by Paul Monette
“But you’re going to get an AIDS czar eventually,” he said, “and the funding’s going to be there.” The underlying question being, why were some of our people still protesting, and especially why so hard against the first President ever to be our sympathetic partisan? A very trenchant point; and how to explain what it meant that we’d been waiting not four months but twelve years and four months? We feared the epidemic, which had taken back-burner status after the military ban, would suffer from White House caution that the President not be perceived as giving “too much to the gays.” (After all our railing that AIDS was not a gay disease but a global catastrophe.) Not that we doubted the President’s personal commitment, but the polls apparently showed a nosedive whenever he reached out a hand to us. I withheld my personal trump card for hospitality’s sake—that nothing could save me now, and yet I would still be out there railing for my brothers, unto my last breath.
There was talk among the straight folk at the table who worried that the March would hurt our cause. The argument went that Mid-America would be frightened off by our numbers and our rhetoric, and the inevitable press attention on the drag queens and the faeries. What they didn’t seem to understand was that our March was for us first and not for anyone else’s sake. Besides, we could scarcely have more enemies than we already had. And as one sequined man sporting a ball gown and a full beard opined to a minicam crew: “My wearing a dress doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s rights. And besides, it’s after six. Time for evening clothes.”
I found myself trying to explain to my end of the table my perceptions about the inadequacy of social-constructionist theory, which had reduced our ranks historically with sweeping abandon. And then this jerkwater poll that had pegged us at one percent. I told them about reading Sappho and the survival of feeling. They listened politely till one of the women, a superbrain in overdrive who’d managed the funding of the ’92 campaign in California, inquired with a nice candor: “Who’s Sappho?”
I blinked like an aging professor long since put out to pasture. How could a sharp, well-educated woman not know the name of the supreme ancestor of our sort of women? I tried not to react like a stuffy prig, contemptuous of the spotty education of the young. I gave the poet her proper footnote, reciting some verses to back it up, then gave the floor back to political passions. I felt more nineteenth century than ever.
Back at the hotel I shook out a red capsule from the prescription bottle: Zithromax, ruler of the planet Toxo. I opened the capsule, dumped three quarters of the drug and swallowed the remnant. For the next twenty-four hours I’d be dashing in and out of the bathroom, lifting my shirt to examine my belly for rashy spots. I-lay down exhausted, but not enough to sleep, reading my thriller till four A.M. One of the minor irritations of AIDS—minor as in not life-threatening, but even more minor on somebody else’s skin—was an itching so intense that you wanted to flay yourself. No scratching seemed to quell it, though that didn’t stop you tearing at it. Variously it had been diagnosed as eczema, as a side effect of one of my meds (but who could say which), and most comprehensively as “somehow connected with the virus.” Meaning nobody had a clue. One of the doctors prescribed an unguent that seemed to help a little, only it left me feeling like a greased pig.
On Saturday morning I woke up shaky, realizing I hadn’t been eating enough all week. 566C80, the drug that had held the toxo in check, had to be taken by mouth four times a day. But because it absorbed so badly, it needed to be taken with fats. So for months I’d been eating groggily in the dark—doughnuts and cheese and whole milk—helping along the five A.M. dose. I mostly ate ice cream for the waking doses, but that left my appetite stubbornly curbed. And even at that, the 566C80 wasn’t doing the job anymore, so I had the feeling of losing ground with every doughnut.
I ordered a big room service breakfast, popped a full capsule of Zithromax, and encouraged Winston not to miss the ACT UP action at the Capitol. For the first time really all week, I started to feel trapped by AIDS. Mournfully I considered that this trip could be my last. I never doubted that I needed to be here; but what about Italy and Jerusalem? The world had shrunk quite suddenly in the last couple of weeks, as I began to understand the intractability of the nexus of tumors in my leg, and grew terrified that my brain was clouding up. I had yet to get through to my neurologist, though we’d both left clusters of messages at one another’s hotel. I sat down to my melancholy coffee and croissants, feeling acutely left out.
