Hold Tight Gently (28 page)

True to Mike’s feminist orientation, CRI fought aggressively for the inclusion of women in its clinical trials; when a drug company submitted a protocol on a “hot” drug that excluded women entirely, CRI’s IRB demanded a counterproposal that unconditionally included women—and won. In several other protocols, CRI got the age limit lowered to twelve, though it didn’t attempt any pediatric trials. Its initial trial for aerosol pentamidine, moreover, proved conclusively that it was a successful prophylactic against PCP. One year later, the FDA sent a team to CRI to inspect its procedures and results and issued a report that concluded that the group was engaged in “good science.” Thereafter, the FDA formally approved aerosol pentamidine. CRI had pulled off an astonishing feat of self-empowered scientific rigor—and saved many lives.
⁶

Yet community-based research lacked the resources of NIAID and other federal agencies. Rumors continued to multiply about the many possibly effective drugs that were languishing on the shelves due to the apathy of the Reagan administration and the FDA’s traditionally slow protocols and drug approval process. By 1987, there was a notable uptake in demonstrations against the stalling and red tape that had characterized the testing of potentially useful drugs—and against the appalling focus of the drug companies on the profit motive above all other considerations.

Some of these unruly and defiant direct-action protests preceded the formation of ACT UP and sprung up in a variety of locales. Several protests involved only a few participants, who the police easily dispersed. But others—like those organized by the Lavender Hill Mob in New York City—involved hundreds of angry protesters in a series of scattered demonstrations and “zaps.” Desperation and rage were unquestionably building—and early in 1987 exploded at New York City’s Gay Community Center when Larry Kramer gave an emotional speech (which Mike admitted and applauded) demanding that the gay community take action. Tim Sweeney—GMHC’s associate director—
then encouraged a follow-up meeting. From that meeting, ACT UP came into being. Its series of media-savvy demonstrations and actions began with a sit-in on Wall Street and expanded rapidly thereafter. By spring 1988, ACT UP chapters existed across the country and for nine consecutive days protests were mounted on a set of issues ranging from the global impact of AIDS to the plight of those in prison.

Fortunately, an unexpected ally from within the Reagan administration arose in the person of C. Everett Koop, the surgeon general. Koop had an impeccably conservative background, including strenuous opposition to abortion, and his appointment in 1981 as surgeon general had horrified liberals across the country. But Koop proved to be his own independent man. Throughout 1986, he immersed himself in the literature on AIDS and then—without notifying the White House in advance—went public with a
Surgeon General’s Report on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
. It came as a profound shock to all parties.

The Koop report was nothing less than a call to arms. He not only advocated AIDS education at “the earliest grade possible”—his critics translated that as giving condoms to eight-year-olds—but also championed safe sex, denounced mandatory testing, and characterized any suggestion of quarantine as “useless.” Yet as the political scientist Cathy J. Cohen has pointed out in
The Boundaries of Blackness
, Koop “seemed to collapse efforts to deal with AIDS among African Americans with policies targeting Haitian communities; this was symptomatic of the institutionalized ignorance of issues relating to race that skewed many of the white reactions to AIDS in minority communities.” But the opposition that arose in the White House to Koop’s report was hardly based on racial sensitivity. Education Secretary William Bennett and White House adviser Gary Bauer led the assault on Koop, arguing furiously that his report should have been “more morally judgmental.” Skillful in influencing the media, Bennett and Bauer fought Koop at every turn. They insisted on “value-based education” that taught teenagers to apply Nancy Reagan’s jingle “Just Say No” to sexual activity. Bauer got the president to further emphasize the message in an April l, 1987, speech in which he stressed that AIDS education in the schools should focus on the importance of sexual abstinence. The Bennett/Bauer position continued to dominate the Reagan administration’s policies, though it failed to silence Koop’s ongoing call for compassion—and condoms.
⁷

Koop’s blind spot about the special needs of the African American community was also characteristic of the
New York Times
coverage. Its very first article on the subject of AIDS wasn’t published until late in 1985. What followed was a rash of stories linking African swine flu to AIDS, along with coverage of the discomfort felt by the black world in general with the “immorality” of same-gender sex. As Cathy Cohen has pointed out, the
Times
published only three articles between 1981 and 1993 that focused primarily on black gay men with AIDS—but nine about afflicted women of color, portraying them primarily as “innocent victims” of “bisexual” black men.

