The law also put an end to some blatant examples of discrimination. As late as 1992, the Board on Professional Standards of the American Psychoanalytic Association was still resisting pressure from analyst and activist Richard Isay to promise to accept lesbians and gay men as training analysts. In April 1992, Dr. Isay asked William Rubenstein, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, to write a letter to the association which pointed out that its continuing failure to promise not to discriminate was illegal under the New York City statute. Just one week later, the executive board of the Psychoanalytic Association finally passed a resolution stating that homosexuals were just as qualified as heterosexuals to become training analysts.
THE OTHER HOPEFUL DEVELOPMENT in the spring of 1986 was an announcement from the National Cancer Institute that a new drug called azidothymidine, or AZT, seemed to help some AIDS patients. Encouraging signs included “fewer fevers, the disappearance of infections, improved appetite and weight gain.” In years to come the drug’s effectiveness—and toxicity—would be fiercely debated within the gay community, but when AZT was first introduced, it was the only medical treatment that provided any optimism at all. Roy Cohn and the Broadway choreographer Michael Bennett were two of the first AIDS patients to be treated with it.
But most of the good feelings provided by the city council’s action and this scientific development were blotted out three months later by a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court.
In 1976 the Court had infuriated gay leaders by affirming a Virginia sodomy statute, without bothering to hear any arguments in the case.* Ten years later, activists convinced themselves that the national climate had changed enough to ensure a reversal. They also believed that they had found the perfect test case to use for a new challenge. Michael Hardwick had been at his home in Atlanta when a policeman barged in to serve him with a warrant to appear in court—because of a ticket for public drinking which Hardwick had already paid. After a roommate waved the policeman toward a back bedroom, the officer found Hardwick performing oral sex with another man and immediately arrested both of them.
At the end of March 1986, the Court heard arguments in Bowers v. Hardwick. Appearing on behalf of Hardwick, Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe told the Court that the Constitution protected private homosexual and heterosexual acts between consenting adults, while an assistant attorney general of Georgia countered that such a finding would undermine states’ efforts to maintain “a decent and moral society.”
When the justices first met privately to discuss the case two days later, there were five apparent votes in favor of striking down Georgia’s sodomy law. John Paul Stevens was part of that initial five-member majority, even though he had told a colleague, “I hate homos.”
The other justices who initially joined in that majority decision were William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, and Lewis Powell. Perhaps because Tribe’s argument was considered so persuasive, rumors quickly spread through the gay community that a favorable decision in the case was likely. But less than a week after their first meeting on the matter, Justice Powell wrote a new memorandum to his colleagues indicating that he would probably reverse his vote, thereby providing a majority to uphold the antisodomy law.
When the Court rendered its decision on June 30, Justice Byron White took the unusual step of reading large portions of the five-to-four majority opinion from the bench. White was contemptuous of the arguments that Professor Tribe had offered. “To claim that a right to engage in [sodomy] is ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ or ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty’ is, at best, facetious,” White declared. Chief Justice Warren Burger enthusiastically agreed in a concurring opinion: “To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching,” Burger said.
But Harry Blackmun filed a fierce dissent: “The majority has distorted the question this case presents,” Blackmun stated. The case was really about “the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men,” namely “the right to be let alone”—as Justice Louis Brandeis had written in an earlier case in 1928. “The right of an individual to conduct intimate relationships in the intimacy of his or her own home seems to me to be the heart of the Constitution’s protection of privacy,” Blackmun continued. “Depriving individuals of the right to choose for themselves how to conduct their intimate relationships poses a far greater threat to the values most deeply in our Nation’s history than tolerance of nonconformity could ever do.”
A Gallup poll revealed that of the seventy-three percent of those who knew about the decision, forty-seven percent disagreed with it, while forty-one percent approved of the Court’s action.
Tom Stoddard, who by now had become executive director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, called the decision “a major disaster from our point of view.” He continued, “For the gay rights movement, this is our Dred Scott case,” referring to the 1857 Supreme Court ruling which held that blacks were not citizens and therefore could be slaves. Stoddard felt the Court’s action rested on “nothing more substantial than the collective distaste of the five justices in the majority for the conduct under scrutiny.” Justice Powell, who provided the key vote upholding the sodomy law, told an astounded clerk that he had never met a homosexual. Court historian David J. Garrow noted that Powell was “apparently unaware” that he had “already employed numerous gay assistants during his fifteen years on the Court.”
A few years later, Justice Powell admitted that he had “probably made a mistake” in voting with the majority. “When I had the opportunity to reread the opinions … I thought the dissent had the better of the arguments,” the justice admitted. Then he added, oddly, that it was a “frivolous case” because it had been brought “just to see what the Court would do,” as if that distinguished it from dozens of other cases the justices heard every year.
Gay activists everywhere reacted with fury to the Court’s decision. But a resounding vindication for the movement from the same Washington chambers was only a decade away.