I had a call from Richard Isay—the doctor who had rethought the psychoanalytic development of gay men, rescuing us from stereotypes and defining our health in terms of self-esteem. We had never met but had promised to be in touch in Washington, hoping to find a free hour for a cup of tea. I begged off by reason of general tottering and queasiness, and Richard asked if there was anything he could do. I tumbled out the tale of my leg and my brain, trying to be matter-of-fact and not awash with self-pity. But that was exactly what his ear was tuned to, and over the next two days he checked in regularly. Not imposing himself but serving as an anchor, especially in the absence of my medical team. A wound-dresser indeed, like a Whitman of the psyche.
I read the Washington Post all the way through, checking out the queer coverage. We were definitely the main news this weekend, with coming-out profiles that let us speak for ourselves about the witch hunts that characterized the military ban. Meanwhile the Navy had released its appalling report on the Tailhook scandal, all the woman-hating details, hoping that it might get buried in the hoop-la surrounding the March. These were the Navy geniuses who had tried to pin the U.S.S. Iowa explosion on the broken heart of one gay sailor, only to have to take it all back a year later. The same Navy that had lied to Allen Schindler’s mother, saying her son had been killed in a fight, just an unfortunate accident. And one of his murderers went free, and the other showed no remorse at his arraignment. The truth would never have come out at all if Allen’s gay brothers in Japan hadn’t blown the cover-up.
The same Navy that had turned whole villages in the Philippines into brothels, keeping all the girls clean for the delectation of the drunken slobs who came ashore. And this was the Navy in which gay and lesbian people were not allowed to serve because we might hurt morale.
I had a visit that afternoon from the writer Harlan Greene and his lover, Olin. They had just been through a nightmare battle over Olin’s health insurance—a battle they’d won in the end, but indicative of the Simon Legree tactics of the insurance cabal that was always scheming to throw people with AIDS out on their ear on the merest technicality. All of us lucky enough to be insured lived in constant dread of a cancellation letter. I’d had a case manager assigned to me some months ago, and she kept me posted on how much slack I had. Just the week before she’d left the information on my machine that I’d used up $156,722 toward my million-dollar cap. I was safe so far, but if the drug to save my eyes began to fail I’d have to move on to a three-hour drip that cost twenty-six thousand a month, just for the medication. Enough of those platinum Band-Aids, and you could blow your cap in a year.
We were talking about Baptists, Harlan and Olin and I—how the local parish tradition in the South had not always been a breeding-ground for homophobia. It was very recent, the assigning of diabolic status to queers. As usual, the hate-mongering had paralleled the growth of our movement, a pipe-bomb response to our coming out in droves. If only we wouldn’t talk about it, they said, they wouldn’t have to mount such a campaign against us. It was all our own fault. Meanwhile we’d just begun to hear rumors of the Nunn “compromise” that would come to be called “Don’t ask. Don’t tell.” Why couldn’t we see they could live with us—Baptists and generals and pundits all—if we’d just stay in the closet? We can live with you if you’ll just play dead.
Winston came back from “Hands Around the Capitol,” ACT UP’s exorcism of Congress. Fifteen or twenty thousand people had shown up, ringing the Capitol dome and grounds in a chain of protest, demanding increased funding for AI
DS research and care. The event was a neat combination of witches’ sabbath and shamanic levitation, culminating in a round of angry speeches by the likes of Michael Petrellis and Larry Kramer, whose coining of “Bill the Welsher” had thrown a new gauntlet down. “He’s beginning to sound like Roosevelt and the Jews,” said Larry. “Talks a good line and then does nothing.” Bringing it round in a circle to Elie Wiesel, shouting his bitter]’accuse in the wind and rain. A circle of witness made tangible by the linking of all those hands.
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, as the sage of Walden Pond called it. “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.” And why? “I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men.…”
When Olin and Harlan departed, I took to my bed again, beginning to feel positively neurasthenic. We’d been invited to several Eve-of-the-March receptions, including one which would preview the media spots for the lifting of the ban. A counter-friction, as it were, to the grotesque tissue of lies and hysteria which passed for the “family values” video making the rounds of Congress. But I couldn’t pull it together, missing one gathering after another. Winston took care of me, soothing my imprisoned spirit. At nine o’clock I felt strong enough to get dressed, and we finally ventured out into the teeming throng of celebration, queers on every corner shivering with expectation of the day ahead.
