Authors: Martin Duberman
“Because of my sexuality,” Riggs wrote, “I cannot be Black. A strong, proud, ‘Afrocentric’ Black man is resolutely heterosexual, not
even
bisexual. Hence I remain a Negro.” “Contemporary proponents of Black macho,” Riggs added, converge with white supremacists “in their cultural practice, deploying similar devices towards similarly dehumanizing ends.” He offered the comedy routines of Eddie Murphy as an example. Murphy unites “Negro Faggotry, ‘Herpes Simplex 10’—and AIDS—into an indivisible modern icon of sexual terrorism. Rap artists and music videos resonate with this same perception, fomenting a social psychology that blames the
victim
for his degradation and death.” Riggs, like Essex, rejected an essentialist vision of race,
including the nationalist version that argued a historical (before the arrival of whites) narrative featuring strong, noble African men. “And women—were women. Nobody was lesbian. Nobody was feminist. Nobody was gay.”
Essex wrote Barbara Smith that despite all the hard work and travel on behalf of
Brother to Brother
, his health was “good and stable” and he’d put on eight pounds. He added that in the coming year he’d have to make more money somehow or “find myself returning to the work environment.” In a separate letter co-signed by Dorothy Beam, the pair warmly thanked Barbara for her multiple efforts on the book’s behalf: “The historical moment will show that concerned individuals such as yourself and others were there in the way communities are supposed to be there for one another.”
T
he situation for black gay men and lesbians wasn’t notably different in New York City than in Washington, D.C. Black and Hispanic elected officials offered little leadership on the issue of AIDS, and although three new organizations—the Hispanic AIDS Forum, the Minority Task Force, and the Association for the Prevention and Treatment of Drug Abuse—had been formed in the eighties, none had gotten widespread community support or sufficient funding. The established media were also of little help. On the first page of its Metropolitan section, the
New York Times
published an article (“Homosexuals Detect New Signs of Friendliness Amid Bias”) in the late eighties that failed to make a single reference to the situation of black lesbians and gay men, thereby reinforcing the long-standing invisibility of both. For good measure, the
Times
mentioned that antigay violence had been decreasing (i.e., “New Signs of Friendliness”)—a claim the New York Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project directly contradicted with figures that proved an
increase
in violence.
1
Nor did the
Times
bother to mention the numerous antigay comments increasingly emanating from the city’s white male leadership. In that regard, his eminence Cardinal O’Connor had long led the pack, denouncing homosexuality, as early as 1983, as “sinful and unnatural.” He thereafter regularly reaffirmed the Roman Catholic Church’s
insistence that same-gender love and lust were iniquitous. (Other churches, it should be added—and especially the Unitarians and Episcopalians—were more benevolent.) When for a short time (before reversing itself) the National Conference of Catholic Bishops decided to allow condom use for the limited purpose of avoiding HIV, Cardinal O’Connor thunderously opposed the decision and helped to overturn it, even as he continued to denounce any form of safe-sex education. For him, the solution to the crisis was simple:
abstinence
. Though students in high schools went right on having sex and using drugs, O’Connor, denying reality, insisted on withholding from them the information and tools that might save their lives.
2
New York City mayor Ed Koch, a great friend of the Cardinal’s (they even published a book together,
His Eminence and Hizzoner
), did declare a “state of concern” about AIDS, but the mayor’s “concern” wasn’t great enough to warrant significant outlays of money to help fund education, treatment, or housing for homeless people with AIDS. When a candlelight vigil and a demonstration of protest both failed to budge the mayor, a group of angry GLAAD members formed the Lavender Hill Mob to stage “zaps” designed to disturb Koch’s equanimity. But Koch was nothing if not stubborn. Even after it became clear by the late eighties that drug addicts in the city had high rates of HIV infection due to shared needles, Koch refused—in direct opposition to the recommendations of his health commissioner, David Axelrod—to allow needle exchange.