THE AIDS COALITION TO UNLEASH POWER was founded in New York in 1987, after Larry Kramer gave another furious speech warning of imminent doom. While the Gay Men’s Health Crisis continued to do a superb job of providing social services for AIDS patients and lobbying for more government money for treatment and research, Kramer perceived the need for another kind of organization that could focus a decimated community’s anger and take it into the streets.
ACT UP was an instant success, driven by the energy of a new generation of activists in blue jeans and combat boots, most of whom had barely entered elementary school at the time of the Stonewall riot. As forty other chapters formed across the country and around the world, these men and women in their late teens and twenties were joined by thousands of lesbians and gay men from preceding generations. As with the antiwar movement of the sixties, a life-and-death issue had been necessary to bring the generations together in a noble cause.
In fact it was their memory of the sixties which attracted some of the more seasoned ACT UP members to the new organization. Ann Northrop had “marched and demonstrated against the Vietnam war and for the rebirth of feminism,” and it “really felt very nostalgic.” Northrop was a former journalist turned AIDS educator who fell “totally head over heels in love at first sight” when she attended her first ACT UP meeting in 1988.
“All the goals appealed to me,” she told the historian Eric Marcus. “They included everything from finding a cure for AIDS to doing the right education, which meant telling the truth, being explicit … and supporting real protective health measures, as opposed to ineffective supposed moral standards. ACT UP was willing … to go out in the street and scream and yell.”
Northrop got arrested during one of the Wall Street demonstrations, and she loved it. By going to work in the lesbian and gay community, she felt that she had liberated herself completel
y, “opening up my life in ways that I couldn’t begin to imagine or anticipate. The proof of this was that I felt completely complacent about the idea of getting arrested.”
ACT UP’S charter described it as a coalition of “diverse individuals united in anger and committed to direct action”; one of its chants identified it as “loud and rude and strong and queer.” As the novelist David Leavitt put it, its members were determined to disprove the idea that a community in the grip of AIDS was “weak, ravaged [and] deserving only of charity.” Instead, “they presented an image of a community powered by anger and willing to go to almost any length in order to defend itself.”
It was a fabulous combination of the practical and the theatrical.
Michelangelo Signorile was typical of the young people who were drawn to activism for the first time by the new organization; before he attended his first ACT UP meeting, the former theatrical press agent turned freelance writer had never entered the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in Greenwich Village. Signorile was mesmerized by the Monday-night scene inside the former New York City public school on 13th Street, where the weekly meeting of 450 was facilitated by “the extremely handsome” David Robinson, who wore a dress; and Maria Maggenti, a “beautiful lesbian with long blond hair.” Signorile reported, “Crying and yelling were almost rituals, and he was “exhilarated.”
It was also a great place to pick up a date.
Signorile joined the media committee, which was meeting in Vito Russo’s apartment, and started reading books by Larry Kramer, Martin Duberman, and other gay writers. “It was time to wake everyone else up too,” he decided. The sidewalks of Manhattan were quickly covered with the organization’s stenciled slogan, “Silence = Death.”
The New York Stock Exchange was one of the first of ACT UP’s targets, with protesters urging investors to sell stock in Burroughs Wellcome, the drug company that owned the patent to AZT and was charging an exorbitant amount for the treatment—as much as $10,000 a year.
“Die-Ins” in the caverns of Wall Street were succeeded by invasions of corporate headquarters. One day in 1989, four young men in business suits moved unchallenged through the front doors of the Burroughs Wellcome corporate headquarters, walked to the third floor, “ejected the startled occupant of an executive office and sealed the doors with metal plates and a high-powered drill,” Cynthia Crossen reported on The Wall Street Journal’s front page. On another occasion, ACT UP members forced Northwest Airlines to abandon its policy of forbidding passage to AIDS patients by staging a phone “zap,” which flooded the airline with hundreds of false reservations.
“This is about constantly sticking it in the face of every single person you can stick it in,” Vincent Gagliostro explained to the Journal. Less than three years after ACT UP’s founding, Burroughs Wellcome had reduced the cost of AZT, and the organization’s members had been invited to sit on many of the government panels they had attacked. “ACT UP has been my way of taking control of my life away from the AIDS virus,” explained Peter Staley, an ex-bond trader turned activist. “The issues couldn’t be more exciting—sexism, racism, needle exchange, homophobia, homelessness. These are the issues of our day.”
“The tribe’” has given way to a “‘queer nation’ which is assertively coed, multi-racial and anti-consumerist,” David Leavitt wrote. “The closed club has become an open meeting. What I liked best about ACT UP was its joyousness. Here was a roomful of people who were refusing to accept the common wisdom that … they were necessarily doomed and hopeless, their lives defined by death. From the shellshocked landscape of the mid-1980s, they had stood up, dusted themselves off and gone to work rebuilding.”
ACT UP’S most controversial action was its disruption of Sunday Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in December 1989. John Cardinal O’Connor was the demonstrators’ target because of his persistent opposition to explicit AIDS education and his lengthy battle against any law that would protect gay civil rights.
