by Michael Nava
“Josh had a date,” Theo replied.
Freddy stripped off his black leather jacket and tossed it on the couch. He looked, as usual, like a fucking god in his cut-off jeans, Doc Martens, and a form-fitting black QUEER T-shirt that clung to his heroic chest, flat belly, and big round biceps. A tattooed snake wrapped itself around his right arm, green and black and red, the flame-like tongue darting from its mouth just above his wrist. In the corner of his right eye was a tiny blue tattooed tear; “for the sadness of life,” he had told Theo in a rare, intimate moment. The snake? What did it symbolize? “My hard nine inches.” And just like that, the fleeting memory of Freddy’s cock in his mouth got Theo hard enough to cut glass.
Freddy smirked and asked, “A date? With who?” Before Theo could tell him about the lawyer Josh had been seeing, Freddy sprawled on the couch and said, “Get me a beer, babe.”
Theo went into the tiny kitchen and rooted through the fridge. There was only one Dos Equis left from Josh’s six-pack. For a moment, Theo hesitated. Whatever, he thought, grabbing the bottle. Josh was kind of a pussy so the worst he would do was bitch a little and let it go. Maybe he’d finally let the lawyer fuck him and come home in a forgiving mood. God knows, the lawyer was hot— old, but hot— though not as hot as Freddy. Why Josh hadn’t given it up to him yet Theo did not understand. He’d been ready to drop his pants for Freddy the first minute he set eyes on him. But that hadn’t happened. Not yet anyway. All Freddy’d let him do so far were hand jobs and a little cock sucking. God, he wanted Freddy’s dick up his ass, big time. But Freddy said, “Sorry, babe, you got the bug. Can’t take any chances.” That hurt. A lot. But he couldn’t exactly argue the point. The virus was like the snake on Freddy’s arm, slithering in his veins, filled with venom. He was lucky Freddy let him touch him at all. Maybe today Freddy’d let him go down on him again. He was so horny he felt like crawling out of his skin.
Back in the living room, on the sofa, Freddy’s legs were spread wide open and he was rubbing his dick through the worn fabric of the Levi’s cutoffs. Mesmerized, Theo handed him the beer.
“Thanks, babe,” Freddy said. He nodded at the glass pipe on the coffee table that Theo had forgotten to hide. “You high?”
“A little.”
“That crystal shit again? That stuff’s gonna kill you, m’ijo. Where do you even get it?”
He shivered with pleasure; he loved it when Freddy called him that. Freddy had told him it meant “my little boy.” “And I’m your papi,” Freddy had continued. “Your daddy.”
“It’s, you know, around. I need the lift some days.”
Freddy patted the sofa cushion and said, “Sit down, baby.”
Theo flopped down beside him. Freddy put a muscled arm around his shoulders and pulled him in close enough that Theo could swear he felt the heat of Freddy’s flesh rising from the collar of his T-shirt.
“You need a lift, huh? You feeling sick?”
“No, nothing like that, I swear. But you know some days it’s hard to think of a reason to get out of bed.”
“You should hit the gym, babe. That’ll get the endorphins going. Plus, you’d have a nice body if you worked at it.”
“Yeah, I used to. I look like shit now, though.”
Freddy took a slug from the bottle. “You’re okay. A little skinny maybe. Don’t lose any more weight. You don’t want to look like you’re wasting.”
Why did Freddy have to say that? Remind him of the spectral figures haunting Boystown, so wasted by AIDS they looked like x-rays of themselves? The look of death. It would happen to him, he knew that. Only a matter of time before he was one of the walking dead, and Freddy, who was negative, would still have his juicy body, those arms, that cock, that ass. He buried his face in the other man’s neck and breathed deeply.
“What are you doing?” Freddy asked, amused.
“Smelling you.”
“Do I stink?”
“No, you smell . . .” and words failed him. Theo had grown up in Riverside County, east of LA, and he remembered walking to school along a road lined with orange trees on spring mornings when the dew was still on the ground and the trees were in bloom. The sweet fragrance of the orange blossoms mingled with the musky smell of the damp earth and spilled through the air, thick as honey. Freddy smelled like that, sharply sweet and earthy but mixed with an animal swelter. He smelled like life. Theo’s own odor was thin and stale and chemical, a sickroom smell.
