Hold Tight Gently (13 page)

In San Francisco, Bobbi Campbell (“Sister Florence Nightmare”), a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a gender-queer group that sported religious garb, was one of the city’s first diagnosed cases of AIDS, and the very first to go public as a PWA. Early in 1982 Campbell began a column in the
San Francisco Sentinel
describing his experiences and offering recommendations to others. Like Mike Callen, Campbell had continued to believe that sexual liberation—sex as recreation and pleasure—should remain at the heart of the gay movement. Both men also agreed that sexual freedom had to include responsibility for one’s own health and that of one’s partners.
¹⁵

As Mike said in a speech early in 1983: “Walking into the baths and backrooms with the delusion that you can check your responsibility at the door with your clothes is an act of personal and cultural suicide. Either you do not love life or you do not know death. What is over isn’t sex—just sex without responsibility.” What was now needed, he went on, was to “begin to formulate a long overdue sexual ethic. . . . The formulation of this ethic will require a change radical in its simplicity: We will have to talk to each other. Yes, even before sex and maybe even after. And we will have to learn to listen to each other. . . . Our challenge is to figure out how to have gay, life-affirming sex, satisfy our emotional needs, and STAY ALIVE. Hard questions for hard times, but whatever happened to our great gay imagination?”

Dr. Marcus Conant, a dermatologist in San Francisco who would
become a leading figure in the struggle against AIDS, had a patient named Dan Turner who’d also been diagnosed early. Conant suggested that Campbell and Turner meet each other. Along with a few other PWAs, they gathered at Turner’s house in the Castro hills, and out of that meeting emerged PWA San Francisco—the first organization “of, for and by people with AIDS.” The principle was thus established that “people with AIDS themselves should be an integral part of AIDS service organizations,” a principle not yet accepted at GMHC in New York, though a few board members (Paul Popham, for one) had already been diagnosed. The members of PWA San Francisco were asked to choose for themselves which boards to serve on. Bobbi Campbell went on the KS/AIDS Foundation’s national board, and Dan Turner was elected to the board of the San Francisco chapter of the KS/AIDS Foundation.

In New York, as Mike told it, he and other PWAs had been feeling “growing frustration” at attending GMHC forums where they’d “sit silently in the audience” and hear assorted “experts”—from doctors and nurses to insurance and social work specialists—tell
them
what it was like to have AIDS. “It would be akin,” he felt, “to having a conference on sickle cell anemia at which no blacks were asked to attend or participate.” Mike himself suggested to GMHC that it hold a forum on the impact of AIDS on sexual behavior. Initially GMHC responded enthusiastically, and both Mike and Joe Sonnabend were asked to serve on the panel. Feeling strongly that GMHC and its board members had a “low consciousness” about feminism, Mike urged that women also be included. Ginny Apuzzo and Gloria Steinem were then added—but both Mike and Joe “mysteriously dropped.” When Mike asked why, a GMHC spokesperson first denied that Mike had ever been invited and then told him that he’d “become too prominent lately.” Outraged, Mike viewed the occasion as “the beginning of real war” with GMHC.

It apparently occurred to several PWAs at the same time—including Artie Felson and Tom Nasrallah, who were reasonably well known in the community—that
they
were the true experts on AIDS and that they should make their voices heard. In the fall of 1982, Mike and Rich Berkowitz formed a New York City group called Gay Men with AIDS (GMWA). Its stated goal was “to support each other by sharing our personal experiences, our strength and our hope,” and it
became oriented more toward therapy than politics. At the same time both Mike and Berkowitz joined the peer-run support group started by Dr. Stuart Nichols of Beth Israel Medical Center—possibly the first such group in the city. Another member of that group, Phil Lanzaratta, whom Mike adored and called a “sweetheart,” had already done a number of TV and print interviews and is sometimes called the “granddaddy” of the PWA movement in New York.

