Personnel and Bulletins from Zones of Dread
“The scarlet stains upon the body, and especially upon the face of the victim were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow man.”
—Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death
“They go at it, darling, nec spe, mec metu.”
—anonymous professor on the phone to a colleague, at dawn,
following a night in the trucks
Wherein a present is wedged between an absent future and an absent past.
A time of inquisitions, of censorship, spying, torn loyalty, anonymous denunciations, secret betrayals, Judases and nocturnal arrests.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man. So, with the dead-eye showmanship, right in sync with the rise out of the linoleum-floor, folding-chair, ratty-old-couch nightclub culture of late-’70s Downtown, of Performance Art: one-man shows, where the instant luminary, Ron Vawter, plays Roy Cohn and Jack Smith with an incorruptible clarity of intention, and the job, instead of acting (as Stella Adler or Lee Strasberg or Uta Hagen or Sanford Meisner of the Neighborhood Playhouse employed the term), is the even-more-exhausting ordeal of constantly maintaining one’s personality. . . .
Enter, screaming, Larry Kramer (does not care to play, well or not so, with others), who would perhaps even today (although you wouldn’t know) wish to be remembered as the dark-cramped-venue Lenny Bruce of AIDS—persecuted, driven to the vertiginous Edge of Doom—but whose histrionics actually made him into—and he should complain?—its Jackie Mason, the rebbe as licensed fool and Broadway legend. Ridi, Pagliaccio, ch’il cuore ti frangi. Laugh, clown, laugh. Smile, though your normal heart is breaking, and if it turns out you have no normal heart to break, you can always put that award where your normal heart ought to be.
In his normal heart, of course, Larry regretted his audiences’ discomfort—it ran quite contrary to the feelings he would have wished for them in other, less apocalyptic circumstances. But that too is Shoah Business, and who shall ’scape whipping?
“I’ll say it: letting that madman hold the rostrum is peculation of public funds!”
“. . . it is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume they have no counterparts.”
—John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy
Unhappily, it is also the less than pardonable (even when completely understood) hubris of the very lonely in combat situations to adopt the methods and style of the enemy not only in order to confound him, but in order to turn him on one’s putative allies. Douglas MacArthur, the last Shogun of Japan, is an example; he managed not only to very nearly break the spirit of an admittedly appallingly cruel conquered enemy, but to kamikaze his own career in a dirty kick-box confrontation with President Harry S. Truman, and in retirement to torment his queer son to death by suicide.
Larry Kramer, of course, has had no suicidal offspring, not exactly. No single memorable mot has ever been heard coming out of this motormouth in overdrive, yet it is demonstrably true that the mouth’s gale force wind has blown down many a pathetic little political straw house and blown apart the pathetic little straw men inside, and this is neither cream cheese nor chopped liver but a nearly Ciceronian rhetorical achievement.
All the same, to whose benefit—cui bono—his critics demanded, familiar as they were only with the most straightforward non-subjunctive concepts of edification and alarmed too that the guns in Larry’s wars of religion all too often seemed to them pointed in the wrong direction.
“Larry fumes, but fortunately there is no hatred in him—or not much and not very dangerous. About a man in Larry’s position, there are always certain misunderstandings.”
“That silence equals death in every instance is far from certain. What is certain is that death equals silence—a thing in many instances, darling, devoutly to be wished.”
“Unsay that, wicked woman!”
Yet what they could not manage to agree on among themselves was, Which wrong direction? Against any and all platform rivals, ostensibly fighting for the same cause, in the assumed manner of Act Up against global capitalism and Big Pharma as such, which the more politically suave (lobbies, access, all that) understood were in the end the only channels available for any success at all in their enterprise. (After all, didn’t Mother Teresa sit down to dinner with despots and world swine to accomplish her ends?—who, of course, many believed was as much concerned with seeing herself, if only from heaven, played by some contemporary equivalent of Ingrid Bergman or Audrey Hepburn or even Sally Field, or, perhaps more seriously, Linda Hunt—little realizing that in contemporary Hollywood the role might well be snapped up by Whoopi Goldberg or Robin Williams, no shit.)
