Hold Tight Gently (35 page)

Grant’s accusations were unfounded, but that didn’t prevent them from deeply wounding Mike. If Grant had been his only critic, he might have sloughed off the charges as the drivel they were. But he’d been in an on-again, off-again struggle with some of the individuals and policies of GMHC and ACT UP as well. Mike fully acknowledged that both organizations “did very good, important work,” but he felt that GMHC particularly was based on hierarchical, patriarchal organizational models of which he disapproved. It was different with ACT UP. Many of its members would have self-described as anarchists—that is, anti-authority, and especially the authority of church and state—but Mike felt that everybody in ACT UP “knew that there was an elite—that nothing could get passed without [the approval of] the T&D (Treatment and Data), the Mark Harringtons and the Peter Staleys” (probably the T&D’s two best-known members).

Considerable deference toward members of T&D did exist within ACT UP, though some excused it as the result of the hard work its members had invested in mastering the science relating to AIDS, and the respect that mastery had earned among professional researchers. At the same time, the occasional arrogance and condescension with which some T&D members treated other members of ACT UP with less knowledge and less access to the powers that be also played a role in creating resentment against them. But at no time, contrary to Mike’s indictment, did the T&D Committee fully control ACT UP’s agenda or dictate its policies.

Mike’s overemphatic criticism of T&D had long been fueled by its periodic patronization of both Sonnabend the individual and CRI the organization. In Mike’s view, “ANY serious critique of the problems of basic AIDS science inevitably spring from Joe’s views and his writings”—for example, his 1988 article “Fact and Speculation.” Mike felt that Sonnabend’s work had been cannibalized without proper attribution—that he was often condescended to as a mere clinician, as someone not involved in basic research.

Mike also felt that ACT UP played a central role in trying to destroy CRI’s credibility. It had, for example, criticized CRI as “racially and sexually biased,” whereas in fact by 1989–90 it had enrolled more women and people of color than all AIDS Clinical Trials Group (government testing) sites in Manhattan combined. When advised, moreover, that CRI would do well to have a prominent member of ACT
UP serve on its board, Mike “sniffed around and found out who the most famous, most respected ACT UP member was” and “manipulated” to get him—Mike never publicly named him—on the CRI board. So what happened? According to Mike the new member “came late to every meeting and left early. He abstained from every vote.” What he
did
do was arrive at one meeting “with a 10-page letter from ACT UP reaming CRI for this failure and that failure.” When he started to read the letter aloud at a board meeting, Mike stood up and stopped him cold: “No, I will not have this. Not after three years of blood and guts. Not after what I did to get you on this board!”

As Mike himself said, “AIDS activism can be a brutal business. . . . We have not learned how to disagree without being disagreeable to each other. . . . Anger cannot sustain activism over time.” He decided that for at least the time being, he’d had enough of the accumulated accusations and stepped down as CRI’s president. He freely acknowledged that “very real failings,” and in particular his own energetic perfectionism, warranted criticism—but not Lou Grant’s “venomous, mean-spirited” ones, nor what he saw as ACT UP’s spurious ones. It might have helped Mike to know that internecine conflict, sometimes bordering on warfare, has characterized almost all movements and organizations designed to produce social change. At one low point, as founder and director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS), I remember sharing my hurt feelings with Tim Sweeney, who’s headed several major LGBT organizations. Tim had come by to talk about the “leadership project” he’d taken on for the Rapoport Foundation. We bounced war stories off of each other, sharing the puzzlement and pain that (so Tim reported) every director of every LGBT organization feels—where mistakes become cosmic crimes and no good deed goes unpunished.

Mike was “weary of crisis management”—his own and CRI’s. He seems to have been hurt most by Lou Grant’s charge that he’d used funds earmarked for minorities for some other purpose entirely—the implication being that Mike was a racist and even a thief. Yet there isn’t a scintilla of evidence to support such a claim. Of the people then enrolled in CRI trials, 25 percent were people of color—much higher than was typical, though still only halfway toward Mike’s stated goal of “making the demographics of CRI trials reflect the demographics
of AIDS in NYC.” As he wrote to the board, “I for one will not rest until people of color are equitably represented in CRI trials.”