When I spoke at the unveiling of Stonewall Place in Sheridan Square in June 1989, Koch was the other speaker. Preceding me, he read the official proclamation aloud. Even though I was standing next to him I was unable to hear a word he said—thanks to the large crowd of some five hundred intense young demonstrators shouting their disgust at his complacency and jabbing the sky with their “Koch Is Killing Us!” signs in the shape of tombstones. Hizzoner’s smug, fixed grin never left his face, but he was smart enough to leave the platform the moment he finished reading the proclamation. I then extemporized my own opening line—“I take no pleasure in sharing a platform with Ed Koch”—to gratifyingly clamorous applause.
3
I assumed the crowd—young, intense, engaged—consisted mostly of ACT UP members. Certainly they’d pilloried Koch before, and would again; he, in turn, referred to them publicly as “fascists.” Fascists they
were not. But they were, by design, tactically neither respectful nor “respectable”—to the disgust of the more conservative members of the gay community. ACT UP was designed to replace normative channels for change (electioneering, lobbying, petitioning) with disruptive, direct-action street demonstrations commensurate with mounting gay desperation at the ever-climbing number of AIDS cases and the deaths of many young people in their prime. As ACT UP’s ranks swelled in the late eighties, it carried out a series of public protests that galvanized the media, gave hope to those with AIDS, and roused the retaliatory scorn of the stand-patters. And it did so with theatrical panache. It plastered the city with provocative posters and daringly designed materials from one of the dozen or so ACT UP affinity groups, Gran Fury, a bunch of professional artists who volunteered their services (they even managed to sneak their famous parody of the
New York Times
—which they called
New York Crimes
—into hundreds of newspaper vending machines).
4
No direct-action event better exemplified ACT UP’s growing impact than its 1988 demonstration in front of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in suburban Washington, D.C. The demonstrators had prepared well. ACT UP’s Treatment and Data Committee had prepared a forty-page pamphlet,
FDA Action Handbook
, and had also held a series of teach-ins to guarantee that the demonstrators were well informed about current research issues. A savvy media campaign also preceded the action, ensuring that it would be well covered. The action itself centered on well-thought-out demands, primarily that the drug-approval process be shortened, that the “unethical” practice of double-blind placebo trials be ended, that people “from all affected populations at all stages of HIV infection” be henceforth included in clinical trials, and that Medicaid and private health insurance companies “be made to pay for experimental drug therapies.”
5
The civil disobedience action at FDA headquarters was determined, prolonged, and raucous. A variety of costumes, props, T-shirts, and posters was employed—“We Die, They Do Nothing”; “The Government Has Blood on Its Hands”; “One AIDS Death Every Half Hour.” The D.C. police, wearing masks, rubber gloves, and riot gear, some on horseback, reacted with brutality and arrested nearly two hundred of the activists. But much of the police action was captured on film and aired on the TV news that night, which ensured the message
would be heard. In the year following the demonstration, officials at the FDA and the NIH began to include activists in their deliberations, and double-blind placebo trials were replaced by ACT UP’s suggestion of parallel tracks, whereby different doses of the same drug were given to all participants.
All that was to the good. But certain stark facts remained true: there was still no reliable treatment for AIDS, let alone a cure; no one was willing to predict when efficacious drugs might emerge from a seemingly empty pipeline; no one was quite sure which sexual activities, if any, were truly “safe.” Did kissing, fellatio, and cunnilingus qualify? What about condoms? Were they usually safe or did they tear or leak with some regularity? Were some condoms better than others in providing protection? Was it true that the partner on “top” during anal sex was much safer than the “bottom”—and if so, just how much safer? It’s no wonder that in unknown numbers, some gay men were choosing celibacy or monogamy, though often neither suited their temperaments or their sense of what “gay liberation” actually meant.
Consuming worry over such questions seemed to the gay writer Darrell Yates Rist obsessional. To the astonishment of many—since Rist was himself HIV-positive—he published an article in
The Nation
early in 1989 denouncing ACT UP, and by implication all AIDS activism, as “fashionable hysteria” and, further, theorized that such “keening” reflected a “compulsive . . . need to partake in the drama of catastrophe” (apparently akin, in his mind, to the gay male worship of diva tragedians like Judy Garland). Rist’s article struck many as a shockingly misguided piece of invective. I was one of those who responded in
The Nation,
writing that “the legions of the young in ACT UP who’ve stationed themselves on the front lines deserve something better than being characterized [as Rist had] as ‘clones’ and ‘chic street protesters.’ ” Rist had further denounced the ACT UP demonstrators as “immoral because they are panic-mongering”—which was tantamount to saying that no one need fear dying of AIDS, that profound fear (“panic”) was illegitimate. Nor did Rist even once in his article implicate governmental apathy or the straight world’s general indifference as causal factors that had
necessitated
the formation of ACT UP and its nervily audacious actions.