Who would Larry see in the role of Larry? But we digress, they said to themselves. “Digress! Digress!” Larry shot back. “I give you full permission!” Well, they could go in a couple of different directions, depending on the concept thrust. Robert Redford. Dustin Hoffman. Kevin Costner . . .
Then again the young, reared for the most part either in strict lower-middle-class Christian homes (and abstracting for the moment their likely expulsions therefrom) or in itinerant come-as-you-are-and-stay-that-way trailer camps, geared to regard all displays of temperament as modalities of instruction and/or outpourings of lovelorn sentiment rather than as a confounding and chemically unstable compound of Jeremiad wrath and Catskills stand-up comedy . . . did not think him at all appropriate.
You’re supposed to wash the mah-jongg pieces before every session.
More sympathetic commentators opined that by the time AIDS hit, Larry, having been, like Mildred Pierce, far too trusting, for far too long, had become both the logophilic (as long as it’s just logophilic) equivalent of a dark-adapted eye and a hardened woman.
The relationship between Larry Kramer’s histrionics and balloon art has not been fully appreciated.
“I’m afraid you are all missing the point. In Larry’s view, in order to combat Falwell and the Christian right, what is needed is an equal and opposite hysteria. Larry is not afraid to make himself appear—or indeed to become—ridiculous. The only question is, is there underneath all of it an equal and not at all opposite overwhelming drive, that of self-promotion. Falwell and Robertson and all that ilk don’t give a wet shit about faith, morals or any kind of decision; they are demagogues pure and simple—only they are filthy and worldly. I cling to the belief that Larry is in the last analysis selfless.”
“Whatever meaning is credited in their final configurations, countless gestural touches could have been conceived by nobody in advance, even the artist.”
Edith Cavell declared you could do anything in the world, provided you didn’t mind who got the credit. Larry minded very much, as did every other AIDS-related commandant.
It isn’t just the generals, it’s everyone who carries a weapon.
Thought: Jeanne d’Arc was no demure little thing either, but rather a tough, headline-grabbing, self-immolating little number who had a job to do and did it, and it is not beyond the reach of the cultivated imagination, considering the perdurable Gallic vogue for American phenomena like the Marx Brothers, Jerry Lewis and Madonna, to foresee in the not too distant future a postmodern French deconstructionist treatise out of Nanterre entitled Le Mystère de la Charité de Larry Kramer.
And who could have predicted that such venting of rage and suffering persecution for justice’s sake over a bullhorn would in the last analysis make of Larry Kramer nothing less than the Gandhi of AIDS (with time yet, let there be light, for Satyagraha?). Nobody—but nobody.
All in all, however, in a development analogous to the development of Greek tragedy following Thespis’s bold egress from the chorus line, myriad performances sprang up in consequence of Larry Kramer’s shtick and that of other rival first-half turns. Yet the one thing Larry never did get, as he routinely barged his way center stage at the beginning of every reading, demonstration and vigil, was that closing the first half, not opening it, was the most desired slot in vaudeville.
By and by AIDS witness became remarkable for qualities less resembling revival meetings than group regression therapy (“Wait your turn please, and remember, no touching!”) staged as a unit-set strophic psychodrama, with two or more well-rehearsed actors playing terrible people reviling one another over their fundamental existential rottenness and revolting personal habits, while maintaining their personalities, hell-bent for leather and terrified of nothing so much as of Stella Adler’s swooping down the aisle and crying out, “You’re boring, darlings, boring!” The hallmark: the domino-row collapse of the collective immune system.
“There’s a lot of it going around this year, darling; death.”
