The reaction of many of her heterosexual friends reminded her of the stories she had heard about Jews during the war before she knew any herself, that they were dirty and evil and deserved to die. Dr. Krim was determined to prevent America from using AIDS to stigmatize homosexuals—and with the help of many of her famous Hollywood friends, she would be magnificently successful.
RANDY SHILTS BELIEVED that a Canadian airline steward named Gaetan Dugas had played a key role in spreading the epidemic across North America. Researchers called him “Patient Zero” because at least 40 of the first 248 gay men diagnosed with AIDS before April 1982 had either “had sex with Dugas or had had sex with someone who had.” Eleven cases could be connected to a single tryst with the airline steward. A statistician at the Centers for Disease Control pondered whether it could be coincidental that 40 of the first 248 victims were all linked to the same man. He decided “the chance did not approach zero—it was zero.”
Gay men had violently different reactions to the first reports about the epidemic. Some stopped having sex altogether: psychoanalyst Richard Isay reported that one of his patients even stopped masturbating because AIDS had made him feel so guilty about his sexuality. Other men sharply reduced their activity, but a third group continued to live their lives exactly the way they always had. Dugas was part of this third group—and like many other men in denial, he became furious whenever anyone suggested he might have a responsibility to stop having sex.
“Of course I’m going to have sex,” he told a doctor who asked him to be more careful in April 1982. Then he directly contradicted himself: “Nobody’s proven to me that you can spread cancer. Somebody gave this thing to me. I’m not going to give up sex.” At the end of 1982, an AIDS hotline received repeated calls from men complaining about “a man with a French accent” who was having sex at the baths, and then calmly telling his partners afterward that he had gay cancer. Challenged again about his activity, Dugas articulated another notion that would become a popular and criminally irresponsible argument among some of those who knew that they had been infected by the virus—but remained determined to go on having as much sex as possible. “It’s their duty to protect themselves,” he said of his partners. “They know what’s going on there. They’ve heard about this disease.” Then he added guiltlessly, “I’ve got it. They can get it too.” A San Francisco health official who confronted Dugas thought that he should have been locked up.
Howard Rosenman was an extremely active Fire Island visitor in the summers of the seventies. He never slept with Dugas, but he did have sex with a great many of the first AIDS patients on Fire Island, beginning with Enno Poersch, who was “German and six feet four, and one of the most beautiful men I have ever seen.
“He lived in the house right across from the one I had rented for the summer in the Pines. That was the house Randy Shilts wrote about. I didn’t sleep with Patient Zero, but I slept with most of Patients One through Nineteen at some time during the eleven years I had summered on Fire Island. Okay? Most of them. In the summer of 1980 they told us Poersch’s lover got cat scratch fever [he actually had toxoplasmosis; he died on January 15,1981]. I was in medical school for three years, right? I remember saying to myself, cat scratch fever? That’s really odd. That was the end of the summer of 1980, and that was the first time I knew something was rotten in the state of Denmark. I was at the zenith of my wildest time. And then I came home to California.
“Somewhere along the winter or the spring of 19801 had a boyfriend named Reuven Levi-Proctor who was a rabbi drug dealer who Larry Kramer wrote about in Faggots. He was from Baltimore, Maryland, and his parents were very religious Jews. But in the summer of 1980, Reuven and I were now friends and he had a new boyfriend who came down with these marks on his body and died very, very quickly. And none of us knew what it was except Dr. Joel Weismann who treated him. Then Bronte Woodard, who was a writer who wrote Grease. He had been writing a screenplay for me. He was a bighearted guy from the south. He was like a big fat boy, bald. He used to give orgies that Nureyev used to attend in L.A., and he was also writing for Allan Carr. He got very, very, very sick with liver disease and other diseases.” Woodard died August 6,1980. His obituary gave the cause of death as liver failure.