Some protesters lay down in the aisles while others handcuffed themselves to the pews. “We will not be silent,” screamed Michael Petrelis, a veteran gay activist. “We will fight O’Connor’s bigotry.” Then the police arrested him and forty-two others inside the cathedral. Another sixty-nine protesters were arrested outside.
Ann Northrop explained her participation in the St. Patrick’s action this way: O’Connor
was telling the general public that monogamy would protect them from HIV infection and that condoms didn’t work. As far as I was concerned, those were both major lies that were going to kill people. … Every week he stands up in the church and during his sermon makes political statements about AIDS, abortion, [and] homosexuality. … We believed we were entitled through our right of free speech to confront his political statements. Besides, by having the broadcast and print media in there on a regular basis, he had breached the limits of a religious service himself and was setting up a political event.
Cardinal O’Connor said it was “kind of ironic that I’m accused of not doing enough” because he had consistently advocated more government spending for AIDS care and research and because the archdiocese was devoting “10 to 12 percent” of its hospital beds to people with AIDS.
Alice McGillion was a deputy police commissioner who witnessed the demonstration from inside the cathedral. “People were horrified that they did it—particularly in a very Catholic police department,” McGillion recalled. “But I did not think their manner was horrific: these were people who were under control. Some of the protesters were taken out on orange stretchers, and they were so frail, I could have picked them up myself. It was just one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen.”
The demonstration created a sharp division within the gay community. One Catholic who opposed the protest at St. Patrick’s was Robert J. Anthony, a regional director of Dignity, an organization of gay Catholics. Anthony said that he understood the demonstrators’ anger because he also considered the cardinal’s position immoral: “No teaching whose net effect exposes thousands of young men and women to infection with the human immunodeficiency virus can be considered moral.” But Anthony still objected to the disruption.
The Catholic activist explained that members of Dignity felt especially strongly about the right to worship without disruption because their own services had been interrupted when Dignity had been evicted from seven parish communities in the New York metropolitan area earlier in the decade. “The most notable example is the 1987 eviction by John Cardinal O’Connor of Dignity New York from St. Francis Xavier Church after eight years of weekly masses in that parish.” All of the evictions had been ordered by the church hierarchy, “none by the parish communities” to which Dignity members belonged. “Therefore, Dignity opposes any such disruptions and asks other members of the lesbian and gay community to channel their anger and energy into other actions.”
ACT UP’S most important achievement was to make experimental drugs available much more quickly to people with fatal diseases. Johnny Franklin told The Wall Street Journal that the organization had saved his eyesight by getting him access to Gancyclovir while the drug was still working its way through the Food and Drug Administration’s lengthy approval process.
Barely two years after ACT UP’s founding, Anthony Fauci, the chief federal AIDS researcher, announced a new system that would permit rapid access to experimental drugs. Some researchers complained that Fauci’s “parallel track” approach would make it harder to prove the effectiveness of new drugs in traditional trials, which required some patients to take placebos while others received the real thing. But the anger of AIDS activists had convinced federal researchers that it was immoral to offer placebos to anyone with a fatal disease, “a major shift long sought by those involved in the fight against AIDS,” the Times reported.
One of the first drugs distributed under the new system was DDI, or dideoxyinosine, an antiviral drug manufactured by Bristol-Myers. Three months after Fauci’s announcement, the FDA said DDI would b
e made available to some patients at no cost if they could not afford it—partly because of earlier protests about the high price of AZT. Federal officials said the decision was made after discussions that induded ACT UP representatives. A Bristol-Myers official said the talks were “very polite,” although the AIDS activists had clearly indicated their “mistrust of the pharmaceutical industry in general.”
BY IMMERSING THEMSELVES in the minutiae of new medical developments and by constantly publicizing their cause through protests covered by everyone from the Times to “60 Minutes,” these activists had achieved a revolutionary shift in the government’s approach to experimental drugs.
This was an extraordinary achievement, and it would prolong thousands of lives into the new decade.
In the program notes for one of GMHC’s earliest benefits, Paul Popham wrote, “I think the most impressive thing I’ve seen over the last year and a half is how affectionate men have grown. We are finding out who we are, what we can do under pressure. And that we’re not alone. … Although we’re paying a terrible price, we’re finding in ourselves much greater strength than we dreamed we had.”
For many straight Americans, the epidemic had transformed the prevailing image of gay men—from sex maniacs into caring, ingenious and grieving human beings. As the gay author Andrew Tobias put it, “It’s pretty hard to hate people who have this run of bad luck.”
Barney Frank, a congressman from Massachusetts, publicly declared his homosexuality during the sixth year of the epidemic. He told Jeffrey Schmalz of The New York Times that while he remained in the closet, his colleagues were often sympathetic when he lobbied them on gay issues, but they rarely took him very seriously. “The pain gay people felt was unknown,” Frank explained. “We were hiding it from them. How the hell are they supposed to know when we were making damn sure they didn’t?”
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