More mysteries characterize the illness. The virus destroys the white cells rapidly in some people, in others hardly at all. A couple infected simultaneously might react diametrically, one partner failing rapidly, the other showing no declining T-cell count at all. In the eighties, before accurate testing, convention had it that the disease possessed “an incubation period” of five years. With no symptoms after this time, one could breathe free. This is not the case. For reasons not at all clear, cases are recorded of people being HIV positive for fifteen years or perhaps more without experiencing any infections whatsoever. The writer Edmund White, for example, testifies to being positive for this length of time; he has buried numerous acquaintances, friends, and lovers, yet he himself remained symptom free in his second decade of infection. The disease manifests other anomalies, too. While one man’s viral load might register nil, his white-blood count might remain unaccountably low as well, thus opening the way to secondary infections.
Still another notable aspect of the disease is the way it has affected peculiar communities. Early on, it was associated with Haitians, among whom the incidence was extremely high. It affects intravenous drug users. Not least, of course, it has ravaged the homosexual community. In the eighties, few had any clear idea about the source of the disease’s penetration of the gay world. HIV was associated with promiscuity or with drug use, for example. Whatever the origins, however, the infection rate stood so high among gay men that the ailment came to be considered, among conventional folk, a homosexual disease. This identity, in turn, effected the public stance of the radically activated gay political movement that had found its own powerful voice in the fifteen years after the Stonewall Inn riot.
Defending gay men’s social, economic, and political interests, homosexual activists on the left engaged in increasingly sharp and rancorous debate over the virus, with antagonists on the right ready to associate the disease not only with homosexuality but also with divine retribution for violating the Torah’s prohibitions in Leviticus, Protestant morality determined in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, and St. Thomas Aquinas’s strictures for Catholics. Besides religious morality, the conventional right in the United States was also responding to growing alarm over the disintegration of traditional norms of every sort after the 1960s, but the corrosion of the conventional family focused its attention in particular. If feminism and the liberated woman might have been the right’s real enemy, gays offered a still more attractive target. In many ways, the gay man became a symbol of their concern—the individual standing outside family discipline offered a critical source of anxiety: the rogue, literally, honored none of the laws of the tribe, by definition. The gay man who actually corrupted the family—by seducing sons, for example—offered a kind of mythic expression of this primal fear. Even so, the advocacy of gay marriage or the social legitimizing of homosexual union or homosexuality in general suggested the radical redefinition of family, the very object conservatives most opposed. In practice if not necessarily in theory, then, such gay initiatives—of their nature—undercut the conventional family.10 Along with the advocacy of homosexual interests as rights and privileges, all these elements of the gay agenda prompted a profound reaction among traditionalists and within conventional opinion in the United States. For these folk, homosexuality—even if natural—lay outside the protection of both religion and the law. Traditionalists rankled increasingly, then, over what they considered privilege seeking by a small and unrepresentative category of deviants. The AIDS epidemic focused their anxiety and ire.
The growing reaction on the right, in turn, helped shape the position of homosexual activists who already had allied with the American left after Stonewall in radical defense of individual privilege against authority of virtually any kind. In order to accelerate funding for AIDS research, for example, it was logical to desexualize and also dehomosexualize the disease. Thus, the issue of heterosexual infection achieved a prominent or even critical place in the discussion of HIV. Out of all proportion to the actual numbers infected in the United States, babies with AIDS, women with AIDS, and hemophiliacs with AIDS, for example, became poster folk in the campaign. Along the same lines of normalizing AIDS came the tendency to conventionalize homosexual activity, homosexual union, and homosexuality. A new orthodoxy emerged, which was increasingly dominant in mainstream American opinion as represented, for example, in the New York Times and weekly newsmagazines.11 AIDS then was just another disease, and gay men were no different from straight men or straight women, even. This position produced it own consequences among gays themselves. While obscuring the association of HIV with homosexuality, more critically, it also masked the association of HIV with particular homosexual activity. There were indeed norms for the transmission of the virus. If God cursed folks with this disease, it was not homosexuality, per se, He damned but unprotected receptive anal intercourse. And if the divinity can be credited with caring about such minutia, He grew particularly plaguey over the practice of promiscuous unprotected receptive anal intercourse.12
Whether God wished it or not, the delicate membranes of the rectum have to suffer very little trauma before blood vessels break and open to HIV-laden seminal fluids. If this process virtually guarantees transmission of the virus from a single individual man to another individual man, changing social, sexual customs within the subculture after Stonewall offered predictable results within the community at large. Truly, social customs and changing norms within the gay community did make HIV a social disease.
As liberation became the catchword of a generation, sexual restraint declined as a virtue. Monogamy may or may not be a natural state; promiscuity may or may not reflect a physical tendency of men. While scholars might discuss these matters dispassionately, the times clearly discouraged the former and encouraged the later, even as “the pill” and the law itself—no-fault divorce, for example—abetted a kind of “just do it” attitude toward sex in general. The times associated restraint with reactionaries, misguided or oppressive authority, and the like. While “closeted” or “closet queen” represented terms of opprobrium, “out”—“out of the closet”—represented their opposite, toward which the movement tended. While this usage represented a political position, it also represents a model for sexual activity, the legitimizing of gay sex for itself. Although the incidence of homosexual activity rose after Stonewall, the legitimation of homosexuality as merely one more “lifestyle choice”—to use sixties terminology—blunted the debilities of being gay or of practicing homosex, as well.