I felt like their grandfather. Not unwelcome and not passed by, exactly—but bittersweet all the same, to find myself an elder before my time. Were it not for the virus I didn’t doubt but that I would be capering in the streets myself. It was strange to be playing the reveler with Death so hot in pursuit, but somehow I rose to it. Probably because I was walking hand in hand with the man I loved. For here was the truly revolutionary act, to me the heart’s core of what the enemy called the “militant homosexual agenda.” Such a quiet gesture, really, no banners or slogans in evidence. Not proclaiming anything but a tenderness that had managed to endure the assaults of grief and sickness.
Jefferson made a great leap forward when he wrote the Declaration, amending the common-law notion of life, liberty, and property to the more felicitous life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That was Winston and me. A careerist had asked us across a dinner table a couple of years before, “What are you working on now?” “Being happy,” retorted Winston. A full-time job when you’re living on a tightrope. Hard to choose a moment to represent all that, but perhaps that winter day, driving over the Continental Divide while I read him aloud the whole of Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric.” And finishing that, we suddenly saw on the blinding slope below the road a pair of wolves cavorting in the snow. We stopped to watch, silent a minute, till one of us remarked, “They mate for life, you know.”
How to explain to a bigot so much resonance? The clasp of a hand on an evening’s walk, the body electric, the mating of wolves. It’s not written down in the militant agenda, and it isn’t a “special right,” as the current coinage had it when they passed the law against us in Colorado. It was simply what Jefferson promised, pursuit of happiness. As useless to pass a law against as to pass one against the wolves.
Later we joined a group of friends for dinner, straight and queer together around a table, trading stories about the weekend’s exuberant parade. Toasting our health with a clink often glasses, but really toasting the fact that we were still here. Herb told us about the powerful appearance Allen Schindler’s mother had made earlier that evening at the March on Washington Gala. With her plainspoken heart she thanked the gay and lesbian community for helping her to expose the Navy coverup. But more than that, she wanted to tell us all that people were wrong who thought we were weird. Such goodness and so much support in her grief had shown her what a loving tribe we were. “Thank you for my son,” she said.
In the cab back to the hotel, Winston and I finally faced the obvious: I wouldn’t be able to march tomorrow. Insistently I urged that he must go for both of us, with Victor and Jehan and Dwora; that I would be fine watching it all on C-Span, my leg propped up on pillows. He was just as insistent shaking his head no. He preferred to experience it all with me, however second-hand.
At midnight I finally connected by phone with my neurologist. Indeed he had seen the x-rays, and indeed there was new activity. Some swelling and edema of the lesion at the far edge of the cerebellum—-a pain I felt about two inches behind my right ear—and indication of a new lesion, but this one just beginning, still very small. Had the 566C80 stopped working, I asked in trepidation, or had I developed resistance to it? No, it was just the absorption problem, nothing to panic over. I had a surreal vision of doubling my doughnut intake, liquefying whole boxes of Winchell’s and feeding them through my IV line.
Dr. Aronow concurred with the rest of the team, that I should be adding the Star Trek trio to my regimen. As to allergic reaction, he thought the Hismanal I was taking to facilitate 566C80 would cover the new drugs as well. From the first he showed a fine capacity to calm my fears, and always with a jaunty assurance that he still had “other tricks up my sleeve.” People with advanced toxo, he reminded me, were not giving lectures at the Library of Congress.
A reprieve then, though four weeks later I still make hourly forays to check my belly for allergy rash in the mirror above the sink. Part of the AIDS version of touching wood, a constant reminder that now is a temporary thing, all the more reason to seize it.