—Diane DeVors
It is not correct existentially to speak of one-time infection (no matter how convenient it became in the next decade for such dramatic purposes as Jonathan Demme’s laudable Philadelphia), and the heartbreaking attempts of America’s then greatest living novelist, Harold Brodkey, to come to terms in print with his own impending death from AIDS. Massive repeated assault must be acknowledged. As with the brain sustaining insults flung by alcohol and other chemicals, we must understand the trauma of the whole human immune system as under siege, largely from the devastating effects of chemicals the human body had never before ingested. To invoke Charles Ludlam again, it is as if it were the voice, and each assault another Norma:
Galas: Bruna, how many Normas do I have?
Bruna (looking down her throat): Eighty-six.
Inevitably, the time arrives when there are simply no more Normas.
The last graffito scratched into the mirror of the Eighth Street BMT men’s toilet before it closed:
MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN!!!!
Cassandras—a representative roll call:
Randy Shilts
Darrell Yates Rist
Richard Voinovich
Mark D. Niedselkowski
Roger McFarlane
Lambda Legal Defense
Thousands of Heroic Lesbians
Dignity
Bernard Lynch (A gorgeous Irish priest. When cruised in Central Park he would stop, smile and say “I’m booked.” He meant, of course, by the Lord)
Richard Rouilard, editor-in-chief of the Advocate, 1990–1992, the exact two-year length of its relevance to queer politics
Andrew Holleran in his definitive work of non-fiction, Ground Zero
“There were countless guardian angels charging about upon diverse errands too, of course, but being unseen their actions need hardly be related.”
—Mary Lavin, “Chamois Gloves”
“Do what is asked of you, sister; no less, and no more. We don’t want any private enterprise in piety.”
—ibid.
“Must’ve been after, deah, ’cause she was draggin’ things a bit.”
—Mae West on Sarah Bernhardt in vaudeville
By the time Quentin Crisp (QC) got around to being a famous immigrant, he was more Martita Hunt than anything like Bernhardt, particularly Martita Hunt as rethought by Hermione Gingold in collaboration with Estelle Winwood—who, asked how it was she stole every scene she was ever in on stage or screen, replied “I play the play!” It was the Gingold lisp that finally put it over, in combination with the Winwood whimsey. “I must go out next week to Chicago and address the lesbians. I shall tell them to be happy.”
Kissed by some strange angel at the spectrum’s extreme violet end, Crisp managed to live in genteel SRO squalor (uncannily resembling that of the legion of character women on Midtown’s Sixth Avenue in the days when there was a living Broadway theater) in one of the few remaining boarding houses still operating in the East Village. He gave out essentially a less imaginative version of the line (“Perhaps you would care to have a look at some of my personal notices?”) plied by the Old Queer Fuck on the Park Bench, and managed to work exactly half—the latter half—of Gore Vidal’s program for something like happiness: “Never turn down a chance to have sex or to be on television.” Finally, however, his deeply, wildly self-abasing reactionary stances were to create in the general queer public exactly the response of one vocal operaphile in Little Italy to the later career of the defiantly perdurable Renata Scotto: “I skeeve on huh.”
“I Will Survive” and “I’m Gonna Live Forever” slow to dirge tempo, as if the dj were leaning on the needle. Disco dies. A mourner laments in form.
“Yes, dear, they’re going, the pack of them—going fast. Positively passing in music out of sight—and it isn’t disco music either, it’s ‘Where E’er You Walk,’ dear, sung by the same darling lyric tenor, so it does seem, at memorial service after memorial service. Why, that sweet boy sings—so very beautifully—‘Where E’er You Walk’ more often to more people than Renata Scotto has ever sung ‘Send in the Clowns.’”
On the public response in the early days of the epidemic: the great smear of mortality across the picture, the dirty mark of pain and horror, found in few quarters a surface of spirit or speech consenting to reflect it.