The AIDS community reacted to the Koop report as a sign of hope—and there had been few of late—that more attention might finally be paid. By the end of 1987, AIDS had appeared in some 113 other countries. Europe reacted with a massive educational program to inform and protect its citizens. The United States reacted with a denunciation from the right-wing antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly declaring that Koop wanted to institute “grammar school sodomy classes.”

The swift growth of ACT UP chapters and confrontational direct action reflected the growing anger in the gay world at the lack of progress against AIDS. Back in 1976 the CDC had spent $9 million within months of the outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease (which killed thirty-four people); during the first year of the AIDS epidemic, with more than two hundred people already dead, the CDC spent $1 million. By the mideighties, the lack of research had been accompanied by growing calls—and not just from right-wingers—for mandatory AIDS testing, quarantine, and even tattooing (the latter advocated by William Buckley). People with AIDS were being attacked, not succored—evicted from their apartments, fired from their jobs, confronted by masked and gloved nurses in hospitals, denied even the assurance of safe private space thanks to the Supreme Court’s 1986
Bowers v. Hardwick
ruling.
⁸

Even as the federal government refused to marshal its resources to combat the mounting AIDS epidemic and in general cut back on social welfare programs that aided the poor, the Reagan administration seemed to have no trouble at all in spending vast sums of money for other kinds of war—including sending marines into Lebanon, invading the tiny island of Grenada, and supporting brutal right-wing elements in El Salvador and Nicaragua. The coffers stayed closed for
sissies and perverts, but they spilled forth without prompting for the promotion of macho violence.

Increasingly, the gay community fought back. The growth in direct-action protest culminated in a massive March on Washington in October 1987. The night before the march, Essex and Wayson did a ten p.m. show at d.c. space and another, joined by Michelle, at midnight. At the earlier showing, at Essex’s initiative, the two men performed a piece denouncing RENAMO (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana), a right-wing political party in Mozambique that was backed by the South African apartheid regime. As Wayson remembers it, the audience response was lukewarm; that in itself bothered Essex, but he was annoyed, too, that Wayson didn’t know as much about RENAMO as he thought he should. The more Essex became a cultural icon in the black gay community, the more, as Wayson saw it, “he was hurt when he felt like he wasn’t understood.” Another example was the negative reaction some members of the black lesbian community had when Essex and Wayson used the word “bitch” when performing the piece “To Some Supposed Brothers.” Essex regarded the piece as “a powerful feminist statement against the verbal abuse and disrespect of black women” shown by many black men, and he felt deeply frustrated that the message had failed to be appreciated. Similarly, when Essex at one point casually dated a white guy, it became, according to Wayson “a bicoastal scandal”—e-mails were exchanged questioning his credibility as an exemplar of black gay male identity and his “blackness credentials” in general.

At the 1987 march, estimates of the size of the crowd, as always, varied. But as a participant—I went with my partner, Eli, the man I’d met the year before and with whom I still live—I felt confident that the outpouring, led by PWAs, some in wheelchairs, was “huge”—hundreds of thousands. The
New York Times
estimated the crowd at two hundred thousand, but we thought
Newsday
was closer to the mark in citing upwards of half a million. “Miles and miles of marchers,” I wrote, went by “in interchangeable blue jeans, wool shirts and sneakers, making the strong visual point that ‘we are everywhere, and everybody.” Watching the TV coverage that night of the simultaneous Columbus Day Parade in New York, with its paramilitary drill units and rifle clubs, I was glad that in
our
march no one brandished a single
weapon; nor were any police needed to discipline the crowd. I saw only one bunch of angry, confrontational people—the Jesus freaks, carrying their hate-filled banners, screaming their violent slogans.
⁹