Rosenman had been friendly with Larry Kramer until people whom Rosenman had told Kramer about in general conversations turned up as characters in Faggots. Kramer hadn’t shown him the manuscript in advance. “He was dishonest with me,” said Rosenman, “and I punched him out and I wasn’t speaking to him. He modeled some of the characters in Faggots on people that were really close friends of mine. And I remember walking to the boat and Larry was sitting at a makeshift desk collecting money for gay cancer. And I remember saying to myself, ‘Howard, whatever’s going on here is really big-time and important. You’ve got to transcend your level of loathing for Larry and go for what he is representing and give him money.’ And I gave him a hundred bucks. And I remember leaving the island and saying to myself, ‘That fucking Larry Kramer. She may be one hysterical girl, but boy oh boy, is she committed!’”
In fact all of Kramer’s instincts about how the community should have behaved at the beginning of the epidemic proved to be absolutely correct. When GMHC was founded, he felt exhilarated: “It was one of those rare moments in life when one felt completely utilized, useful, with a true reason to be alive.” But Kramer continued to behave like a volcano that was never dormant, constantly spewing lava in all directions.
Because he was so lacking in any ability to get along with his colleagues, much less his adversaries, no one ever considered Kramer for GMHC’s presidency. That job went to Paul Popham, a beautiful, closeted ex-Green Beret, who worried that his mailman would realize that he was gay if he saw an invitation for a fund-raiser with Gay Men’s Health Crisis as the return address. Popham constantly battled with Kramer about tactics and substance. Later, Kramer admitted that he had been somewhat in love with Popham.
One of the first arguments between Kramer and Popham was over whether GMHC should tell its members to stop having sex altogether, or reduce the number of their sexual partners. Kramer was adamant that they should be warned, but Popham and rest of the board opposed the idea. What if it was determined that there was no infectious agent? Popham asked. Then GMHC would look ridiculous.
The infighting came to a head in April 1983, after Kramer had repeatedly accused Mayor Edward I. Koch of an inadequate response to the health crisis. After months of violent attacks from Kramer, the mayor had finally agreed to a meeting about AIDS with ten representatives of gay groups around the city. But the GMHC board refused to send Kramer as one of its two envoys. Paul Popham was terrified of how Kramer might behave in a small meeting with the mayor. Kramer was stunned—and promptly resigned from the board. After that, GMHC rebuffed all of his subsequent efforts to rejoin the organization.
A decade later, Koch said that he regretted not meeting with Kramer sooner. “I read a letter from him in one of the magazines in which he was … denouncing me,” Koch said. “I inquired and I was told that he had made a request for a meeting. … I was told he was not held in high regard because of his vehemence and I should just ignore it. I’m sorry I took their advice, frankly. He is a very important force in the AIDS movement. … He has caused people to give this matter a lot of attention.”
Despite all the internal dissension, GMHC grew rapidly into an extremely effective social service agency and lobbying group. Anyone with AIDS could come to the agency for help. After one of Kramer’s periodic complaints about inadequate press coverage of the epidemic, the Times printed a glowing three-thousand-word feature story about GMHC at the end of 1983. Written by Maureen Dowd, then a rising star on the paper’s metropolitan staff, the story described the agency as a “sophisticated social-service organization with growing political power, 12 paid staff members, an 8-member board of directors, 500 male and female volunteers, and a 1984 budget of $900,000” which was “currently helping 250 people with AIDS.�
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The story reported that GMHC had received a $200,000 grant from New York State and $24,500 from the city, and credited the group with lobbying that helped to increase federal funds for AIDS from $22 million to $40 million. By this time, 1,261 New Yorkers had been diagnosed with AIDS, and forty-one percent of them had died. The number of AIDS cases had risen forty-eight percent in the first six months of 1983, compared with the same period a year earlier. Volunteers told Dowd a litany of horror stories—about government clerks who neglected AIDS cases “because they are afraid to be in the same room to fill out forms,” about nurses and orderlies who refused to enter the rooms of AIDS patients, even a doctor who refused to clean off a patient’s bloody face, and handed a GMHC volunteer a piece of gauze and told him to clean up the patient himself.