So it had been as they’d been warned: a fool’s paradise. Warned by the bitter Old Guard in the darkened wrinkle rooms, who now spoke to the young, if they spoke to them at all, not boldly, but in simple statement form, sometimes philosophically, sometimes as if seeking personal exculpation, sometimes, though rarely, and then almost reflexively, in order to be liked or pitied, as if they were talking, as if for the first time, to heterosexuals.
For with the Great Liberation, they, the old, had abandoned their last hopes, even in the wan compassion of the mercy fuck—which having only heard tell of and never dispensed, these Olympic-class sexual athletes, the drugged young, imagined as inexplicable-if-not-handsomely-paid-for encounters between certain of their own, young, beautiful and naked and the old, senile and ugly, in which the former entwined with the latter in seeming delight.
They, locked into single expressions of single moods of what in all likelihood had once been mood-variant natures (nurtured by Mabel Mercer and Frances Faye), had returned almost listlessly to the ways of their youth (for as the young were dying in their droves, so failing supply had accompanied diminished demand), inwrought, obsessive, elliptical, desperate, to the circle jerk behind locked doors and to what remained of the tea-room scenes and of The Way of the Crosstown Bus. A fool’s paradise, from which the specified had been chased like a dangerous animal. What therefore had at present befallen was that the specified, standing all the while at the gate, had now crossed the threshold . . . and on such a scale as to fill out the whole precinct.
“Who gathers knowledge, darling, gathers tsouris. Ecclesiastes.”
The following a discussion with David McIntosh, in the garden he made at the Gay Center on West 13th Street:
“The likely truth is neither AIDS nor cancer nor any other disease is ever going to be absolutely eradicated allopathically, because, point-blank, once and for all, it is in the exact nature of allopathy to contain disease, not to eliminate it. Humanity did not eliminate wolves, lions, tigers, panthers, et cetera; they domesticated, worshiped and bred dogs and cats. Allopathy domesticates, worships and breeds disease. Now everybody go home—and pray.
“And you might while you’re at it learn a thing or two about herbs, and make a friend of a witch.”
Of course, I had made friends with a Witch, John Yohalem, who said:
“Wicca—which is a modern religion based on ceremonial magic and traditional folklore—was founded, theologically speaking, on the male-female duality as creative sacrament, and at thumbing one’s nose at prim British de-sexed religion, so the Witches were a bit uneasy with variant sexualities. Then, in this country, the feminists got hold of it, and lots of them were lez, so of course modifications had to be made. Still, conservative, by-the-Book Circles exist, as they would, in a religion with no official dogma beyond ‘An it harm none, do what thou will,’ and no corrective institutions to adjudge the innumerable feuds. If you didn’t like the folks in your coven, you went looking for another coven, or you ‘hived’ with new friends.
“Then along comes AIDS, and of course there were conservative witches who said, or, rather, intoned, ‘The Goddess is punishing Practices Against Nature.’ That was great fun, because everyone had a wonderful time trashing the old-fashioned types who had said it. Everyone felt real self-righteous, and pro-gay was part of the good feeling.
“Someone even rewrote the symbolic sacramental blessing, you know? ‘As the blade is to the male, so the cup is to the female, and conjoined, they bring blessedness’? Whereat the priestess (or priest) brings the knife into the cup held by the priest (or priestess)? It got rewritten, ‘As the blade is to the lover, so the cup is to the beloved.’ A more universal view, it was thought, of the old ‘in-out.’
“Everyone designed rituals around AIDS: Rituals for a Cure, rituals for understanding, rituals to send energy to distant Positives—Witches love to send magical healing energy, it is our favorite thing—rituals to zap coven members in travail, rituals to build T-helper cells (these might not have been a good idea, anti-virally speaking).
“I was introduced to Wicca Seattle in ’87 (after twenty-six years as a solitary Pagan, going to the opera when I needed magical ritual) by Laughing Otter, whom I met through the Radical Faeries; he introduced me to Leon, who was the teacher of Wicca in the Northwest. I did my year-and-a-day with Leon.
