead his life pretty much as he had been: “I will continue to be ‘promiscuous.’ I won’t be scared out of seeking fulfillment. Nor will I consider my behavior in any way as self-destructive.” Jurrist died from AIDS in 1991.

In the
Native
, Dr. Peter Seitzman, president of the New York Physicians for Human Rights, agreed with Mike and Rich that “it is the number of
different partners
that increases risk, not the amount of sex itself,” but he objected to the “vehement” tone they’d employed and accused them of “shout[ing] guilt . . . from the rooftops.” In the
Advocate
, Nathan Fain, a GMHC board member, similarly claimed that Rich and Mike were urging gay men to “follow along in self-flagellation.” And even Dr. Lawrence Mass joined the chorus of contempt, inaccurately accusing them of linking hands with the Religious Right in demanding that the baths be closed down.

Nor was the negative reaction confined to New York. A number of the early male leaders of gay rights activism, including Marty Robinson and Jim Owles in New York, Morris Kight in L.A., and Frank Kameny in D.C., actively and publicly resisted any suggestion that recreational sex could be linked with disease. In Toronto, the radical paper
Body Politic
published a piece by Michael Lynch and Dr. Bill Lewis denouncing the efforts of some gay men to “rip apart the very promiscuous fabric that knits the gay male community together. . . . Gays are
once again allowing the medical profession to define, restrict, pathologize us.” Such a response was perhaps understandable, given the fact that the medical community had for generations pathologized gay people, but it was also a misunderstanding of Mike and Rich’s basic argument. In a sharp reply to the
Body Politic
, Mike fought back:

Lewis and Lynch are at a loss to understand all the “fear and paranoia” which the AIDS epidemic has caused. It astounds me that I have to point out that all this “panic” is because
gay men are dying
. . . . However much gay people have suffered at the hands of medicine, we cannot allow our knee-jerk defensiveness to delay urgently needed, rational discussion about the medical hazards of promiscuity. Promiscuity may indeed be the warp that “knits together the social fabric of the gay male community,” but this lifestyle is clearly killing us. . . . By refusing to see that our lifestyle is potentially fatal, we may permit the ultimate triumph of the Moral Majority: we will kill
ourselves
.

In a 1983 interview on the TV show
Freeman Reports,
Berkowitz went still further, likening promiscuity to “alcoholic addiction,” agreeing with his fellow panelist Larry Kramer that “homophobia”—not pleasure—was “at the heart of promiscuity”; the denial of civil rights, the two men claimed, forced people “into the ghetto” and a life of promiscuity. Thus began an ugly schism within the community of gay male activists, one that would at times take on a fiercely acerbic edge.

In a further attempt to rebut the angry critiques, Mike and Rich submitted a fourteen-page reply to critics of “We Know Who We Are,” in which they justly claimed that their views had been misread, misunderstood, and misrepresented: “Neither of us has experienced a moment of guilt about our own promiscuous behavior. . . . Neither of us has problems with our gayness or with sexuality; we have problems with disease.” They wrote understandingly of a community “dazed by tragedy” but insisted that the best defense was to “educate ourselves about how our bodies work.” The
Native
refused to print their response and turned down as well another piece that specifically replied to Jurrist’s critique.

As the debate raged on, New York City hospitals were reacting to the mounting number of AIDS patients with a harshness reminiscent of the medieval treatment of lepers: as contagious sinners kept in de
facto isolation from “innocent” human beings. It wasn’t yet clear whether AIDS was most efficiently transmitted through blood or semen, and tales abounded of nurses, gowned and masked from head to toe, ignoring patients or approaching them only with the utmost wariness, frequently sliding meals somewhere in their vicinity—like outside in the hall—rather than risk actual contact. Some AIDS patients, refused a room, ignored by orderlies, died on hospital gurneys in the corridors.