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Rist and those who thought like him were unable to stop or slow ACT UP/New York’s momentum. Its dramatic series of protests continued:
demonstrations on Wall Street, at Trinity Church, and in Grand Central Station; an action against the Burroughs Wellcome drug company that led to a reduction in the cost of AZT; a four-day-long picketing of Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; several angry zaps of Mayor Koch—and a host of others. All were theatrical, imaginative, shocking to many (including conservative gay men), and usually consequential. For sheer drama, as well as subsequent wrath, none exceeded the demonstration (co-sponsored with WHAM!—the feminist Women’s Health Action Mobilization)—at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in December 1989. That action would mark a critical divide in the organization’s history and produce an outraged response from both the general public and a considerable segment of the gay community.
Certainly St. Patrick’s, in the person of its representative figure, John Cardinal O’Connor, had, through its poisonous denunciations, more than earned the enmity of gay activists. From a free speech perspective, O’Connor had every right to deplore safe-sex education, clean needles, condom use, and abortion. But his ignorance-is-bliss campaigns of disinformation literally threatened the lives of many New Yorkers, including members of his sexually active parish. O’Connor also vigorously opposed the repeal of antigay discriminatory laws, was vehemently antichoice, and successfully urged the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to oppose all needle exchange programs. “The truth is not in condoms or clean needles,” O’Connor claimed. “These are lies—lies perpetuated often for political reasons on the part of public health officials.”
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O’Connor even outdid his predecessors when he banned the gay Catholic group Dignity from holding meetings in any Catholic church. When members of the group held silent protests against the ban in St. Patrick’s, O’Connor got an injunction to clear them out. Further, he actively supported the activities of Operation Rescue in its terrorist campaign against abortion and family planning clinics. His position ran directly counter to ACT UP’s prochoice stance, along with its struggle to end the policy of women being routinely excluded from AIDS trials because of their “reproductive capacities”—that is, the potential damage to fetuses. When the Supreme Court in 1989 issued its
Webster v. Reproductive Health Services
opinion, which gave the states more power to restrict access to abortion, WHAM! and ACT UP joined forces in demonstrations to “Stop the Church.”
The special venom of O’Connor’s invective against gay people made life still more difficult for them, more filled with the guilt and shame that socially induced homophobia had already bred into them. O’Connor’s voluble hatred and distortions of the truth ran counter to a true Christian’s allegiance to love and to alleviate suffering. He’d hurled down the thunderbolts of “sin” and “sickness” for so long and with such vehemence that it was all but inevitable that the time would come when they’d be hurled back.
On December 10, 1989, a dozen or so members of ACT UP/New York scattered in the pews of St. Patrick’s, while about a thousand demonstrated outside the cathedral. When the signal was given in the midst of the cardinal’s sermon, various ACT UP members threw their bodies into the aisles in a “die-in” act of civil disobedience and hurled condoms into the air, while others chained themselves to the pews and shouted “Your works are killing us!” at O’Connor. One former altar boy deliberately dropped a consecrated communion wafer on the floor—thereby giving the “pious” press a focal point for howling denunciations of so “sacrilegious” an act. Mayor Koch, Mayor-elect David Dinkins, and New York Governor Mario Cuomo all deplored the scandalous excess of invading “sacred” space. The police dragged the protesters into the street and arrested more than one hundred of them (the few who’d been inside the church, plus many outside). Within gay circles, a number of leading spokespeople, including journalists Randy Shilts and Andrew Sullivan, deplored ACT UP’s “adolescent” tactics as “discrediting” the community. “Good gays,” apparently, did not engage in militantly confrontational behavior—that was reserved for cardinals and mayors.