“Otter was sort of a gumball-spewing shaman, descended from Southern Baptist preachers and trained by Thundercloud, a Lakota in Leon’s coven. The epidemic, the talk of New York and the obsession of San Francisco, was still a glimmer on the horizon in the Northwest.
“Then Otter’s lover died of it. A year later he went to the desert to commune with its spirit, and when they brought him back to town, he couldn’t breathe. He had dreamed, out there, of a white lady—I knew exactly who that was, but somehow his hosts missed it. He lasted two weeks in Harborview—the ones the Goddess loves, she takes quick. (And in October, so they don’t have to hang around long before Samhain.)
“Everyone was frantic while he was in that damned ward: rituals, vigils, the huge local pagan community galvanized. One day I ran into Mary, Leon’s Maiden (later his Priestess), when she’d been sitting by Otter’s bedside, and she suddenly collapsed on me sobbing. She worked in an herbal store. ‘I’m supposed to be a healer, and these men come to me, and I can’t do anything for them! I’m a Witch, I’m supposed to be able to heal.’
“They really thought they could beat AIDS, by sending energy; it was a major theological crisis when they couldn’t. Not that allopathic medicine was helping much either, at that point. Scientists were as frantic as we were.
“We gave Otter a masquerade funeral. You never saw anything like it; bad taste was de rigueur. Junk food was served. I was very sedate in full leather. Tim came in gold lamé, and he’s dead. Stefan came as Morticia Addams (tiny steps in a black hobble skirt), and he’s dead. Leon’s Allan wore a leopard-skin bustier and falsies with alligator clips on the nipples; Purple Mark wore white, powdering his long hair and face. And Thundercloud led a Lakota mourning chant, wordless keening, high and lonesome, and suddenly it hurt us and we all let go—everything we were holding back, in our white-folks way, came barreling out of us. It was the moral equivalent of grand opera. TC was a wreck for months, but that’s what a shaman does—heals the tribe, not necessarily himself.
“As for the virus—the Witches were numb for a while, under the repeated blows, but life goes on. I started to make mandala talismans for friends who were positive; they meditate on them to zap the virus, which is part of the drawn pattern. Haven’t lost a patient yet. Wish I’d done one for Charles Ludlam.
“It’s all natural cycle, though, right—Nature, red in helper cell and pseudopodium? Aren’t viruses also children of the Goddess? Not that that makes them immune to anything. But as Black Lotus put it, ‘I am the Mother of All Things, and All Things should wear a sweater.’ Goes for condoms, too.”
Commentary—response to a letter:
Leaving intravenous drug users aside, the overwhelming percentage of the male sufferers of AIDS are routine practitioners of what is commonly known as passive-position anal intercourse, or what the Greeks, who always, only and forever envisaged such practitioners as adolescent boys, called catamites, after Ganymede, the boy beloved of God the Father, Zeus—or in plain talk, those of us who take it up the arse. And the establishment noise is we are compulsively so, and that as a consequence—of that and of the compulsive use of toxic substances ranging from amyl nitrate to horse tranquilizers and back, and added to same the disquieting gossip that we are what the Yiddish language calls oyshgetrett (fucked out)—we can’t even have this anal sex anymore without first getting stoked up and then chilling out by, for example, putting on headphones, getting ourselves slung into leather or stainless steel chain-link hammocks installed in filthy basements near the North River waterfront—see above: no more smooching on the porch swing under the June moon, you candidate for this depraved life, so forget lyrics like
‘I just adore the boy next door
I love him more that I can say’
and the Judy who sang them to you.
Plus which, smart Tops did not get AIDS maybe for the same reason smart fuckers didn’t get syphilis for centuries. It’s an age-old piece of wisdom, dispensed by Italian neighborhood doctors that after you fuck anything—man, woman, sheep or decapitated chicken—you first piss right away, clearing the channel, and piss into a glass which you then dunk your cock into. The end.
