Hold Tight Gently (17 page)

For its part, the majority of GMHC’s board was uncomfortable with Callen’s and Berkowitz’s determination to speak plainly about gay male promiscuity and the hazards of specific gay male sexual practices, regarding both as upstart radicals lacking the needed clout (and common sense) to court the white establishment. Though GMHC had refused Mike’s earlier request to help distribute copies of
How to Have Sex in an Epidemic
, its board did accept his suggestion for a local forum on “AIDS and Sexuality”—but then kicked him off the panel because, as Mike saw it, he “lacked the proper professional credentials” and was too controversial to boot.

Mike and Rich both made it to the Fifth National Lesbian and Gay Health Conference in Denver in June 1983, thanks to a wealthy donor with AIDS who paid their way. Once there, they caucused with others from around the country who were now insisting on being called
“People With AIDS” (PWAs)—
not
“patients” or “victims”—and together this group of about twenty drafted a manifesto that became known as the “Denver Principles.” At its heart was the feminist health movement’s credo that “there are no experts on peoples’ lives except those people themselves.”—which Mike would later come to see as an overstatement. According to him, they “stormed” (Mike’s word) the closing session of the conference and asked the nearly four hundred delegates (mostly health care professionals) that PWAs henceforth be regarded as having the “right to control their lives, their healing and their own destinies.” According to one newspaper account, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, and the keynote speaker, Ginny Apuzzo, had to wait ten minutes before the audience was able to compose itself. The PWA self-empowerment movement had been born.
⁹

An ecstatic Mike and Rich returned to New York and, once back in the city, placed an ad in local gay papers calling for the formation of “a rabble-rousing group of PWAs”—this was a full four years before the formation of ACT UP, with a comparable goal. As a result of the ad, PWA–New York came into existence, though due to a combination of deaths and internal dissent, it soon transformed into the PWA Coalition (PWAC). From the start, the coalition’s mission was in line with the goal earlier laid out in the historic “Denver Principles”: PWAs were entitled to full explanations from the “experts” so that they could make “informed decisions” regarding
every
aspect of their own treatment. It wasn’t till 1987, when GMHC began putting
publicly
identified PWAs on its board of directors, that the two organizations would work together much more harmoniously.
¹⁰

Mike and his San Francisco ally Bobbi Campbell had disagreed about one matter during the intense discussions in Denver. Mike had urged the inclusion of the principle “People with AIDS have an ethical obligation to apprise potential partners of their health status.” Campbell believed that the foundational axiom of gay liberation had been the separation of love and sex: “Hey, if you’re here in this bath house, that’s your business. You want to suck my dick, that’s your business, and I don’t have to tell you anything that’s going on with me.” Besides, Campbell insisted, people in a bathhouse or in a jerk-off session typically don’t talk, and “it’s silly to say you have an obligation to wave your hand and say, ‘Hello, everybody, I have AIDS.’ ”

Mike argued that at the very least, one had the moral obligation to
be truthful about one’s health in a dating situation, where the possibility existed not only of sex but of some sort of future relationship. He didn’t press the matter in Denver, not wanting to jeopardize the PWA group’s unity, but he continued to feel strongly that while gay liberation
was
based on sexual freedom, it was also based on bonds of brotherhood, on emotional concern for and connection to one’s fellow gays—even during brief, “anonymous” sexual assignations. “Affection is our best protection” is how Mike phrased it on a 1984 poster, a phrase he would repeat in many speeches.

The debate about the separation of love and sex has a long history and was but one example of how AIDS came to represent a host of political issues and values that emerged from and yet transcended the disease itself. The very notion of self-empowerment was another. Many gay men—and particularly those more affluent white gay men who’d had no involvement with the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s—had often internalized deference to authority (including submission to the psychiatric view of homosexuality as “pathology”). Moreover, in a society that worshipped science, including medical research, some gay men had trouble believing they could or should play an active role in determining their own health.

