HIV ANONYMOUS
In the middle of 1983, I moved to Washington Street, just a few blocks north of Christopher Street, in the West Village. The Hudson River, off the West Side Highway, was a short walk away. I had moved into a small studio, with a working fireplace and a bathroom with beautiful pink and black vintage tiles. Finally, I was living in a place by myself, and I loved it.
At this time, though, the waterfront was in an outrageous state of decay, rot and deterioration stretching all the way along the Hudson River down to the southern tip of Manhattan. Since the seventies the docks had been completely abandoned, with empty sheds and rusted buildings, which were true ghost towns—desolate and rat-infested.
Yet the piers became a hot spot for many emerging artists and photographers at the time. On the weekends, I would walk through the destroyed rooms and see gorgeous murals painted on the walls by Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, Luis Frangella, and the site-specific installation art of Gordon Matta-Clark. At that same time, historic photos were being taken by Peter Hujar, Stanley Stellar, and Al Baltrop.
The piers also became famous for anonymous sex in the gay community. The public phones along the West Side Highway were ringing off the hook and, if you answered any of the calls you were urged to come up to the anonymous caller’s apartment and have nameless sex.
On the piers themselves, there were amazingly gorgeous men—all naked—lying on concrete slabs as the sun streamed through the open windows of the abandoned buildings. There were all kinds of men: daddy types, bodybuilders, young teenage guys from the suburbs, and older men from the neighborhood. They wandered around those haunted, abandoned rooms—most of the time with leather vests on, worn jock straps and work boots. Sex was going on everywhere.
There were a lot of large holes in the floors of the abandoned buildings and, because canvases were thrown over them, you had to be careful late at night not to step on them or you would fall right into the Hudson River. Many men were often pulled out of the river because, in the darkness, it was hard to avoid all the craters.
In the Meatpacking District there were trucks that delivered beef for supermarkets and stores throughout the city. At night, when the trucks were parked, many men did heavy cruising around them. They would roll up the hatch in the back of the truck and go in to have sex, then leave. It was either the piers or the trucks. Or both.
During one of the many nights when I wandered up and down West Street having drinks at the Anvil, the Eagle, or the Spike—and was thoroughly drunk and drugged up—I went to the piers with the crowds of men roaming around the forgotten water’s edge. It was exciting, titillating, mysterious and, mostly, anonymous.
In 1981, it was reported that a group of gay men in Los Angeles had developed a rare form of cancer called Karposi’s sarcoma. It was accompanied by severe immune deficiency and there were reports about a group of people—nearly all of them gay—who had died from it.
As the months rolled into 1982, it became clear that this new virus could be spread through homosexual and heterosexual sex, as well as IV drug use. By September 1983, the CDC named the virus AIDS, and nearly 50 percent of those diagnosed with it were dead.1 Most of the dead were gay men and “[b]y 1985, the structures along the piers [were all] torn down as the AIDS pandemic struck and the city began to demolish areas of ‘potential contagion.’”2
A serious fear, nearing terror, moved through all of us in the gay community. Every day, I was frozen with both shock and complete confusion.
My doctor, Barbara Starrett,3 was aware of the new and fast-spreading disease. A test had been developed for HIV, which the National Cancer Institute found was the likely cause of AIDS4 and Barbara wanted to test me for it.5
She did, and the result was positive. I must’ve sat with her for an hour, in tears. I had seen so many men dying around me. Thousands of fears raced through my mind. What in the world was my future? Would I survive this? And at the top of my rising panic—the main reason for my tears was—how do I tell my mother?
I kept working despite my constant feeling of imminent doom. Honestly, I was fine physically. My doctor said that, despite my diagnosis, I was asymptomatic, though that didn’t calm me down much. It just meant that I could keep working, which I did—to forget, to put my mind elsewhere. I kept drinking for the same reason.
I don’t remember exactly when I told her, but it was probably a few months later.
“Mom, I have to tell you something.”
I was sitting at her kitchen table in Borough Park, with my sister, Cheryl. She brought me a cup of tea.
“What is it?” she asked and sat down across from me.
I started coughing, trying not to break down, trying to hold myself together.
“Uh, well . . . I’m very sick, Mom.”
I started to cry and so did Cheryl. Even though I hadn’t said what it was yet, Cheryl had figured it out.
Mom looked at me, tears were building in her eyes.
“I have HIV.” I started sobbing. Mom began tearing up. I don’t think she fully understood the impact of what I was telling her. Blanche and her girlfriends were old school. She spent most of her days with them on the front stoop of our apartment building, or watching One Life to Live.
She knew I was gay, though I don’t think it mattered to her because we never really discussed it, and I’m sure she didn’t know what HIV was.
Later that day, I heard her talking to her girlfriends Joann and Sue on the phone. Maybe they explained more to her about the virus even though those ole gals got all their information from The Six O’clock News, which, at that time, was filled with alarm and shock about HIV and AIDS. When Mom put the phone down, I watched her breathe heavily and then she started weeping. At that moment she grabbed me and Cheryl and we fell into each other’s arms, in tears. It was devastating.
Meanwhile, I had just started working at Elektra Records. I was committed to making my new job a success, while hoping that I would remain asymptomatic and as healthy as possible.