“Fighting a siege of death and prejudice, the community that was once characterized by a carefree and freewheeling spirit has evolved into a more mature and politically savvy population,” Dowd wrote. The reporter also noted another effect of the crisis on the gay community: “Homosexual leaders … said it has drawn many young professionals out of the closet.” A thirty-four-year-old psychologist named Ken Wein told Dowd, “I wouldn’t have put myself on the line before. AIDS finally strengthened my will to confront my boss, who was biased against gays, and quit a job at a hospital where I worked. You get enraged at the feeling that the world thinks you’re disposable because you’re gay.”
Dowd’s story was one of the most favorable articles ever written about the gay community during the Rosenthal regime. “On the whole,” she concluded, “homosexual leaders agreed the community has developed a new maturity in coping with the AIDS crisis.”
NEW YORK had far more AIDS cases than any other city in America. For Howard Rosenman, 1982 was “already my last summer on Fire Island because there were people coming off the boat with IV things plugged into their arms, walking down the boulevard with those metal stands on which you hung the IV bag. And it was deathly, and people were dying, fucking getting sick left and right by eighty-two. I definitely think that the combination of gay liberation and the gay sexuality, the freedom of it, bred the matrix in which this epidemic could form—the way gays sanctioned promiscuity, innocently. In L.A., the 8709 was at the epicenter of this way of life because 8709 was the hippest bathhouse in the country. From that corner the disease spread. The epidemic started right there. In that 8709 came all those boys from New York, Chicago, and Miami. [A famous clothes designer from New York] would fly out to L.A. just to go there for a night. People would come out for weekends and go back to New Orleans and go back to Toronto and go back to Montreal. People would spend whole weekends at those baths. Ten years later I saw how destructive that was for me. But only ten years later.
“The price of this is so staggering. It informs every second of my life. I know 450 people that died of AIDS that I can count. Thirty to 40 of my close friends that I had made from 1967 to today died from this disease. I’ve been through their deaths on a very personal level, in a big way. You know, I assisted them dying, did their errands, washed them, fed them, gave them their medicines. And then watched them die.
“I wake up in the morning and it’s as if I’m outside of my body and I look at my body, and I say, ‘How come this didn’t happen to you? You were the wildest of all of your friends and you were a leader of all this. You said let’s go to San Francisco for the weekend, all fifty of us, and we all went to party.’
“We had a group in California that came out to L.A. between 1972 and 1973, about fifty of us, that partied every weekend. Nando Scarffioti, who was a production designer for Bertolucci’s movies, The Conformist and The Last Emperor, he was the rich one. He bought Brooke Hayward’s house, which I turned him on to. In that house from 1972 to 1983 fifty of us that came from New York to get into the motion picture business partied every weekend, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And at the beginning we would buy a gram of coke and split it between all of us for the entire weekend. You just took one little toot at the very beginning. By the time the party was over, we would consume six ounces of cocaine in one weekend—and every other drug known to man. Of those fifty, there are six that are alive. Everybody else is dead. My closest friends in the world. People that I called every single day of my life for ten years in a row, who I holidayed with, who I New Year’s Eved with, who I went to the Saint with, who I went to Fire Island with. Gay people, if they’re not married and living in another city—especially out there, we form a tribe. It was a way of making a family. And we had our own traditions and we had our own worlds and our own celebrations and rituals. All of them are dead. It is beyond staggering to me. I do make friends, but I force myself to. I don’t want to make new friends because it’s, like, I don’t want to make new gay friends because I think I’m going to lose them, you know? I’m on my fourth generation of people now that are dying.
“I feel that if I die it doesn’t matter. I’m not that afraid of death anymore because maybe it’ll be a relief, because the sense of loss is so overwhelming to me that I think that nothing is permanent. And it’s made me cynical and sad and depressed. Now on the other hand, what I’ve replaced the sense of loss with is the sense of fulfillment that I get out of documentaries which mean something personal to me. I produce them without a fee.” Rosenman produced Common Threads, an Oscar-winning documentary about the quilt invented by veteran San Francisco activist Cleve Jones to memorialize people who died of AIDS. Rob Epstein and Jeff Friedman directed the film, and Dustin Hoffman narrated. “If Common Threads transforms one straight person’s homophobia into a more empathic way of viewing gay people, then I feel I have been successful in my life.” Rosenman was also one of the producers of Epstein and Friedman’s Celluloid Closet, the documentary based on Vito Russo’s history of gay characters in film. “That’s another film that shifts the homophobic curve downwards,” said Rosenman. “That’s what keeps me going.”