I got up at noon on Sunday, and Winston was already tuned to C-Span. The afternoon rally on the mall was just beginning, and we sat glued to it for six hours. The Woodstock energy was infectious and many of the speeches very moving, though we wished they’d pan the crowd more as it surged along the March route, past the White House and down Pennsylvania Avenue. It took seven hours to bring the whole sea of us onto the Mall, evening already before the last groups arrived. Later we heard a chorus of complaints from people who hadn’t heard a single speech. That the marshals were unprepared for these kinds of numbers. That the ACT UP die-in—thousands of protesters falling to the pavement and playing dead for the seven minutes that passed between one actual death and the next, the plague’s clock—had slowed everything down.
And the numbers themselves. A lesbian friend, veteran of the ’87 march, was backstage when the Park Service arrived to make its estimate. They were notorious for undercounting, especially the likes of us. It was as if they’d learned their arithmetic from the pollsters who’d reduced us to one percent. My friend approached one of the youthful organizers and asked her where her negotiating team was. For this was the crucial bargaining moment with the Park Service, playing the poker of estimating crowds. A shrug from the organizers, who had no team in readiness. Giving the Park Service free rein to ballpark the lot of us at three hundred thousand, and this in the mid-afternoon as hundreds of thousands of us still flowed down Pennsylvania Avenue, nowhere near the Mall yet.
The D.C. police, no special friends of ours, put the figure at 1.2 million. The transit authority announced that four hundred fifty thousand extra riders had ridden the subway that day. But the media picked up the Park Service figure alone as being the only “official” figure.
With so many people to speak at the rally, the participants were sternly limited to just a few minutes apiece, the entertainers to a single song. One of the early appearances was made by our friend Judith Light—who made the point that we were all here to teach our fellow citizens as well as every tarpit dinosaur in Congress. For years she’d been one of the movement’s tireless allies, serving as the token straight on so many boards and dinner committees, emceeing so many events; she’d eaten enough hotel ballroom chicken to qualify her for combat pay. A big ovation before and after she spoke, Winston and I joining in all the whistling applause from our room-serviced exile.
Cybill Shepherd, the other ambassador from Hollywood, roused the crowd by recounting the story of calling her father to tell him she’d be here. “But wait—they’ll think you’re one of them,” he declared with
some concern. “Who cares?” she retorted breezily, to roars of approval all along the Mall. Who cares? became a battle cheer that day, perhaps because so many of us had had to confront the same anxiety from family and friends who fretted about our going public. Who cares? undercut the drama just the way Queer Nation did: We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.
Urvashi Vaid, former head of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, gave a stirring rebuke to our enemies. Eyes flashing fire, she berated the “Christian Supremacists” whose own agenda was a determination to replace democracy with theocracy. She put them on notice in no uncertain terms that we’d be there to block them every step of the way.
Torie Osborne, who’d taken over the helm at NGLTF, was just as impassioned in her reaching out to embrace us as a united people. Halfway through she had a coughing jag, pounding the podium in frustration, gasping that she’d been working on this speech for four months. She didn’t realize how human she sounded then, how much she embodied the halting declarations of so many of us, groping to find the words to set us free. Undaunted, fierce Amazon warrior that she is, Torie called for lemon, chomped on a wedge and finished to cheers.
Then she turned around and drew Larry Kramer to the podium. We heard later that she had done so under threat of arrest from the March organizers, still stubbornly asserting that AIDS wasn’t what this March was for. But Larry gave his stump speech uninterrupted, a welcome gust of ferocity. Followed not long after by David Mixner, who spoke with a thrilling quaver about the outrage of the military ban, swearing a blood oath that there would be no going back.
There were too many lesbian comics, or too many not-ready-for-prime-time yet. Afterwards we would hear a lot of clucking about the woman who’d made an extended joke about doing it with Hillary. Didn’t bother me, but then I was all for nothing sacred as a general rule for all such gatherings. When Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi stepped up to read Bill Clinton’s letter of support—such small potatoes and scraps from the table—she was greeted by a din of catcalls from the crowd. Bravely she went on reading into the whirlwind, the words drowned out by a groundswell of withering disdain. Words by proxy were not enough.
