Frequently money appropriations requested were cut in half, or sat for months on the desk of Margaret Heckler, the secretary of health and human services.
She was, of course, following the wishes of her boss. President Reagan’s atitude toward gays and HIV was largely shaped by his political base. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell maintained that AIDS was a punishment from God. In Congress their attitude was pushed by Representative William Dannemeyer (R-CA) and Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC). It was reflected in the monies spent by the CDC: $1 million for AIDS, $10 million for Legionnaires’ disease. (The Legionnaires had logged fifty deaths; AIDS, a thousand).
When Rock Hudson, a good friend of Reagan’s, died in 1985, Reagan still didn’t mention AIDS. William F. Buckley, Jr., a staunch conservative and friend of Reagan’s, wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times in 1986 suggesting that HIV-positive gay men should have the information tattooed on their butt.
Considering the attitude of the government and its supporters, gay men paranoid about the possibility of concentration camps may not have been that far off the mark. The attitude of much of the government, and possibly the president, was “Let the pansies die.”
In San Francisco, it was like a war was going on, with the casualties hidden from the general public. Gays with AIDS either stayed in their homes, tended by friends and lovers, or else ended up in hospices, where their stay wasn’t all that long.
The community did its best to take care of itself. There were fund-raisers to help those who had locked themselves away, and for publicity and local education about how to have sex without dying from it.
The statistics were frightening. Almost three hundred deaths in 1983, twelve hundred in 1986. There was some progress being made on the medical front. AZT was an early drug that showed some promise, but many gays refused to take it on the grounds that it killed a number of its users.
AZT did not obliterate HIV; the most that can be said is that it postponed its effects. Some gays tried their own systems. One man I knew claimed that drinking his own urine was helpful.
A more practical approach was taken by Danny Nicoletta, a former helper in Harvey Milk’s camera shop. He watched his diet, took a combination of pills from the health-food store, and staved off the infection for years. He finally switched to protease inhibitors, a better drug, when his doctor warned him that his regime was staving off the effects of HIV, but wasn’t eliminating it. If his T-cell count fell below three hundred, then it was only a matter of time before he died.
Danny switched, his T-cell count rose to seven hundred, and there was no trace of HIV in his blood (which didn’t mean it wasn’t there—the virus was an expert at hiding).
After the death of her friend Rock Hudson, actress Elizabeth Taylor founded AMFAR (American Foundation for AIDS Research) along with Dr. Mathida Krim. Taylor concentrated on fund-raising and soon became an icon to the gay community. Before she died, she had raised $270 million, parceled out to researchers and different AIDS groups.
A turn in public opinion was engineered by Larry Kramer when he scripted The Normal Heart, which played for a year at the Public Theater in New York. It got rave reviews and reduced many in his audiences to tears. Kramer had been a gadfly for the New York Native, constantly suggesting that New York gays do more to pressure the government and the public to fight harder against AIDS. His main character, Ned, was patterned after himself, and other characters were similar to members of New York AIDS groups whom Kramer had pilloried in the Native. In a sense it was Kramer’s revenge against some of the New York AIDS organizations that he considered slackers. Once the play received an overwhelming critical response, Kramer was a hero to some and at least tolerated by others.
Over the years, several of the actors in the play died of AIDS (including Brad Davis, who had the main role of Ned). The character of Ned was a plum role and was played by a variety of actors over the years, including Joel Grey, who played the role of the MC in the movie of Cabaret and later reprised it when Cabaret hit the road.
After his run in The Normal Heart and role in Cabaret, Grey wanted to play Harvey Milk in a movie. When Cabaret played in San Francisco he asked Anne Kronenberg and me to meet him in his dressing room and talk about Harvey. I had to give him credit for trying, but I didn’t think it was ever going to happen. His voice wasn’t right and he was six inches too short to be a convincing Harvey.
(He was the second straight man to whom I admitted I was gay. The first was Dr. John O’Brien, who had the courtesy to look interested but also bored when I told him. We were both collectors—I collected old magazines and Dr. O’Brien collected military miniatures. He had filled his basement with pool tables loaded with armies of military miniatures and I even managed to accumulate a small army of my own.)
In addition to Kramer, there were other “civilians” who contributed both time and effort to fighting the plague. One was Ryan White, a thirteen-year-old hemophiliac who had been given six months to live. When White tried to return to his school in Kokomo, Indiana, parents and students objected. He fought the school system and became a poster boy in the fight against AIDS.
Ryan White gave everything he had, including his life. He died when he was eighteen, but he didn’t die in vain. Congress passed the Ryan White Care Act, which became the largest provider of services for people in the United States living with HIV/AIDS. I’m sure Ryan was thankful for the act but would have preferred to be alive.
Cleve Jones, Harvey Milk’s right-hand man with a bullhorn, was responsible for creating the greatest contribution to making the general public aware of AIDS. Jones had the idea for an AIDS quilt to be made by the parents and friends of those who had died. Each section was three feet by six on which memorabilia of the deceased were stitched to remind those who made it of the man they loved. Letters, photographs—anything that would serve as a memento.