At roughly the same time, Mike, Berkowitz, and Sonnabend began to work on what became a self-published forty-page pamphlet,
How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach
, which appeared in May 1983. Mike used the refund from his own tax return to pay for the publication; he found a typesetter on King Street who for a fee let him, Berkowitz, and Richard Dworkin use his IBM typesetting machine. They made it clear at the top of the pamphlet that their recommendations were based on the multifactorial theory of AIDS but claimed—accurately, as it would turn out—that the guidelines would prove equally valid for reducing risk of contagion even if a new, as yet unidentified, virus was discovered to cause the disease. Whichever theory you believed, they emphasized, promiscuity was central to the health crisis. The National Cancer Institute had itself reported that “AIDS is occurring in a specific subset of homosexual men, possibly but not exclusively defined by the number of lifetime sexual partners.” Repeated exposure—whether to a specific virus or to an accumulation of infections—was at the heart of the matter. There were rumors of monogamous or sexually celibate gay men developing AIDS, but to date no such case had been produced. Nor was it accurate to say—as two articles in the left-wing Toronto-based gay paper,
The Body Politic,
had argued in 1982—that panic and “an anti-sexual sense of guilt” were blowing a minor health problem out of all proportion.
¹⁶

As Mike put it, “I have tried to be a ‘good gay’ and ‘wear my sexually transmitted diseases like red badges of courage in the war against a sex negative society,’ ” but as the numbers of those afflicted with AIDS steadily mounted, the stakes had simply become too high. Too many doctors, moreover—and, in some of its printed material, GMHC as well—were advising gay men to “cut down” on the number of different sexual partners and to have sex only with “healthy” ones. But as Mike asked with exasperation, what
specific
behavior was being advocated by the advice to “cut down”? Does that mean three partners a
week instead of six? Does it mean going to the baths once a month instead of once a week? And were gay men being advised to
ask
their partners if they were healthy? Besides, some infections, at least initially, were asymptomatic, and the partner might not know himself whether or not he was “healthy.” Even if he did know, “what does it say about our community that there are gay men having promiscuous sexual encounters knowing that they’re ill?”

A fierce debate would soon spring up within the community about whether to close down the bathhouses. When it did, Berkowitz would turn out to approve closure, but Mike would argue strenuously against. He wasn’t a believer, as he put it, in “legislating health risks; I have never and will never suggest such a thing.” But that didn’t mean that in the current crisis nothing at all needed to be done, and he tried to get safe-sex literature and condoms into the bathhouses. Most owners refused, arguing that “the atmosphere” would be “ruined.” In
How to Have Sex
, Berkowitz and Mike argued that it was essential—this was the pamphlet’s core recommendation—that one should avoid “taking in your partner(s) body fluids” (an injunction that resonates to the present day). That was the key to avoiding infection. The pamphlet emphasized that “sex doesn’t make you sick—diseases do. Gay sex doesn’t make you sick—gay men who are sick do.” Mike and Rich wanted gay men to examine their lifestyles, but they discouraged “misplaced morality masquerading as medical advice.” The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s had made it clear that sex and love are not inevitably or ideally linked, but “the 1970s,” they concluded, “are over. Taking ignorance to the baths and backrooms is not sexual freedom—it’s oppression.”

In the face of raging fears of contagion, the pamphlet gave lucid, detailed advice about what was or was not “safe” sex and also underscored the importance of talking openly with sexual partners (whether intimates or strangers) about which practices or behaviors were riskiest in terms of disease transmission. The guidelines Mike and Rich suggested are still largely followed: sucking your partner without a condom isn’t 100 percent risk-free; fucking someone probably poses no threat, but one should always use condoms during anal sex for the bottom’s protection, though they weren’t designed for assholes and might rip during penetration; getting fucked without a condom posed the greatest risk; S/M practices almost never did; fist fucking, which
could produce anal tears, could be “extremely dangerous.” Bathhouses and back rooms were full of disease, but if one wanted to partake, the four “musts” had to be followed: talking, washing, light, and condoms. Safest of all were “creative” masturbation, closed circles of fuck buddies, and jerk-off clubs.

