The Gay Metropolis

by Charles Kaiser

  Shilts wrote that by the beginning of 1983, it was “virtually an article of faith among homosexuals that they would somehow end up in concentration camps.” While most heterosexuals were baffled by these fears, Shilts thought they were perfectly understandable: “Humans who have been subjected to a lifetime of irrational bigotry on the part of mainstream society can be excused for harboring unreasonable fears,” he wrote. “The general apathy that the United States had demonstrated toward the AIDS epidemic had only deepened the distrust between gays and heterosexuals.”

  The power of Shilts’s book came from the author’s willingness to be equally critical of greedy bathhouse owners, who resisted efforts to close their establishments long after it was clear that they were a breeding ground for infection, and lackadaisical blood bank administrators who pretended that the blood supply was safe and expensive testing was unnecessary for years after the first strong evidence that patients were becoming infected by transfusions. (Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control had predicted infections through transfusions as early as January 1982.)

  One of the most chilling moments in Shilts’s account occurs between a San Francisco bathhouse owner and Paul Volberding, the director of the San Francisco General Hospital AIDS clinic.

  “We’re both in it for the same thing,” the bathhouse owner told Volberding. “Money. We make money at one end when they come to the baths. You make money from them on the other end when they come here.” Volberding was too horrified to reply.

  Bathhouse owners were among the most successful businessmen in the gay community. They were also among the most generous, lavishing contributions on gay political activists, as well as helping to finance early AIDS organizations like the San Francisco Kaposi’s Sarcoma Foundation. Shilts suggests that particularly in San Francisco, some gay newspapers were corrupted by the money they received from bathhouses, which made them reluctant to give the epidemic the coverage it deserved.

  In an excruciating irony, Shilts learned that he himself was HIV-positive the day he turned in the last page of his manuscript in 1987.

  IN NEW YORK CITY, the first gay writer to become alarmed about the epidemic was neither a journalist nor an activist. Larry Kramer was a novelist and screenwriter. He had an elfin look, bouncing eyebrows, and boundless energy to excoriate enemies and friends alike. He had spent years in analysis to try to overcome the self-hatred typical of the gay men of his generation who had come of age in the fifties, but he still seemed deeply discontent much of the time. His first important success came in 1969 when he wrote and produced an excellent film version of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, which featured a famously homoerotic wrestling scene between the two male protagonists. For many years, that was his only visible contribution to the gay movement. “I certainly wasn’t interested in gay politics,” he wrote in 1989. “Like many others, when gay pride marches started down Fifth Avenue at the end of June, I was on Fire Island. Gay politics had an awful image. Loudmouths, the unkempt, the dirty and unwashed. … On Fire Island, we laughed … when we watched the evening news on Sunday night flash brief seconds of those struggling, pitiful marches.”

  Most gay activists were unaware of Kramer until 1977, when he published Faggots, an inflammatory account of upper-middle-class white gay life in Manhattan. Because he had so much contempt for the movement, the novel naturally did not acknowledge its existence, much less any of its achievements. Kramer thought he was writing satire on the level of Evelyn Waugh, but gay activists considered his graphic accounts of fist-fucking and every other sexual excess of gay culture a blood libel. Others simply found the book so overdone as to be unreadable.

  “Why do faggots have to fuck so fucking much?” Kramer’s narrator asked. “It’s as if we don’t have anything else to do. … All we do is live in our ghetto and dance and drug and fuck. … There’s a whole world out there! … as much ours as theirs … I’m tired of using my body as a faceless thing to lure another faceless thing.

  “I want to love a Person.”

  For thousands of young men mesmerized by their newly won sexual freedom, this notion was truly radical. As the gay psychologist Joe Brewer told Randy Shilts, “Stripped of humanity, sex sought ever rising levels of physical stimulation in increasingly esoteric practices,” while Brewer’s colleague Gary Walsh saw promiscuity as something more positive—“a means to exorcise the guilt … ingrained in all gay men by a heterosexual society.”

