by Dale Peck
13
November 12, 1996
Dale Peck
92 St. Mark’s Place, #4
New York, NY 10009
tel: (212) 388-0461
fax: (212) 254-5717
Letters to the Editor
Magazine
The New York Times
229 W. 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036
To the Editor:
It is understandable that Andrew Sullivan, as a P.W.A., should invest a great amount of hope in protease inhibitors; but, as a journalist, he should have known better than to forecast the end of the AIDS pandemic based on a treatment regimen that, in the first place, does not work for everyone who tries it, in the second, is not available to the vast majority of people with H.I.V. and AIDS, and, in the third, has only been in serious testing for one year. That protease inhibitors have had profoundly beneficial effects for many P.W.A.s is cause for celebration and perhaps even for hope; nevertheless, an enormous amount of research still needs to be done on these and many other drugs, and a prediction of victory in the battle against AIDS—let alone victory itself—is still years away. Mr. Sullivan has cottoned on to a mood among certain persons involved in the pandemic and distorted it into a manifesto that is in reality not much more than a wish-fulfillment fantasy. And, while I pray that Mr. Sullivan is in fact correct in his predictions, prudence—and, more to the point, an attentiveness to scientific fact—would have served better than the three or four mini-biographies of P.W.A.s he offers instead. Empathy probably won’t hurt anyone struggling with this disease, but it won’t help them much either, and it won’t cure anyone.
Dale Peck
14
I was a foot soldier in an army small enough that the generals and the grunts were in daily contact with each other—at its peak, there were perhaps a thousand people at ACT UP’s Monday night meetings, and only one or two actions a year managed to get even half that many people on the streets. I’d say I was the equivalent of cannon fodder, but that’d push the metaphor into an uncomfortable place—the truth is I had a better chance of surviving this war than far too many of my peers. Like a centurion quaking when Caesar inspected the ranks, I stammered in the presence of Larry Kramer—the only man I have ever known whom I consider a hero—and felt blessed, anointed even, when he deigned to know my name. I make no claims for my time in ACT UP (or Queer Nation, or Pink Panthers, or WHAM!, or any of the other offshoots and unofficially affiliated groups that sprang up in the early nineties). I wasn’t a founder or a leader. I had no ideas, did no heavy lifting, acquired no specialized knowledge, took no extreme risks, committed no felonies in the name of civil disobedience (I was arrested three times, spent perhaps twelve hours total in jail, another couple in court; in all three instances I received an ACD, or adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, which is the judicial equivalent of a slap on the wrist, except there’s no slap). All I did was give thirty or so hours of my time each week: in meetings and marches; at actions and demos; working phone trees; xeroxing and stapling flyers; assembling bleach kits for addicts to clean their works and exchanging new needles for used ones; patrolling the streets of the West Village to deter gaybashers. And I educated myself: for three or four years I read almost nothing that hadn’t been published in the previous decade or been written by a gay man or lesbian or bisexual or transgendered person—everything else lacked urgency to me, seemed so divorced from the present moment as to lack all meaning in a world that was being remade before my eyes, by a disease, and by the people fighting it. I was a body and a voice and, for the first and last time in my life, an unconflicted believer. If I go to my grave thinking that I never did anything more important than what I did in ACT UP when I was twenty-two and twenty-three and twenty-four years old—and so far nothing has come close—I will go to my grave happy, and proud.
It was an idyll in hell: either the best possible circumstances under which to be young, or the worst. Well, of course it was the worst: more than 300,000 dead before combination therapy appeared in 1996. I refer only to this country, of course, the epidemic in Africa being both so vast and so undocumented that the estimates of fatalities and infections were (and continue to be) rounded off to fractions of millions. But in the United States of the early nineties, where war was an affliction of the past and natural disaster a vagary of the future, AIDS was the shadow shackled to day-to-day life. Nothing had so reshaped the way Americans lived their lives since the radical redefinition of intimacy that was the sexual revolution; and like that earlier war, the AIDS epidemic began in a few localized populations but quickly made its mark on all levels of society. Conservatives will tell you that it was, in fact, the sexual revolution that made AIDS possible, if not inevitable, but the truth of the matter is that people have always fucked in ways not sanctioned by political authority, and if you want to blame the plague on anyone—besides your elected leaders—then blame the Wright brothers (but please, please don’t blame Gaëtan Dugas). I do think, though, that the (perhaps necessary) naiveté that informed the sexual revolution profoundly deepened the psychic impact of AIDS. A quarter of the population of Europe died from bubonic plague, after all, but by and large the population’s faith in its traditional institutions wasn’t shaken, because rats had never been one of those institutions. But Americans, straight as well as gay, had chosen to believe in sex: we’d decided, in fact, that it would save us. In a world that seemed to lack both god and benevolent politicians, we’d reclaimed a concept of Dionysian excess, christened it free love, and declared it humanity’s last hope. But before the bacchanal could save anybody—or fail to save anybody—it emerged that it was in fact killing us, and we were left with an enormous cultural experiment that had not been disproved as much it had been destroyed. Our prophets held up their books and icons, but the words had been erased now, the images rendered invisible. In the space of a few years the sexual revolution dissolved like the wetted Wicked Witch of the West: it caved in on itself, an empty dress collapsing in on its bodiless core, and the soldiers who had once fought in its service rushed to stamp on its remains.