In a transcribed phone conversation, Mike told Berkowitz that the more he became involved in politics, the less he felt he understood it. Why did it seem so impossible to separate issues from personalities? He told Rich that he’d done a lot of reading in feminist literature and as a result began to understand that you can disagree with somebody about an issue without insisting that the other person was “gross and disgusting.” He wished that more gay men would avail themselves of feminist insights: it would do wonders for cutting down the personal abuse that seemed to accompany the struggle against AIDS. He perhaps had in mind the comments made by Dr. Peter Seitzman, president of the New York Physicians for Human Rights, who’d written in the
Native
a few months before the publication of
How to Have Sex
about those people—naming Berkowitz and Callen—“whose guilt is shouted from the rooftops.” Mike was probably thinking, too, of Dr. Larry Mass, who’d characterized the two men as “sex-negative propagandists” intent on “blaming the victim.”

In general, though,
How to Have Sex
was well received, selling nearly all of the five thousand copies printed. “This is the sanest, most sensible advice I’ve read yet about AIDS,” wrote Edmund White, the novelist and co-author of the liberatory
The Joy of Gay Sex
. Dennis Altman, the well-known Australian writer of many gay-themed books, including
The Homosexualization of America
, hailed the pamphlet: “At last: a response to the effect of AIDS on our lives that goes beyond fears and myths to suggest positive actions.” Both GMHC and the state of New York flatly refused to distribute the pamphlet, but most people seem to have felt that in the face of conflicting dogmas, murky theorizing, and hysterically aggressive moralizing, Callen and Berkowitz had produced a pioneering, modulated, nonhectoring guide, and that it did
something
to assuage the confusion and anguish of those who’d considered celibacy as the only possible safeguard against death.

The pamphlet elevated the two men to the status of minicelebrities, and Mike, especially, received a host of invitations to speak and write. His careful, moving remarks to the New York congressional
delegation so impressed Representative Geraldine Ferraro that on May 18, 1983, she had them read into the
Congressional Record
. Mike eloquently described to the delegation the process by which at least some gay people were being radicalized as a result of the epidemic: “The tragedy of AIDS has made many . . . take a new look at the situation of America’s other disenfranchised groups. We are beginning to see that homophobia and racism are not, as some of us thought, totally unrelated. We are beginning to see that America’s fear and ignorance of homosexuals and its hate and bigotry toward black and brown people are not just coincidental.”
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Mike pointed out that in the few years since AIDS had first been recognized, it had killed more people than swine flu, toxic shock syndrome, Legionnaires’ disease, and cyanide-laced Tylenol combined. Yet the federal government had continued to ignore the epidemic. After all, the disease had struck only “disenfranchised segments of American society: homosexual men, heroin abusers, Haitian entrants and hemophiliacs,” plus some prisoners, sex workers, “and the children of high-risk groups who are also victims of poverty.” Mike felt sure, he told the New York congressional delegation, that “if such a deadly disease were affecting more privileged members of American society, there can be no doubt that the government’s response would have been immediate.”

He ended the speech with these telling and poignant remarks: “Surely when you first dreamed of holding public office you did not, in the furthest reaches of your imagination, foresee that your duties would include having breakfast on a Monday morning with a homosexual facing a life-threatening illness. You can be sure that ten—five—or even one year ago, I could not have imagined the possibility that I, too, would be up here begging my elected representatives to help me save my life. But there you are. Here I am. And that is exactly what I am doing.”

Within two weeks of giving that speech, Mike, on June 1, 1983, spoke to the New York State Senate Committee on Investigation and Taxation. He reiterated many of the same points he’d previously made to the New York congressional delegation but put more emphasis on the demeaning and legally incriminating sorts of questions that government researchers were commonly asking AIDS patients. In the current CDC questionnaire, for example, they were being asked if
they’d had sex with animals, and if so, how often; asked, too, to detail sexual practices “which are illegal in a number of states”; and asked as well to list which illicit drugs they’d taken. The answers were then stored on government computers, and many patients rightly doubted if confidentiality could be ensured. As a result, most AIDS patients were
not
providing truthful or helpful information to researchers.