It would be a mistake to conflate the heightened number of gay people now committed to direct action against governmental AIDS apathy with the whole of the gay community. Mike’s “quintessential image of an urban gay man in the Reagan 1980s” was someone “sick; shunned; frightened and frightening; and largely unprotected by either law or popular opinion.” Plenty of gay people remained cowed in silent terror—at the disease, at coming out to family and friends, at employers who applauded the recent Justice Department ruling that in regard to federal contracts, employers were entitled to fire employees simply on the
suspicion
that they were HIV-positive and might “casually transmit” AIDS in the workplace. Still others in the gay community, though not ill or in terror, retreated to an ostrich-like head-in-the-sand attitude.

Just two months before the March on Washington, when Eli and I vacationed on Fire Island, we stopped off one day to visit Larry Mass, Arnie Kantrowitz, and Vito Russo, who’d taken a house together in Cherry Grove. We found Vito in a justifiable rage over the seeming indifference of the island’s gay inhabitants toward AIDS; he’d written a fiery letter to the
Fire Island Times
denouncing the smug atmosphere in the community, and it had caused “outrage.” When, that same week, we had dinner in the East Village apartment of three of Eli’s friends, we found a different sort of inactivity—due to illness, not apathy. One of the three, sick with hepatitis and tuberculosis, could hardly sit at the table. The second had already been hospitalized once and had a T cell count of 0. The third had also been hospitalized but was currently feeling okay. The three men had in varying combinations been lovers for some fifteen years and were deeply supportive of one another; the atmosphere that night was “chatty” and “up.” Their untheatrical valor reduced me to near silence, and tears. No protest march for them. All three would soon succumb to the disease.

Richard Dworkin had been urging Mike for some time to get back into his music. He not only believed in Mike’s vocal talent, but felt he needed a respite from the tension and acrimony of his life as a PWA activist. Earlier, they’d formed the band Lowlife. It had recorded a
few songs and done a two-week tour in Fort Lauderdale and Key West—irrepressible Mike sometimes twirling a baton, yodeling, and playing synthesizer simultaneously—but Lowlife had lasted only until 1986. Sometime in 1987, Richard played the record
Nina Simone and Piano
for Mike—not simply for its own glories but to demonstrate to Mike that recording an album need not involve a huge production, complicated arrangements, or a ton of money—which Mike had long assumed.
¹⁰

Richard’s strategy worked. The power of the Simone record convinced Mike that neither a lot of musicians nor a lot of cash was needed to produce something musically and emotionally powerful. Yet some connections
were
needed, and it was Richard’s musical background that produced them. Back in the 1970s, when living in San Francisco, Richard had learned to play the drums and had also studied jazz with the saxophonist John Handy. He wanted to play with and for the gay male community—“giving it a voice it never had before”—and ultimately that came to include Blackberri (who both Essex and Joe Beam knew), the group Buena Vista, Casselberry and DuPree, and Steven Grossman, who became Richard’s roommate.

With Buena Vista—named after the big gay cruising park—Richard sometimes played at the Stud, the hangout (in Richard’s words) of “the hippie fags, the freaks of San Francisco.” For the first time, he was able to perform “an out-and-out love song sung by one guy to another guy.” He had also played for dancers in performance and was part of a group that organized a loft jazz space called the Blue Dolphin in the garage of a Victorian house at Seventeenth and Sanchez in the Castro District. Through a friend who was the keyboard player for the pro-gay Glide Memorial Church in the Tenderloin, Richard, out of his love for black gospel music, occasionally attended services there—though he was “raised and confirmed an atheist from birth.”

The first post-Stonewall gay male record had probably been that of a group called Lavender Country, who Richard saw perform in San Francisco in the early 1970s. Steven Grossman’s album
Caravan Tonight
had claim to the first “out” gay record on a major label. (One of the main reasons Richard had left San Francisco for New York was his inability to get Grossman, who was an accountant by day, to stick with music consistently.)