IN 1985, Philip Gefter decided to leave New York and move to San Francisco. He and Jack Fitzsimmons were no longer lovers, but their relationship had evolved “in a way that I think many gay relationships evolve,” Gefter recalled. “There was a kind of brotherly love with physical intimacy. But there was no commitment to an exclusive relationship. So I went to San Francisco in 1985. Jack came to visit me a lot—half a dozen times. And he would spend two weeks at a time.
“I met John McCarron in 1986. He was two years younger than me. He was thirty-three in eighty-six. I met him at a performance through mutual friends. My sexual habits had changed dramatically by then. I really didn’t have very much sex at all. I might have gone on several dates between eighty-five and eighty-six, which is when I met John. So we were involved and we had a monogamous relationship for a year. I was working in Sausalito and he was living in the Castro. He was director of San Francisco Art Space, which was quite an influential arts center.
“When I moved there in 1985 it was like moving to the City of the Dead. I could walk down Castro Street, and there wouldn’t be a soul on Castro Street. It doesn’t mean that there weren’t people in bars, but it didn’t have the exuberance it had five years earlier. It felt like there was a pall over the city. I moved there to write. I didn’t move there to have sex. But when I met John it seemed auspicious enough. So we were involved and we had a monogamous relationship for a year.”
In April 1984, the federal government announced that it had isolated a virus that was the cause of AIDS. French researchers had actually made the original discovery, but it would take three more years and a lawsuit before they got part of the credit they deserved. In March 1985, a test finally became available that could detect antibodies that indicated exposure to the virus. But at this point there were still no effective treatments, and no one knew what percentage of the people who tested positive would ultimately get sick. As a result, thousands of gay men continued to resist testing. What was the point? they asked. If they learned they were positive, they would just worry themselves to death anyway.
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Gefter had remained in close touch with Jack Fitzsimmons back in New York. “From 1981 to 1987, Jack is in superb health,” Gefter said. But Fitzsimmons was one of the many who refused to be tested. “Sometime in May of eighty-seven, Jack started complaining of shortness of breath,” said Gefter. “He wasn’t breathing as easily as he normally did. He went to a heterosexual doctor on Park Avenue who told him he had bronchitis. A month went by, and it was getting worse, not better. He was having greater difficulty breathing. He would call me from his house in Water Mill [on Long Island] on weekends when I was living in California, and saying that he really couldn’t breathe. And I would say, ‘Are you panicked about it? If you are, you need to go to the hospital. This is a problem.’ And I remember him saying to me, it was a little better when he drove around, he could breathe a little better. So I remember telling him to please call his friend Lee Mindel, who was an architect with a house in the Hamptons. And maybe he would drive him to the hospital or something. So Lee takes him to the hospital, and it turns out that he has Pneumocystis,” a particularly virulent form of pneumonia.
Gefter flew in from California and visited Fitzsimmons at New York Hospital. “He had always seemed like he was in great health except for these two months. He called me from a Fourth of July party at Andy Tobias’s in the Pines to tell me he was really having trouble breathing. So I spent a weekend sometime in late July, probably a week after Andy’s party, visiting him in the hospital.
“So this is a horror story. He’s on an oxygen mask. He tells me that he’s terrified of going on a respirator. He takes off the oxygen mask and he’s talking to me for two hours without it. The nurse walks in, and says, ‘Oh, you really have to have the oxygen mask on. You can’t be sitting there with the oxygen mask off.’ So they put it on and they have to increase the dose of oxygen. When I got there, it was thirty-five percent. The next day it’s something like ninety-five percent. He’s having greater trouble breathing. Maybe they were giving him Bactrim. They really were not very sophisticated in 1987 about the medication. The nurse had come in three or four times before she noticed that he wasn’t wearing the oxygen mask.
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