Other social issues played a role in making the disease an epidemic among gay men.
Even if promiscuity was common before Stonewall, homosexual sex usually took the form of incidental sexual encounters with straight men. This involved the normalization of sex outside the cultural unit. When promiscuity came to center within the cultural unit itself—the gay sub culture—it opened the tribe to the accelerating transmission of all sorts of diseases. It did so, too, just as that community was expanding quantitatively.
Effectively, society and the law encouraged these tendencies, with the waning of police raids and government surveillance, for example. More critical still, the development of institutions for homosexual pleasure-taking followed naturally from these other trends. This development made it easier for men to have sexual relations with each other.
Up to the sixties, homosexual meeting places had been careful secrets. They were the particular phenomena of large cities, too. In contrast, the seventies and eighties witnessed the rank proliferation of clubs, bars with back rooms, and, most notably, public baths, virtually all over the country. One might now have sexual intercourse several times a night with a variety of men, and one might go out and do the same thing again four or five times in a week. Hundreds of sexual partners for every variety of sexual activity in a single year was not uncommon. The lines between receptive and insertive sexual partners mostly collapsed as well. In this context, even the most occasional forays into this hothouse by otherwise
essentially monogamous men—gay or straight—had awesome consequences. If the writer Paul Monette is to be believed, he and his partner were completely faithful to each other from the early seventies—with one exception. In one isolated episode, Monette’s partner tricked with a stranger in Boston after the couple had had a spat. Infected without his knowledge, he then passed on the virus to his lover. If infected themselves, Monette and his boyfriend, afterward completely monogamous, infected no one else. That was not the norm for the Stonewall generation.
The great urban centers of American culture—New York, San Francisco, Miami, New Orleans, Atlanta, Boston—multiplied the possibilities of this life-threatening activity, but even the most provincial way stations in the Southern Bible Belt—like Montgomery, Alabama; Augusta, Georgia; and Asheville, North Carolina—spawned their own homosexual institutions that provided opportunities for local men to satisfy their craving for other men. Moreover, the increasing self-consciousness and nationalization, in effect, of homosexual culture—or plain old homosexual activity—increased the potential of even more exchanges of diseased bodily fluids, from the great centers to such remote outposts in the American provinces. The completely asexual institutions of American society of the age—like the interstate highway system—assisted the flow. One could drive from New York or Washington to, say, Johnson City, Tennessee, in a matter of hours, a long day’s trip, but makeable. “Hotlanta,” as the Georgia capital was called among gays, was closer still to such overgrown villages. The sexiest clubs, the hottest baths, the most beautiful men, by this measure, lay within touching distance of the most provincial bergs with the hokiest homosexual rendezvous, like the Connection; the poorest inner-city motels—the Mid-Town Inn; and the most forbidden hometown cruise spot—Rotary Park, all in Johnson City—Nowhereville—Tennessee. The disease was only a day away. By the eighties, this very Tennessee community harbored literally scores of the infected. And so HIV spread even to hillbilly hollows and, from there, to mountain-cove mobile homes, as far as one could possibly imagine from Manhattan’s ritzy clubs and Midtown Atlanta’s sportin’ life.13 There is, dreadfully, no evidence that Johnson City, Tennessee, was in any way exceptional; it was only better reported than other, similar towns. The result? In 1982, the gay world was an uncovered Petri dish waiting to cultivate debility and death.
How did the virus get into Liberace’s system? Perhaps he contracted it orally. However rarely, the infection has been passed this way. A cut in the mouth or a bleeding gum might have provided lodgment for the virus during oral sex. While evidence exists for this form of transfer, it is not the standard process by which the disease is spread.14 If this sort of transmission might be rare, problems also arise in ascribing the standard transfer of the virus to Liberace. For one thing, the entertainer possessed a street reputation as an insertive rather than a receptive sexual partner. Even so, various elements might have accounted for his playing the other role. Thorson testified to Lee’s passion for variety, for one thing. Softening lines of homosexual roles encouraged such experimentation, too. Finally, Thorson also described his old lover as suffering from impotence, which might have prompted his trying other forms of sexuality.
What are the details of his infection? Perhaps Liberace carried the disease before 1982. It is not implausible that he did. He did not, however, infect Thorson who tested negative after their breakup. For all the showman’s propensity for being the active, aggressive partner in sexual intercourse, Thorson insisted they never indulged in anal sex; this would have kept him relatively safe even if Lee already harbored the virus. While it is not impossible that Liberace was infected prior to his involvement with Thorson, it seems rather more plausible that the infection followed the disruption of his union with the youth from La Crosse. Among gay men, a riotous period of liberation frequently follows the disruption of a long-term relationship. That Liberace would have followed in this pattern makes particular sense given the peculiarities of the Liberace-Thorson affair, especially Thorson’s sexual prohibitions. Thorson himself toyed with the idea that the two French boys were the source of his old lover’s infection. In addition, 1982 was perhaps the most dangerous time for playing the sexual field in homosexual America. Sexual liberation remained at a peak, and the disease was spreading insidiously through the gay community, but no one knew what was happening, or how. Few were taking precautions of any sort. One way or another, Lee fell into the trap.