  In an interview published in 1982, the French theorist Michel Foucault explained the prevalence of promiscuity among gay men this way: “In Western Christian culture homosexuality was banished and therefore had to concentrate all its energy on the act of sex itself. Homosexuals were not allowed to elaborate a system of courtship because the cultural expression necessary for such an elaboration was denied them. The wink on the street, the split-second decision to get it on, the speed with which homosexual relations are consummated: all these are products of an interdiction.”

  Kramer’s novel had focused on the emotional damage he thought had been inflicted by nonstop sex. But like Edmund White’s pre-AIDS speculation about the possible cost of gay fantasies of San Francisco—“Did we know what price these dreams would exact?”—something else Kramer wrote would soon sound like an ominous prophecy. Everything had to change, said the narrator of Faggots—“before you fuck yourself to death.”

  Until the onset of the epidemic, almost everyone speaking publicly for the movement had assumed that an unfettered and unlimited sexuality was one of its most important achievements. For many, this was the main reason they were glad to be gay, and they reveled in their outlaw status. Gay people who had accepted themselves had created new lives by ignoring conventional advice. Thousands were addicted to danger; thousands more were addicted to sex. Unlimited access to sex was used like a drug to cure whatever ailed you. These attitudes deafened many gay men to the earliest warnings about the possible dangers of their behavior.

  Philip Gefter recalled the Fire Island scene at the height of the seventies: “The Ice Palace in the Grove was the most fabulous disco I’d ever been to in my life because there were two thousand writhing, drugged, beautiful bodies dancing on this dance floor. By 6:00 A.M., we were outside around the pool, and we were dancing under the stars as the sun was coming up. And I believed at that moment in time that we were having more fun than anybody in the history of civilization had ever had. Because there was the combination of that sexual tension among all of these men, in concert with the drugs we were taking and the electronics of the music—and the sun coming up. It created a kind of thrill and excitement and sensation that I believe no culture had ever experienced before.”

  Then there was the Meat Rack—a sexual meeting ground in the woods between the two gay Fire Island communities, the Pines and the Grove. “The Meat Rack, basically, is this enchanted forest,” said Gefter. “I remember walking through the Meat Rack, thinking, This was my wildest fantasy when I was in summer camp. There were either couples or clusters of men in various permutations of sexual activity. I remember once when I went there on the way back from the Ice Palace with Peter and Eric at 7:00 in the morning. And there were these three or four men, naked. They were all, like, playing with each other’s hard-ons and sucking each other off, and sniffing an ethyl chloride rag. It’s like poppers, but it’s somehow more extreme. Basically it just renders you brainless. I never did it.

  “So we were watching this cluster, and they just kind of reached out and grabbed us, drew us in. So we found ourselves—six of us in this cluster of men, in this beautiful path in the woods—with our pants down to our knees, in various permutations of sucking and fucking.

  “That’s kind of what the Meat Rack was like.”

  Faggots “angered everyone, of course,” Kramer recalled, “particularly the gay political leaders who told everybody they should have as much love as they want.” But Kramer thought that “having so much sex made finding love impossible. Everyone I knew wanted … a lover, and e
veryone was screwing himself twenty-four hours a day … to what turned out to be to death. … You could have sex twenty-three times just going to the market.” After Faggots was published, it was made “pointedly clear” to him that he was “no longer welcome” on Fire Island.

  At the beginning of the epidemic, because no one knew for sure whether AIDS really was a sexually transmitted disease, anyone recommending reduced sexual activity as a sensible precaution ran the risk of being attacked for “internalized homophobia” or “sexual fascism.” And because Kramer had already attacked promiscuity for other reasons, he was particularly vulnerable to this criticism.