In time the various quilts were stitched together to make a huge panorama of quilts. A few years later, when they unfurled it in Washington, DC, on the Mall before the Capitol, it covered the entire area—some eighty thousand quilts representing forty-five thousand gay men who had died of AIDS. It wasn’t just hairdressers and actors who died of AIDS, it was also the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, the cook, and the construction worker. One thing for sure: each quilt was far superior to a small white headstone in some soon-to-be-forgotten cemetery.
Theaters on Broadway did their part when they dimmed their lights for a minute to pay tribute to all of those who had contributed so much to the plays and musicals their audiences had just watched.
I think some parents didn’t want a quilt to remember their son because it might be a sign their son had been gay. But when Johnny came home in a casket, the neighbors could probably guess why.
Toward the end of the eighties, a number of survivors in San Francisco confessed that they had started to suffer funeral fatigue. Their friends would live on in their memory or in the quilt. But a funeral ceremony several times a week was hard to take, and a few refused to go.
One friend of mine threw a party before he died, inviting all his friends and telling them to take anything they wanted from his house as a memento. I couldn’t bring myself to take a thing.
I was losing friends outside the city as well as in. Craig Musser had gone to Paris, as had Rock Hudson, because they’d heard that researchers there had found a cure. They hadn’t, and Craig slowly died by inches on the East Coast. (His former lover Eric Ashworth died of AIDS at age thirty-nine.)
For myself it was like flipping over dominoes. One by one my friends disappeared, and Castro Street was looking strangely empty. They still had a parade every year, but eventually I couldn’t bring myself to go.
The final total for the country of those who had died of AIDS from 1980 to 2012 was 636,000. That’s roughly equal to the total who died in the Civil War (on both sides). The total of deaths from AIDS in San Francisco was close to 20,000. The community had been decimated.
They weren�
��t old men—they were young men who had yet to contribute the most to their country. Eventually various states in the country repaid their sacrifice by making it legal for gays to marry those they loved.
The last one of my friends to go was Tom Youngblood, whose Indian heritage had been of no help at all. We had a small breakfast club that used to meet every morning, and Tom would always be there. He hadn’t appeared for a number of days now and we’d begun to worry.
Then one morning he dropped in. Or rather, a shadow of him did. Gaunt, shaky, but determined to show up. All of us knew why. Tom had come to say good-bye.
We said all of the appropriate things, shook hands all around, and he left. That afternoon he went to his bedroom and took the pills. Who he got them from, I didn’t know. But doctors who had dedicated their profession to saving lives were now in the position of watching every single one of their patients wither and die. There was nothing they could do. If they knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that their patient was terminal, they probably made it easier for them to slip away. The part of the Hippocratic Oath, “I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it,” no longer applied.
A friend of Tom’s sat with him as he died, then two weeks later did the same thing.
I had no tears left. I no longer went to funerals, I no longer searched for familiar faces on the street. There weren’t any. I had lost every close gay friend I had since coming to San Francisco.
No exceptions.
There was no way that thousands of people didn’t know somebody who had died of AIDS or of somebody who had lost a son to the disease. Being gay was no longer a subject of humor or of violence. They could be the boy next door or the man who fixed your car.
Cleve deserved a lot of gold medals for his work with Harvey, but the biggest medal of all should go to his creation of the AIDS quilt. If there was one single event that started the ball rolling to change the attitude of Americans toward homosexuals, the AIDS quilt was it. It wasn’t just the hairdresser who had died. It was the son of your next-door neighbor or the kid who waited on you at McDonald’s.
The quilt on the Mall was probably the first time that Americans realized the death toll among their fellow citizens numbered in the tens of thousands—and growing.
Tolerance and awareness of gays was also growing, but the gay community had paid a horrendous price.
XXVIII
AFTER THE LAST book we wrote together, Tom Scortia moved to Los Angeles to try to make his mark in Hollywood. He had made connections with Gene Roddenberry and said they were going to make a film (predictably a science fiction film) together. My guess was that Roddenberry was impressed with Tom’s extensive experience in the aerospace industry. A few months later, Tom talked of a lawsuit against Roddenberry, claiming he was doing all the work and Roddenberry was doing nothing. I thought that when Roddenberry had lent his name to the project, he’d done his half.
Tom went back to writing books, the first of which was titled Blowout. It was not going well for him. Tom was sick and getting sicker by the day. Some days, according to his adopted son, JJ, he could only write a few lines and then go back to bed.
At first he refused to see a doctor. His brother had died in a hospital, which had left Tom with a deep prejudice against them. By the time he finally agreed to go, it was too late.
As a writer Tom was an “idea” man, expert in plotting and characterization. His only fault was that once the book was plotted, in Tom’s eyes it was done. I was the cleanup man who did the elementary editing and polishing.
In many respects, he was a great man to work with. He drank too much and smoked too much, but that didn’t affect his professional life. He was a heavyset man, not particularly athletic, “nice-looking” (as my mother might have said but not what she would have called handsome), a great raconteur to bullshit with. His major flaw, which I think affected his life, was that he was not the first man you’d look at in a gay bar.