The first news of a “gay cancer” and of curious occurrences of a rare form of pneumonia among homosexual men were circulating in both professional and popular journals in the last half of 1981. From ’82 on, with ominous frequency, friends and lovers were checking out under the most mysterious—and horrible—circumstances. The lucky ones got pneumonia and died quickly. Others simply shit themselves to death as a result of uncontrolled intestinal parasites. Disfiguring Karposi cancer destroyed men’s beauty before it killed them. Brain lesions corrupted the minds of even the brightest before they too died. By the summer of 1983, scientists had isolated the white blood cell-killing virus that led to such physiological catastrophes. How was the virus contracted? Nobody knew. Each year brought more deaths, more anxiety. Lee Liberace shared the fears. Almost overnight, being gay had become a scary health prospect. Queers had always had social and political debilities, but World War II had brought penicillin for syphilis and clap, the most dreaded venereal diseases. Something worse was in the air.
In 1985, things were out of whack at Shirley Street. In February, Liberace had hired a new housekeeper, Yvonne Dandurand, who worked for him for six months. She determined that he was ill. “He kept losing weight and slept most of the day,” she said.15 By November, newspapers carried reports of his signing into the hospital under an assumed name, “Lee Michaels,” suffering from back pain and blood in his urine.16 Other reports of the illness’s progress differ. Another account has him detecting a worrisome swelling in his groin in the late summer or early fall. It was probably nothing, it couldn’t be much, but he scheduled a doctor’s appointment. By one report, he entered Valley Hospital in Las Vegas for doctors to investigate in late September. He demanded an AIDS test. It came back positive.17 Cary James offered another version of the nightmare that lurked in every gay man’s mind. “It was August 1985,” he mused. “Lee had gotten his annual physical at Dr. Elias Ghanem’s office, and two days later his secretary phoned and asked me to come by for an ‘anemia test.’ A week later Lee returned to the doctor’s office. Then an hour later I went in—and the doctor told me Lee and I both tested positive for the HIV virus.”18
This shattering news was delivered in an especially devastating context. On July 25, newspapers had blared the information that Rock Hudson was deathly ill with HIV-related infections. Since Magnificent Obsession, over thirty years before, Hudson had been Hollywood’s biggest, secret homosexual star. Like Liberace, two impulses had fueled his life: his career and homoeroticism. He had rigidly separated the two, the publicity of one matching the secrecy of the other. As a conservative Midwesterner whose sympathies lay much more with Barry Goldwater-Ronald Reagan Republicans than with Michael Dukakis-Jimmy Carter Democrats, Hudson shared still other similarities with the piano player from Wisconsin. As they did with Lee, Hudson’s social and political ideology reinforced the logic of his separating public and private life, celebrity and homosexuality. In his last decade, however, Hudson began chaffing at the bifurcation. This explains, for example, his discussions of homosexuality with the journalist Boze Hadleigh, who interviewed him on several occasions between the mid-seventies and 1982. His revelations included, of course, a description of his early fling with Liberace.19 If he was becoming more open about his sexuality in this period, Hudson still resisted public alliance with the gay movement. The reluctance persisted after he was infected with the AIDS virus, too. Circumstances dictated another course in the summer of 1985.
In Paris for treatment, Hudson found himself trapped between his own silences and French medical procedures. The
cat leapt yowling from the bag on July 25. The information triggered an explosion. With the oldest gossip now public fact, Hudson made necessity something of a virtue as his publicists scrambled to redeem his reputation. Uncloseted even as he was exiting the house altogether, he even authorized a biography to publicize his secret life.20
Hudson barely survived the trip from Paris back to Los Angeles. He died less than ten weeks later, on October 2. The funeral notice failed to stifle the furor. The media had been rioting over the news for weeks. Hudson’s death exaggerated the uproar. The frenzy affected Liberace profoundly. And right in the middle of the uproar, he discovered that he, too, was HIV positive. If he had ever doubted his Claude Bristolian commitment to blind faith and positive thinking, the Hudson affair steeled his resolve. It was a horrible time.
At first, he took time off from touring. In September, he announced that he was canceling performances. The self-imposed retirement did not last long. He took to the stage again in March of ’86. He could not resist performing; it was life itself to him. Audiences inspired him. The infection did not hear the bravos. By August 1986, only a year after his initial diagnosis, the virus was eating up his white blood cells at a furious pace, and a variety of secondary infections attacked his body. Doctors informed him that he was suffering from AIDS proper. He could not keep weight on. His body wasted, but his will did not. The stage still galvanized his energy. His physical condition notwithstanding, then, he honored his commitment for a third string of performances at Radio City Music Hall in the fall of 1986, thereby performing one of the extraordinary feats of entertainment history. Its heroism has few parallels.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 55