At one point in Grant’s correspondence with Mike, he emphasized that CRI’s “fiduciary responsibility” should not be compromised by any person’s desire “to restructure this capitalist system or destroy it.” He added that it was important to separate “utopian dreams [i.e., Mike’s] from the needs of an organization that has to thrive and survive in the real world.” In other words, Mike’s left-wing views were being held responsible, at least in part, for CRI’s financial problems. The indictment had little merit overall, but Grant’s specific complaints did have some: the recent choice of an administrative director was to prove unwise and the amount of long-range financial planning being done at CRI was insufficient.

The turmoil within CRI continued for the better part of a year. Grant soon turned his fire on the fact that the board over time had had “three chairpersons (all white men—the usual unconscious and costly, but nonetheless vicious and stupid racism/sexism), none of whom took hold of the meeting and provided needed direction.” On top of that, Grant accused Drs. Sonnabend and Bihari of using up board time to share technical medical information better exchanged elsewhere. As well, he continued to criticize Mike as sometimes being “very willful”—which he could be—of showing “great strength” as a leader but not leaving enough room for others “to express their own leadership,” and of acting the victim, “the wounded butterfly.” Grant attributed the latter to Mike’s need as a performer for constant “affirmation and approval.” From there, the charges degenerated further. By the end of the year Grant was calling Mike and his supporters “sick egos” who “don’t know what the fuck you’re doing.”

There was also considerable grumbling about CRI’s response to supplying Compound Q, the latest in a long series of purported miracle cures. The board of directors voted unanimously to collect data on the substance, though several members expressed concern that CRI might be liable for damages if the organization appeared to be encouraging the compound’s use. Mike was very clear that CRI could not even indirectly encourage people to take a substance of “unknown risks and unknown benefits.” If community physicians were willing to monitor those individuals who decided to run the risk and take Compound
Q, then it would be proper for CRI to collect and analyze data about the substance. Mike sided with board member Dr. Bernie Bihari, who warned that there was good reason to believe that Compound Q “makes infected macrophages burst,” which could lead to swelling of the brain, pancreatitis, and intestinal bleeding. But given the desperation that many in the gay community felt, still more antagonism toward CRI followed for its “cowardice” in refusing to take on Compound Q.
¹³

Late in 1989, Sonnabend privately wrote, “I now worry that the idea of CRI is more romantic than practical. Self-empowerment without professionalism cannot work, at least on technical matters such as designing and constructing clinical trials.” CRI would rebound in 1990 and also experience an uptake in revenues. But the following year, it would merge into the AIDS Community Research Initiative of America, a group that would continue to emphasize the importance of empowering PWAs.

CRI’s parent organization, PWAC, was itself having financial trouble. PWAC had expanded its programs to include support groups for mothers of PWAs, Spanish-speaking PWAs, women, and people of color. It had also established a drop-in center (“the Living Room”), which served meals three days a week, ran a hotline, held public forums, and published
Newsline
monthly (with a Spanish-language edition in the works). Unfortunately, as PWAC’s good works expanded, its income receded. One of its main benefactors had been amfAR, co-chaired by Mathilde Krim; the independent organization dispensed money for research to a number of both university-and community-based projects. Krim had herself been arguing for some time that the standard double-blind placebo trial was “an insult to morality,” and she had also defended community-based trials against those critics who’d questioned whether local physicians had sufficient knowledge of sophisticated lab techniques.