Urine is the best antiseptic there is—a fact known to peasant women for centuries, who bathe their children in it before rinsing them off in streams. (P. S. The right pocket yellow handkerchief might have had some salubrious effects after all, although even then being what’s known as an all-out Undinist didn’t cut it in the purification line—only the dunking the dong in the cup of your own piss.)
Easy enough if you believe the working HIV hypothesis. Well, I call this the Manichaean approach, and in Puritan America it is a shoo-in. The Devil Virus. But for those who believe that no retrovirus can by itself do all that with which it is credited, there is another, more lurid and complex scenario—right out of Plato and St. Augustine by way of Dante and the Marquis de Sade. It is even less pretty, but before I get to it, let me go back to my dream, because a lot of the time I know—from the letters—you’d rather be listening to dream songs than to reports of waking nightmares.
And I know why. The stuff that dreams are made on is more us. Also, my dreams will be different from your own—congruent in assertion, perhaps, but different in cut and line—whereas the reports of waking nightmare are all the same.
And yet there is still no falsifying evidence to contradict the central dogma of molecular biology: that information can pass from nucleic acid to nucleic acid, and from nucleic acid to protein, but not from protein to nucleic acid.
Take that onstage, darling, the next time somebody casts you as Lucky in Waiting for Godot. Meanwhile, be careful of what you write down and sign, lest, moving from nuclear biology back to high school chemistry, where we belong, it all blows up in your face.
And in conclusion, the first four questions, Who am I? Where do I come from? What do I want? Where am I going? have been answered. The time has come for the second four, Who is alive? Who is suffering? Who understands? Who investigates? Speak up.
NICE BOYS AND NEEDLES
Published in the New York Native,
Issue 74, October 10–23, 1983.
by Michael Shernoff, M.S.W.
Even “nice boys” do it—use needles to take their drugs, that is. It has become increasingly apparent to substance-abuse professionals that I.V. (or intravenous) drug use in the gay community is far more prevalent than has been generally appreciated. Indeed, needles—or “points,” as some know them, are seldom discussed at all, at least among the uninitiated. While it is hard to get a clear picture of the extent to which needles and drug use are connected in the gay community, certain instances come to mind.
• The infamous San Francisco baths, The Hothouse, which recently closed, used to have signs posted at the door indicating various forms of prohibited behavior: hustling, the selling of drugs, the playing of radios and shooting up. Local color, thought the naïve New York tourist.
• Another popular San Francisco sex club has a regular assignment for its morning shift to sweep up the sidewalks outside the club’s windows. It seems discarded hypodermic needles have been seen there too often.
• A friend described an experience at New York’s Everard Baths. Before getting down to business with someone he had just met, the fellow asked if my friend minded if he “got off first.” Not one to stop the party, my friend did not object, thinking that his momentary fuck buddy wanted to be the first to cum. Whereupon he was given a dextrous demonstration of the method one uses to tie off an arm with a belt and shoot up without assistance. More local color.
• On the Saint’s closing night last spring, I recognized a fellow traveler on the Pine/Saint circuit. He was at the sink in one of the men’s rooms with a syringe in his arm. As I stared, he nonchalantly moved to one of the nearby stalls, needle still in his arm. “He isn’t diabetic,” I thought.
• A friend who is a flight attendant for one of the major airlines recounted the following. He was working in first class on an overnight flight to Europe when one of the passengers, a man he casually knew from both Fire Island and around Manhattan clubs, emerged from the lavatory in a business suit, jacket over his shoulder. There was a syringe stuck in his arm as he stumbled back to his seat in a drug-induced stupor.
• The toilet stall doors at San Francisco’s Trocadero dance palace were removed more than three years ago, not for fear of sexual goings on, according to the owner, but to stop patrons from shooting up and nodding out behind the latched doors.
• Discarded syringes are commonly seen on the floor of the bathroom next to the rear bar, downstairs at the Mineshaft.