So: yes. A bad time. But when youth syncs up with such epochal moments, a tone is set. The sexual revolution belonged to my parents’ generation, after all, and the first great wave of AIDS deaths affected a similarly aged population. I lost an opportunity, a context, but I didn’t lose the hundreds or thousands of friends that people a decade or two older than me did. And I got to be present at the birth of something new. Something that permanently changed the position of queers in American society, and less palpably but no less importantly, the way that society thought about sexuality and sexual identity. Compared to that, the information revolution seems to me a paltry thing, a mechanistic acceleration rather than a genuine change in the way people conceive of and live in the world. What I mean is, I recognize today’s teenage straight kids, who resemble the teenage straight kids of my generation, albeit in modern drag, but I don’t recognize many of today’s teenage gay kids, who have ways of being that didn’t exist or weren’t possible when I was their age. And you know what? That makes me feel great. Middle-aged, but great. Then, too, there was the fact that in addition to sex we (and again I mean not just queers but all Americans) had chosen to believe in an idea of statehood in which a government is beholden to its people. Notwithstanding conservative bluster about getting government out of the way, the same technological and demographic realities that made possible the global spread of HIV make necessary the intercession of regional bureaucracies on the part of the people they represent, and AIDS activists took the United States and a few European governments to heel for failing in their duties and shamed them into addressing the epidemic. If there was any way in which the first fifteen years of the western gay plague was the global phenomenon that Andrew Sullivan seemed to think it was, it was the way in which the activism it engendered speeded the development of medicines that remain the developing world’s only hope in the fight against this disease—even
as, two decades later, it remains mostly just that: hope.
When I think back to those days I think of Bob Rafsky (whose shattering eulogy at Mark Fisher’s public funeral was resurrected in David France’s How to Survive a Plague), gently coming on to me and then rejecting himself on my behalf so graciously that I felt like a better person.
I think of a man I met at a porn theater known variously as the Bijoux, Bijoux 82, or Club 82. We fooled around for a bit but the chemistry was off, and as I excused myself from the booth he asked me slowly, in a thick Eastern-European accent, “Are you HIV-positive, or HIV-negative?” I told him I was negative, and he gave me a nod that only a Slav could have pulled off without seeming creepy. “You’re the lucky one,” he said. My roommate put that on my thirtieth birthday cake a few months later.
I think of Gordon Armstrong, the Vancouver-based playwright I mentioned earlier. I met Gordon at a Chelsea sex club called Zone DK, where he quickly distinguished himself from the average encounter. His performance was so good that I invited him back to my place for a second round, and it wasn’t until we were in the cab that he asked me what I did and I told him—somewhat sheepishly, because my first book had come out only a few weeks earlier—that I was a novelist. He asked the name of my book, and I told him, and then, surprisingly, he asked if I’d heard of a news report the Canadian Broadcasting Company was making about artists and AIDS. I was surprised by this question, to say the least, because I was going to be interviewed for the report the very next day. I asked Gordon how he could have possibly known about it and was even more surprised when he told me that he’d been interviewed for it right before he came to New York. There were, I think, six artists filmed for this story, scattered across Canada and America. The chances that Gordon and I would meet while he was in New York on a weeklong vacation were astronomically low; the chance that the meeting would fall between our interviews made our hookup feel like kismet. That, plus Gordon’s obvious intelligence (not to mention the hour-long blowjob he gave me the following day before my interview), were enough to inaugurate a three-year epistolary friendship that produced the most remarkable correspondence of my life.