  He went to his doctor three weeks after the Times article to ask him what he could do to avoid the new disease. “I’d stop having sex,” his physician told him. One month after that appointment, his first warning about the epidemic appeared in the New York Native, a gay newspaper that pioneered coverage of the disease:

  The men who have been stricken don’t appear to have done anything that many New York gay men haven’t done at one time or another. We’re appalled that this is happening to them and terrified that it could happen to us. It’s easy to become frightened that one of the many things we’ve done or taken over the past years may be all that it takes for a cancer to grow from a tiny something-or-other that got in there who knows when from doing who knows what. … Money is desperately needed. … This is our disease and we must take care of each other and ourselves. In the past we have often been a divided community; I hope we can all get together on this emergency, undivided, cohesively, and with all the numbers we in so many ways possess.

  The attacks he received for this sensible appeal set the tone for the debate within the gay community during the first few years of the epidemic. On one side were those like Kramer who believed “something we are doing is ticking off the time bomb that his causing the breakdown of immunity in certain bodies,” and therefore “wouldn’t it be better to be cautious, rather than reckless?” On the other side were writers like Robert Chesley, who immediately skewered Kramer in the letters column of the Native:

  I think the concealed meaning in Kramer’s emotionalism is the triumph of guilt: that gay men deserve to die for their promiscuity. In his novel, Faggots, Kramer told us that sex is dirty and that we ought not be doing what we’re doing. … It’s easy to become frightened that Kramer’s real emotion is a sense of having been vindicated, though tragically. … Read anything by Kramer closely. I think you’ll find that the subtext is always: the wages of gay sin are death. … I am not downplaying the seriousness of Kaposi’s sarcoma. But something else is happening here, which is also serious: gay homophobia and anti-eroticism.

  Kramer later credited Chesley’s attack with turning him into an activist. Kramer was the founder of two of the most important gay organizations spawned by the epidemic. The first one was Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which grew out of a fund-raising meeting in Kramer’s Fifth Avenue apartment on August 11,1981, where he raised $6,635. Philip Gefter attended this first gathering with Jack Fitzsimmons; then Gefter volunteered to organize a follow-up fund-raiser on Fire Island over Labor Day weekend.

  “Larry made this impassioned plea for us to focus all of our attention and our energy on this because this could become a major crisis,” said Gefter, who was working as a picture editor at Forbes magazine at the time. “We went out to dinner after that meeting, and I remember Jack was panicked. I’d never seen him so panicked. He was a very controlled person and very even-tempered. But he was really scared, much more than I was. I asked him, ‘Why are you so scared?’ And he couldn’t answer. For six years he had an obsession about AIDS. Every time there was anything in the paper about it, he would call me and read me the story.”

  Gefter used the Xerox machine at Forbes to make several thousand copies of a six-page brochure about the epidemic, and a copy was placed at the front door of every house in the Pines and the Grove in September. The response was tepid.

  “Nobody cared,” Gefter remembered. “Nobody was interested. They’d just walk by us. I was profoundly disappointed in my community at that moment in time.” A paltry $769.55 was collected during the whole weekend.

  “They thought that this had nothing to do with them,” Gefter continued, because “they were good clean middle-class men who in fact were the very men who hung out at places like the Anvil and the Mineshaft and the baths, so it had everything to do with them. But they just denied it. I didn’t have a clue, but I thought it was sexually transmitted. I know that I had had syphilis, gonorrhea, and hepatitis in the previous six years. I thought it was a breakdown of the immune system. I didn’t know how or why. I remember there were some kind of black comedic conclusions we had arrived at. At one point we thought it was the deer on Fire Island; years later we found out that the deer did carry Lyme disease. That was kind of a tongue-in-cheek conclusion. We thought it might have been the drugs we had been taking; we thought it might have been what we had been doing to our bodies; we thought it might have been just the general erosion of our immune system. Drugs, sex, the various illnesses we had had.

  “Never once did I think this was some kind of divine retribution for what most of the world thought of as our sins, and what I thought of as a celebration. Partly, my conclusion about why I was a survivor may have to do with the general makeup of my body, for sure, but I also think that I never felt guilty about sex. I always thought that sex was a kind of celebration. That’s not to say that there are not a lot of people who also felt that way who have since died. Guilt was never involved for me when it came to sex. I felt guilty about other things, but not sex and not about the amount of sex I had.