• A few months ago, while on a date with a regular pal who is a well-respected physical therapist at a major New York medical center, I was offered cocaine. He also asked if I’d prefer to shoot it, since he “just happened to have a syringe in the house.” I demurred.
• A middle-class white gay client of mine with Kaposi’s sarcoma admitted only after several sessions that he had shot drugs repeatedly, and had shared syringes with friends over a two-year period preceding his AIDS diagnosis. But he had certainly made no such admission to the CDC investigator to whom he had denied any history of I.V. drug use.
• A close friend of mine, who is far from naïve about drugs, told me that during a week-long vacation at the Pines earlier this summer he was hanging around an acquaintenance’s pool with a group of men when the host offered cocaine. Shortly, he emerged from the house with a tray, on which was a large vial of cocaine, snorters and a syringe. Several of the men used the same syringe to inject themselves with the cocaine.
Closet within a Closet
A reluctance to talk about, much less admit, using needles to take drugs is understandable, given the attached stigma. But this reticence makes the problem all the more difficult to recognize or confront. While it may be generally accepted that drugs, including alcohol, are part of the urban gay “lifestyle,” it would come as a surprise to most that needle use has also become part of the picture—for more people than is commonly realized. In this sense, shooting up is a kind of closet within a closet for many gay people; it is a topic not easily broached, except with those who share the same fascination. Only people who shoot up seem to know who their compatriots are.
IN PRAISE OF LARRY KRAMER:
A TESTAMENTARY STATEMENT
TO THE QUEER STREET AUTHOR
BY ROBERT WEIL
It will be hard for any who were not young adults in the 1980s to fully appreciate the catalyzing effect Larry Kramer had on the gay community. Indeed, I cannot think of a single voice more effective in warning of the plague that soon would be visited upon us like “a holocaust on an entire world.”
Who among us who were sentient in those terrifying years cannot still visualize the black-and-pink “Silence = Death” buttons first worn by the activists? But the slogan popularized by Act Up and other groups was far more than mere Krameresque rhetoric, and the deadening silence of the press, not only about the looming AIDS crisis but about queer culture in general, reflected a staggering cultural prejudice that had existed as long as late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century gay life had flourished. Larry Kramer’s almost eschatological vision and his aggressive, “in-your-face” political advocacy came then to define the activism that defied this prejudice.
It’s stunning just how far the gay movement has progressed in a little over twenty years. Those of us who are old enough can recall with clarity that the New York Times, in fact, refused for many years even to use the word “gay,” preferring the more genteel word “homosexual”; this semantic choice was the pallid indicator of the paper’s far from bland decision to avoid not only polite but virtually every overt mention of the AIDS crisis in the early years when the virus was spreading unchecked in bathhouses and back rooms across the country—spreading as if by fire from Village rooftop to rooftop. At a time when hundreds of thousands of people, the overwhelming majority of them gay men, were being infected, the Times and almost all other leading papers simply failed to cover the crisis.
As a twenty-five-year-old in the late winter and spring of 1981, just months after medical authorities and doctors realized that an epidemic was at hand, I first became aware of the virulent nature of this contagion that had yet to acquire a name. An avid reader of the New York Times, I did see one, perhaps two minor mentions of GRID or a virulent “gay cancer,” but the disease simply did not exist in the mainstream press, and it was the New York Native, begun one year earlier, in 1980, by Chuck Ortleb, that provided an extraordinary, and still largely unrecognized service, in warning gay men that a plague was already full blown. As a result of these prophetic tocsins issued by the Native, I was one of the lucky ones who quickly chose celibacy during those years, since no one was quite sure what specific sexual act caused infection. I still don’t know what impelled me to act so early, but it was the articles in the Native, which I eagerly read every two weeks, which provided graphic warnings and horrific medical reports that could not be found in the leading science magazines of the day.