She and Mike not only shared views on such matters but had become somewhat friendly. AmfAR had funded several of CRI’s trials, but in 1989 it rejected the organization’s proposals five consecutive times—even though Mike had been led to believe that they stood a good chance of being funded. Mike thought the reasons given for the rejections were “insulting” and he complained about it to Krim. She
expressed her embarrassment and vowed to make changes at amfAR. Yet when CRI submitted an
emergency
request to amfAR for $50,000 to partially fund the salary of a medical director, months passed without word, and when it did come the award was reduced, without explanation, to $30,000 and CRI was told that the money could
not
be used for the requested purpose.
¹⁴

An angry Mike wrote Mathilde a long, blistering letter in which he spelled out his “contempt” for amfAR, even as he tried to exonerate her personally for what he considered its failings (“Mathilde, I have never been able to express the depth of my admiration for you. That someone not immediately, personally threatened by AIDS should be so tireless on our behalf makes me weep sometimes”). But he felt he had to tell her that amfAR had become a “den of thieves.” The problem, as he saw it, was that she’d set out to create a foundation to fund AIDS research that the federal government had failed to do but, “in an attempt to legitimize” amfAR, had invited in “the very scientists and establishment types responsible for the deadly delays at the federal level.”

The result, according to Mike, was that “amfAR has lost whatever fire in its belly it ever had.” He claimed that the staff at amfAR had pretty much circumvented her, that the organization had become “a sewer of self-interested scoundrels for whom AIDS is low on the agenda,” that a West Coast/East Coast competition for funds had developed without her knowledge, and that each successive director of amfAR—and Mike named them, calling each either a “disaster” or an “asshole”—had made matters worse.

I can’t pretend fully to assess the accuracy of Mike’s claims: no detailed history of amfAR exists, and no response to his letter from Mathilde Krim has turned up in my research. But Abby Tallmer, then an employee of amfAR, confirms most of Mike’s indictment and adds as well that at that point in time, there was “low employee morale.” Two additional things can be said with reasonable certainty: Mike
was
a truth teller and, judging from his record as a whole, he wasn’t one of those activist-warriors who sometimes confuse advancing an agenda with building up their own reputations.

When
Time
magazine, for example, featured a photo of Mike along with its article “Longer Life for AIDS Patients,” instead of glorying in his prominence, he wrote a furious letter to the editor denouncing the
contents of the piece. It had contained a number of odious comments, including “New drugs are giving hope but also raising difficult questions”—namely, that the “staggering” bill for medical care would only “postpone by a few years the eventual calamity of early death,” and—the most offensive single remark to Mike—“many of the lives being lengthened are either dangerous to others or sexually isolated and childless.” Dangerous to others? The implication was that predatory gay sociopaths with AIDS were stalking unsuspecting and innocent people. As for the article’s closing phrase, Mike was succinct: “being dead is a worse fate than being ‘isolated and childless.’ ”

The angry tone Mike took with Krim may have partly been a function of the periodic physical exhaustion that accompanies serious illness, and Mike’s growing sense “that AIDS is closing in on me.” He was now getting KS lesions at the rate of one a month and could “literally feel my body rotting. Political games I might have been willing to play a year ago are simply no longer tolerable.” Simultaneously, he was beset by a crisis at PWAC. He’d stepped down as president of PWAC in order to concentrate on editing
Newsline
and attending to the rest of his activities and commitments and by the summer of 1989 had pretty much “stopped trying to figure out what is
really
going on” with the organization as a whole.

But his editing of
Newsline
soon became an issue in itself. Mike received a hand-delivered letter from PWAC’s current executive director announcing that henceforth he’d be expected to submit each issue of
Newsline
to a board committee for approval. The reason given was that Mike was no longer a “full time, fully committed Coalition staff member.” That was a cruel, deeply hurtful description of the fact that Mike, due to health issues, had of necessity been spending more time than usual out of the
Newsline
office, and failed to give even a token nod to the central role he’d played in PWAC up to that point. Besides, the notion of a committee passing on the contents of every issue of
Newsline
in Mike’s mind would “hopelessly delay timely publication and would lead to censorship.” In the face of such a blinding lack of appreciation, let alone understanding, of his multiple activities on behalf of AIDS education and research, Mike simply threw up his hands and—after four and a half years of presiding over PWAC’s publications—submitted his resignation.