  “Tom Johnston was the first person I knew who got sick. He was a friend of Jack’s. He had a real gym body. He wasn’t beautiful at all, but he had that Fire Island look. We shared a house in Water Mill in eighty-three or eighty-four. And I remember not knowing how to talk to him about having this disease. What did we call it then? GRID?* And just being terrified of it: any glass in the cabinet was somehow home to the virus. I was afraid to use the same toilet paper. Tom was trying all kinds of alternative treatments even then. I remember seaweed in the refrigerator. It was all so new and all so terrifying. We didn’t know enough about the virus then, so that even though I assumed on some level that it was sexually transmitted, that didn’t exclude the possibility of being exposed to it in any number of ways. I had also had parasites in the seventies, and you can get parasites from somebody else’s water glass. So I thought that was possible with this virus.

  “But I never thought this was moral retribution. I also bought into the conspiracy theories to some extent. I thought the world was hostile to this community and this is a concentrated community and here is some new disease kind of revolving within this community. I entertained the possibility that somehow something was planted by the government. I can’t be more specific. I still think that’s possible. It was too concentrated a community and too threatening to our society. Gay culture was becoming so visible at that moment in time. It was a period of time when being gay in New York was very chic—all these fashion designers, Studio 54. That whole nexus was written about in magazines and it seemed very exotic and appealing; ten years earlier it was still this hideous aberration. And that was very threatening to America: the established order.

  “The party didn’t stop for several years. By 1985 the party had stopped; but from 1981 to 1985 I don’t think the party stopped at all. People were more and more terrified. I knew people who were afraid to go out and have sex. But I remember going to the Boy Bar in eighty-three or eighty-four, and it was packed. I remember going to The Bar from eighty-one to eighty-five, and it was always packed. And I continued to have sex. I did change it to some extent. I don’t remember really using condoms until later. But I believe that one reason that I am a survivor is that whenever I was entered I came first, and the person who was inside me had to come out before he came. I would say that was true at least ninety-five percent of th
e time. They may have perceived me to be a selfish lover, but in the long run it turns out that that may be why I’m alive today.”

  ONE SCIENTIST outside the government was more important than any other heterosexual in New York City in sounding the alarm about the growing crisis. Her name was Mathilde Krim, and she was born in Italy in 1926, the daughter of a Swiss father and a mother of Austrian descent who had grown up in Czechoslovakia. When she was a child, her family moved to Geneva. In 1945, she made her first Jewish friends at the University of Geneva, and she was appalled by what Hitler had done to the Jewish population of Europe. To the dismay of her parents, she converted to Judaism and began to run guns to Menachem Begin’s underground in Israel. After the Israeli War of Independence, she moved to Jaffa. Then she became a cancer researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science. In 1956, she gave a tour of the laboratory to Arthur Krim, the chairman of United Artists, and a longtime Democratic party activist. In 1958, Arthur and Mathilde were married and she moved to Manhattan.

  After playing an important role in the passage of the National Cancer Act of 1971, Dr. Krim continued to work as a cancer researcher. In 1980, Joseph Sonnabend, a former colleague who was now practicing medicine in Greenwich Village, told her that some of his patients had strange symptoms including swollen lymph glands. Three years later, Dr. Krim founded the AIDS Medical Foundation, which merged in 1985 with the National AIDS Research Foundation in Los Angeles to form the American Foundation for AIDS Research. From that platform she fought for funds to perform basic research.

  With Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen and Warren Beatty among her allies, Dr. Krim played a pivotal role in making the cause of AIDS respectable within the heterosexual community. People she knew “felt that this was a disease that resulted from a sleazy life style, drugs or kinky sex,” she told George Johnson of The New York Times in 1988. They felt “that certain people had learned their lesson and it served them right. … That was the attitude, even on the part of respectable foundations that are supposed to be concerned about human welfare.”