Similar articles appeared in other gay newspapers and sympathetic publications over the next two years, while the general and scientific press remained at a polite remove, although some articles, far more dire, began to surface suggesting that a round-up or quarantining of infected man could be in the offing. As the epidemic began to infect and gradually decimate a population, gay leaders were extraordinarily responsive during this harrowing period (GMHC was founded by Kramer and five other early leaders—Nathan Fain, Larry Mass, Paul Popham, Paul Rapoport and Edmund White—in Kramer’s Village apartment in January of 1982). Yet, as cachetic wraiths soon came to supplant the body-builders on Christopher and Greenwich Streets, the Times remained eerily silent.
Undoubtedly, the most consequential journalistic story of these terrifying years was Kramer’s seminal piece, “1,112 and Counting,” which appeared in the New York Native on March 14, 1983. I still remember buying the paper at the corner of 23rd Street and Third Avenue, quite aware on what night of the week the delivery truck would bring the latest edition. There, emblazoned on the cover, was Kramer’s latest jeremiad, as fiery and passionate as anything I had ever read about the contagion. I actually devoured the piece on the sidewalk across from my apartment, and literally felt a chill, so powerful were Kramer’s words. I called all the friends I knew who might be affected and begged them, taking Kramer’s advice, to stay out of the bathhouses, where many still chose to spend their weekend evenings, and I later xeroxed the piece and sent it to friends on the West Coast. My personal background made me recall the rank apathy, the neglect, of the larger German public when Hitler took power and the Nazis began persecuting the Jews, and this was a comparison that would become the basis of Kramer’s Reports from the Holocaust, published a decade later.
In recalling the full impact of Kramer’s words, I do think the article was a turning point that forced the community itself to take some responsibility for its actions and actually contemplate, if not finally begin to use, condoms, in spite of the many who felt that prophylactics conferred an unacceptable sentence they could not possibly countenance.
Historians often struggle to define an exact turning point when a curtain comes to a close, but for me it was the Kramer piece that marked the end of an era, for previously a majority of gay men still seemed, or were clearly unwilling, to part with a multiplicity of mating rituals—be they on the rotting piers, in twenty-four-hour bathhouses, in the mythic tea rooms or in the endless variety of bars—that had in many ways come to represent the centrality of queer culture. Kramer’s piece, unbelievably alarmist (no one could accuse him of understatement), thus stated, in no unequivocal terms, that the jig was now up. The piece was then as much a premonition as a dirge for a lifestyle that could no longer be maintained. And by the end of 1983, although there were nearly 5,000 reported AIDS cases in the United States and over 2,100 deaths, the tide seemed finally to turn, both in the gay community and in general public consciousness. There appeared finally an awareness of not only the grave medical situation but also the struggles that lay ahead in reconstructing a once vibrant culture that was crumbling as rapidly as the wood planks on the piers of the Hudson.
Old Queer Fuck on the Park Bench:
“I hate to be a pill, to piss on smoldering embers, no matter how warming, but the facts are these: it was neither Larry Kramer’s hysterics, the courageous reporting of the New York Native, Everett Koop’s blinding-hot moral flash or anything else that turned the tide of AIDS recognition in America and of AIDS research funding by the American government. It was nothing less or other than Ronald Reagan’s sentimental—goddamnit—feelings for a fellow guy he just happened to like a whole hell of a lot from their Hollywood days, a guy called Rock Hudson who came down with the goddamn thing. And if you don’t think them’s the facts, go look them up. As our story winds down to a close, darlings, in the year 1985, rather than cut AIDS funding by ten million. Ronald Reagan—or more probably Nancy, as Ronnie was already, courtesy of Alzheimer’s, more and more lunching out, though not in public—was upped to one hundred million, and, get this right please, a 270 percent increase in AIDS reporting. You see, darlings, all that heaven allows written on the wind by tarnished angels is an imitation of life.”
“All Lil’s boyfriends are Judases, betraying her with kisses for cash.”