Another city, another sex club (actually about a year or so before my encounter with Gordon): I met Anthony and Sammy in San Francisco. The circumstances were charged to begin with: I’d run into Derek (of green mohawk fame) at Tunnel Bar in the East Village, and while Derek played pinball he told me how David had dumped him, leaving him with an extra ticket to San Francisco that, before his game was over, he offered to me. On our first or second night in SF I hooked up with Anthony in what I think had been the living room of a Victorian row house that had been turned into a sex club. As with Gordon, it wasn’t a typical encounter: Anthony was, as the Psych Furs sang, into me like a train, and soon enough I forgot we were in public—was surprised, when we finished, to look up and see half a dozen men surrounding us, jerking off as though we were putting on a show for their benefit. I needed that, Anthony said, it’s been two months since I had sex. Why? I asked, and Anthony leaned in and whispered something I didn’t hear. I asked him to repeat himself and he grinned sheepishly. I had to wait until the last zoster dried up, he said, louder, and after a moment I shrugged and asked him to invite me home. He had a boyfriend, Sammy. They didn’t live together, but Sammy called the following morning, and I had the amusing experience of listening while Anthony described what we’d done in the club and in his bed, at the end of which he said, Sammy wants to meet you. It turned out that Anthony was nervous about getting fucked by Sammy, who was HIV-positive, and since I’d decided as soon as I met Sammy that I was going to be the filling in that sandwich, I happily demonstrated my belief in safe sex (although I was probably lazier than usual, since I was already stuffed with the delicious plantain soufflé Sammy had made for dinner). The next morning we woke to the news of Jeffrey Dahmer’s arrest, the gleeful detailing of the body parts in the refrigerator and the vat of acid beside the bed, and the day I got back to New York I found a message on my answering machine—between a message from a telemarketer and another message from a friend of my roommate’s telling her that his boyfriend had died of AIDS—informing me that Farrar Straus and Giroux had made an offer on my first novel, even though my agent had pulled it out of submission more than two months earlier. With all that context, I’m sure I would’ve remembered the encounter anyway, but Anthony and Sammy moved to New York a year or two later, looked me up, let me know that my ease in bed had made Anthony more confident in the efficacy of condoms, and twenty-two years later they’re still together.
But above all I remember Derek Link. Of all the things I could tell you about him, the most relevant is that he was the first person I slept with who told me he was HIV-positive. He told me the night after we met, which is to say, the night after we had sex for the first time. That had been a Thursday, and I decided to skip work on Friday to hang out with him. We went out for breakfast at the old Odessa (I had French toast, he had pancakes). He said he had something to tell me and even as I guessed from his tone what it was he said: “I’m positive.” I use quotation marks here because I know these were his actual words: I recorded them on a piece of yellow paper ripped from a legal pad that I later tucked into a new journal. I was a sporadic journaler at best, usually starting one when I felt that something momentous had happened, and I knew that something momentous had happened here. Not that I had slept with an HIV-positive person, but that I had met someone great. Someone about whom I need manufacture none of my usual illusions to love. I already knew from ACT UP that Derek was a member of the inner circle of Treatment and Data, and that alone would have elevated him into an exalted position in my estimation. But it was what he had done before joining ACT UP that cemented my feelings for him. Or, rather, what had been done to him, because Derek, like me, had been a witness, a cog in a brutal adult machine, but unlike me he had not escaped unscathed—he had been gnashed and ground and all but chewed up in the machine’s gears. So great was the psychic torment inflicted on him, and so complete was my identification with him, that ten days after I met him I wrote in my new journal: “I know that I will write about us.” We only hooked up for a few weeks but months later I was still writing, not because I was carrying the torch but because I was convinced that Derek was “a more authentic version of myself.”
From that same journal, in an entry dated January 20, 1991:
I haven’t been really writing down what I know about Derek. I’ve concentrated instead on how I feel about him, and trusted that the mundane facts will remain in my memory. I feel a little guilty just contemplating reducing Derek to a list of historical facts that would begin: b. May 30, 1967; and therefore suggest the ending: d. _____, and I don’t really want to think about how soon that date may come. But, for the record:
DEREK LINK
• b. May 30, 1967
• HIV diagnosis: sometime in the summer of ’89, since he found out 2 months after graduating college when his best friend/sometime (or onetime) lover, Stephen, was diagnosed with PCP.
• Education: 7 years in English boarding school (11–18); 2 ½ @ Columbia, finishing up at Bard. BA in, I think, Art.
• Sex: Btw. 450–500 men. For the last 2 years, 50 men a year. Before that, 100. Likes bathhouses. Loves getting fucked, having cum on his face/in his mouth. Tells of groups of 8 or so boarding school kids taking turns tying one another to a wire box-springs and gang-banging the victim. Sexually active since 14. Out since 16.
• Before AIDS: Painting was his passion. I’ve never seen one. He doesn’t have space or time for it now. Sculpture, though, and architecture, are his 2 favorite art forms, though he doesn’t practice them, because they are 3-D, and therefore a tangible, unavoidable part of reality. He also played in an all–gay boy hardcore band (w/ Stephen).
• He was bashed in Boston in ’89. He could’ve died; his lungs filled up with blood. 4 boys beat him with sticks. None saw jail. He was awarded $20,000 in damages to be paid in installment
s. The 1st is 2 months late.
• Some work: He gave private art lessons to rich kids. $65/hour, ten kids a week. Also painted their portraits: $5,000 a pop. A lot of this money paid for Stephen’s health care. He’s got plenty in the bank too.
• Family: Jewish (changed name from Linkowitz). Father’s side has big $. Great-uncle converted to Catholicism and endowed the George Link Pavilion in St. Vincent’s. Dad sits on the board of some big company.