According to Mike, many of the women involved in the AIDS movement “got it instantly”; they immediately understood that scientists made real contributions but weren’t the ultimate authorities. Starting in the 1960s, feminists had established the view that patients should be partners in any policies or decisions relating to their own health and that women being in control of their own bodies
was
a political issue. (Later on in the AIDS movement, many focused on getting “drugs into bodies,” buyers clubs proliferated, and with the formation of ACT UP in 1987, the Food and Drug Administration came under direct attack for failing to accelerate the research process.)

But Mike understood much earlier the underlying principle that people, especially the disenfranchised, had to become active on behalf of their health. After the Denver conference, he and Campbell spearheaded a self-empowerment movement that took the organizational form of PWA coalitions, culminating in the National Association of People with AIDS. Speakers went out to various venues, including colleges, to spread reliable information about how to
continue
to have sex, but to have it safely. The San Francisco AIDS Foundation headed
up the movement on the West Coast, and in New York Mike had the inspiration for PWAC to sponsor a new publication,
Newsline
, which became widely read and kept readers up-to-date on a myriad of developments. Mike became both
Newsline
’s editor and the president of PWAC. He understood that most gay men remained closeted, unaffiliated with any movement organizations, and therefore unlikely to be abreast of the latest information. To reach them, he saw to it that
Newsline
was surreptitiously photocopied after hours in an unsuspecting law office and left anonymously in a wide variety of bars and public places.

As the issue of whether or not to close down the gay bathhouses started to heat up in 1984, Mike agreed to become a member of the Safer Sex Committee chaired by Dr. Roger Enlow, director of the New York City Office of Gay and Lesbian Health Concerns. Mike thought Enlow self-important and defensive but felt the committee might itself prove influential. The controversy over the baths flared first in San Francisco, then in New York. On the West Coast, public demonstrations against closure (one protester carried a sign that read “Today the Tubs, Tomorrow Your Bedroom”) failed to stop the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s decision in October 1984 to close down the city’s bathhouses.

To prepare himself for the debate in New York, Mike decided to give himself a tour of the bathhouse scene, marking the first time in two and a half years that he’d entered one. At his first stop, the Club Baths, he saw no one having unsafe sex but noted that its bulletin board had no risk-reduction information on it, even though by that point GMHC and the Safer Sex Committee had produced and distributed posters and brochures to dozens of establishments. He also noted that most of the customers were black or Hispanic and reminded himself that the Coalition’s materials needed to be translated into Spanish.
¹¹

The East Side Sauna was his next stop. He had a West Villager’s “chauvinistic disdain for anything even vaguely ‘Upper East Side,’ ” but he did his “totally demoralizing” duty. The sauna was packed, but he saw none of the spontaneity and abandon that had previously characterized the bathhouse/back-room bar scene. A way of life was over. The expressions on the patrons’ faces reminded him of “the endless
Life
magazine photos of children of war.” An image stuck with him “of little boys lost—each wandering around aimlessly . . . holding on to his penis for what small comfort might be left in this hostile, frightening world.” Once again he found a bulletin board with various announcements tacked to it—gay Front Runners, tickets to an Alvin Ailey concert, and so on—but once again nothing at all relating to precautionary measures in regard to AIDS. And this time he did see some unsafe sex—men fucking other men without condoms.

A similar scene awaited him at Everard’s, the oldest and best known of the city’s gay bathhouses. It was filthy and Mike could smell mildew and mold everywhere. “The management” had put up a number of signs: “No Drugs”; “We Reserve the Right to Refuse Admission to Anyone”—even one that urged the patrons to “Shower Between Contacts.” But nothing at all was posted about AIDS and safe sex.

After his grim tour of the bathhouses, which had proven utterly lacking in AIDS or safe-sex information, Mike launched into the debate about the pros and cons of closing the bathhouses. He understood the civil liberties issues involved and disliked the notion of authorities of any kind dictating permissible individual behavior. He also recognized that the bathhouses, ideally at least, represented a place where a cross section of individuals could meet: “I don’t want to make too much of the democracy of gay life,” he wrote in notes to himself, but where else but in a gay bathhouse “could you find a Park Avenue doctor and a Puerto Rican delivery boy, stripped of all outward appearances of social rank, naked in mutual need.” He knew, too, that the baths were among the few places where closeted or married men would allow themselves to go.