Great abdominals and a handsome face were of much more appeal than the ability to hold your own in a conversation. (Conversing in a gay bar is usually at a mininum.) I once took him to one of my doctors, who later told me he’d never met a man who hated himself so much. Tom’s friends had a much higher opinion of him than he had of himself. His background in aerospace was of immense help in writing science fiction, but of little interest to the man sitting next to him in a bar engrossed in his glass of beer and the hot number standing in a corner by himself.
I think Tom would have given a lot to be the man in the corner.
I finished Tom’s novel for him, and that was the last of our collaborations.
I had written one novel by myself (The Power), which did well, and now I was faced with the prospect of working alone. I looked forward to it. Critics who reviewed the books by Tom and me had usually typecast them as “disaster” novels—what’s the disaster, who lives, and who dies.
In my first solo effort after Tom had passed I swore to myself that it would be a story based largely on character. I hated the title—The Dark Beyond the Stars (suggested by fellow pulp collector Bill Trojan)—but with time learned to love it. It was about a spaceship looking for life among the stars. It’s been traveling for two thousand years, which meant that the crew—who had an ordinary lifetime—had to breed the next crew.
There was one exception: the captain was immortal and had been brainwashed at launch not to come back to Earth until he’d found life on another planet. The crew wanted to go home—the ship was falling apart, and while they would never get back to Earth, their descendants might. The captain intends to take the ship across “the Dark”—a section of space with no stars in view for thousands of light-years, though there are some on the other side. The crew knows the ship will never make it and is ready to mutiny. But the captain is unable to change the indoctrination he’d received on Earth.
Any kind of a ship with a mutinous crew is hardly original—the Bounty had beat me by years. The fun—and original—part for me was what the crew would be like after two thousand years. How would they interact with one another? How different would they be from the original crew? There would be no divisions when it comes to sexuality—there would be straights, gays, and bisexuals among the crew, and all of them would be accepted as totally natural. Impregnation and the birth of babies would be a religious affair, with multiple impregnations so no man would know which baby he’s fathered. My best line: “The father is the one who takes an interest.”
It was the line that hit the closest to home.
I told the plot to an editor I’d met at a science fiction convention in New Orleans. He was wildly enthusiastic, saying “put it up for auction and I’ll bid it in!” Unfortunately, he’d had too many hurricanes, which erased his part-time memory. When I got home I sent ten copies of the manuscript to my agent, asking him to auction it. Of the ten, six were returned unread. Three were rejected. The last was accepted primarily because a publisher’s stringer editor in San Francisco (Debbie Notkin) liked it a lot.
The book received great reviews, won the first Lambda Literary Award for “Gay Men’s Science Fiction/Fantasy” (I knew some of the judges so in part it was a put-up job), and was chosen as a “Notable Book of the Year” by The New York Times. It’s still available from Amazon twenty-two years later.
The next one I liked almost as well. Waiting. What if Neanderthals (in the book called “the old people”) were still living among us, breeding true so they remained a different species? And since they were here first, what if they wanted their world back?
That was long before researchers discovered that all of us have a few Neanderthal genes. For a while scientists thought we might have killed them all when Homo sapiens came up from Africa. It seems they interbred and Neanderthals were swamped by the (my hopeful guess) gorgeous-looking Homo sapiens women.
One benefit: Neanderthals had lived in Europe and the Levant for hundreds of thousands of years and had become immune to most of the local diseases. They passed tha
t immunity on to us—otherwise Homo sapiens might be just a footnote in some other species’ history book.
My last solo fiction book was something of a potboiler, a throwback to the type of book Tom and I usually wrote. Titled The Donor, it concerned the richest man in Boston, who has a disease and is doomed to die at fifty or sixty or so. He has himself cloned twice and plans on raising the two boys as a donor bank when needed. One boy, who’s already been operated on for a spare kidney that the rich man needs, escapes and the story becomes who finds who first.
I thought it was a great idea. Unfortunately, the publisher forgot to set two pages of type, so I sent him hard copy on both. When I got the book itself I had a fit—they’d set the two pages, but nobody had read them; they’d relied on “spell check.” All the words were spelled right, but five or six of them were the wrong words. Our heroine is talking to her boyfriend and suddenly breaks into fractured Greek (or whatever).
Predictably there were few reviews, no chance with Hollywood, and few sales or recommendations. Readers are usually alert even to typos, and this book was beyond the pale.
Most authors have friends who want to be writers, and I had two. The first, John Levin, was a winner. The Great Divide’s premise was as follows: The East has a political grip on the country but the West has most of the natural resources. The governor of California plots for the West to secede and support their economy by trading with Pacific nations, rather than letting the East bleed them dry. The president is a drunk, the veep has a bad ticker, and most of the action is carried by the veep’s chief assistant.
Both of us thought it would be a winner and a cinch for a movie. And what could be more relevant with modern-day Texas making secession noises and California realizing that most of its trade is with Japan and China?
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