Mike had also long advocated lots of sex as a necessary antidote to society’s erotophobia. He stood by the view that “bathhouses potentially promote healthy abandon”—but “potentially” was of course the sticking point. If the baths promoted disease as well as abandon and barred safer-sex information on the premises, weren’t they then a liability? Abandon could be achieved elsewhere. Then again, it was also true that it was safer—in terms of violence, not disease—to have sex in an indoor bathhouse than, say, in an outdoor parking lot prey to violence-prone homophobes.

Mike insisted that in the original 1982 article he’d written with Berkowitz (”We Know Who We Are”), they’d “never suggested closing
down the baths”—as their critics had claimed; rather, they were the first to warn about the threat of the government doing so. “Ultimately,” they’d written, “it may be more important to let people die in the pursuit of their own happiness than to limit personal freedom by regulating risk.” But that was in 1982. Mike’s recent tour of the bathhouses apparently led him to shift the balance and come down on the side of closure. “These men are too nice to die,” he now decided. The few patrons he’d talked to directly during his tour did
not
seem well informed about how AIDS might be transmitted or about how to protect themselves and their partners. And the bathhouse owners were obviously not going out of their way to enlighten them; they were, predictably, far more concerned with maintaining their margin of profit than with the health of their clients.

Throughout the 1970s, Mike had believed that having lots of sex was the equivalent of being a soldier in the sexual revolution. And he continued to believe that partaking of sexual abundance was far preferable to the alternatives of monogamy or abstinence. He knew, too, that closing the bathhouses was unlikely to make more than a slight dent in the spread of the epidemic, since alternate venues were no safer. Besides, in 1984 it was commonly believed—a notion pushed by GMHC—that AIDS was
not
a gay disease. IV drug users, hemophiliacs, heterosexual women, and children were among those already known to be infected, and many activists insisted that it could only be guessed how the disease might be distributed in the future. Mike was not among them. He remembered “cringing when I heard the executive director of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis compare AIDS to a steaming locomotive roaring down the tracks” toward the general, that is heterosexual, population. As a tactic for prompting a more active response from federal research institutions and increasing support and sympathy from the public—who’d shown indifference to a disease confined to gay men and drug users—depicting the epidemic as an equal threat to heterosexual people can be considered a somewhat successful political ploy, but the depiction was an inaccurate one for the United States and Europe.

Sonnabend was particularly incensed by the argument that AIDS would soon spread widely into the heterosexual world. He and Dr. Mathilde Krim (who was married to Arthur Krim, a leading Democratic fund-raiser and head of Orion Pictures) had been colleagues in
interferon-related research in the 1960s. In April 1983, Sonnabend and Krim co-founded the nonprofit AIDS Medical Foundation (amfAR) to raise private funds for research, and hired Mike and Rich to advance safe-sex education. They were grateful for the opportunity, having been turned down repeatedly for grant proposals, often, according to Berkowitz, “by panels that included GMHC board members who sat on funding committees.”

Berkowitz further claims that after Krim hired them, two GMHC board members threatened that “they would turn the community against her unless she got rid of Sonnabend, Callen and Berkowitz.” As a compromise, she held on to Sonnabend but let Rich and Mike go. Rich spent the next year (until the end of 1985) reporting weekly on AIDS and safe-sex-related issues for Lou Maletta’s cable TV show. But Maletta couldn’t afford to pay him, and Rich decided to accept an invitation from a former client to move into his oceanfront apartment in Miami Beach; he continued to do safe-sex education at South Florida bathhouses and bookstores, but returned to New York City and to hustling in 1986. As for Sonnabend, his history with Mathilde Krim would be marked by alternating cycles of friendly cooperation and angry disaffection. This was especially true in the mid-1980s, when Joe became incensed at the continuing insistence of some amfAR representatives that the epidemic would soon engulf the heterosexual world.