He felt like such a loser! Maybe he’d always been one though it hadn’t seemed so, back when he was so hot strangers would come up to him on the street, press little pieces of paper scrawled with their phone numbers into his hand and beg him to call them. Offer to pay. He’d enter a bar and people would whisper, that’s Brock Tanner— his porn name— recognizing him from his picture on the DVD cases. He felt like he was king of the world, but looking back, spreading his legs on camera didn’t feel like much of an achievement. Dancing on a platform in a smoky bar while strangers shoved dollars into his jockstrap, selling himself to some rich old fag, getting high with B-list actors at parties in hillside mansions he would never afford turned out not to be so glamorous after all when all the smoke and tinsel had cleared.
In the cold light of day, it turned out he’d just been another pretty boy thrown out by his family, with low self-esteem and something to prove. Because beneath the glitz was raw need. He’d fuck almost anyone, not for the sex, but for the scraps of attention they gave him, for the feeling of being wanted, for the voice calling him baby and the strong arms that held him after the sex. For a few minutes in that sentient darkness he felt— what? Loved? Yeah. Loved. But there was always the morning after. Putting on the party clothes from the night before that looked ridiculous in the light of day, smelling like sweat and cum, and stumbling out into the street, clutching, if he was lucky, the guy’s phone number but more often not even sure of the guy’s name.
God, he wanted another hit of meth. Freddy slapped his hand away.
“I told you that shit will kill you.”
“I’m going to die anyway.”
Freddy scoffed. “Is this how you want to go? Sitting in a room with the curtains closed, getting high and feeling sorry for yourself? Letting them win?”
“Letting who win?”
“You know who,” Freddy said. “The fuckers who are doing this to us. The fucking politicians and doctors who would as soon let the queers die as find a cure. Those asshole Christians who want to lock us up. The fags who think marching around with signs is going to save us. No one is going to save us except us. If we’re going to die, let’s take some of those fuckers with us!”
People in QUEER thought Theo was a loudmouth, but everything he said, he learned from Freddy. Freddy couldn’t be bothered to talk to those losers, but he encouraged Theo to speak out because someone had to remind them what was at stake when they descended into endless bickering about their so-called “actions.” The only action the situation called for was war; that’s what Freddy said: “If I could, I’d strap a couple of bombs to my body and walk into the White House and blow it up. Take a baseball bat to that fucker Jesse Helms and bash his head like a piñata. Take an Uzi into Falwell’s church and let loose. Let them suffer like we suffer. Let them bury their dead for a change.”
Theo loved Freddy’s passion— it got him higher than a bump of meth. He faithfully repeated in public what Freddy told him in private.
Now, as Freddy raged, “We should kidnap their kids and infect them. Turn their lives into graveyards for a change,” he rubbed his crotch in agitation. Gingerly, Theo extended a finger and touched Freddy’s dick. Freddy stopped talking, looked at him, smirked and unzipped his fly.
“This what you looking for?” he asked, pulling his hard dick out of his briefs.
“Can I . . . suck you off?”
Freddy responded by grabbing the back of Theo’s head and smashing his face into his crotch. Theo managed to get his mouth around Freddy’s dick.
“Yeah, fuck,�
� Freddy groaned. “Oh, yeah baby, just like that. Deep throat it.” He thrust his cock down Theo’s throat, holding down his head as he did, choking him. Slobber poured from the corners of Theo’s mouth, and he was gasping, his body twitching, but Freddy wouldn’t let go.
“Oh fuck, I’m going to come.”
He pulled Theo’s head back and splattered his face with semen. It ran down his chin with his spit and snot.
“Shit— go clean yourself up,” Freddy said, wincing with disgust.
In the bathroom, Theo beat off and shot a geyser of cum.
SIX
The courtroom was filling up. The judge had allowed TV cameras at the hearing, so the camera operators were setting up at the back of the room while the TV reporters touched up their hair and makeup and tested their mics. The print reporters squatted in the first couple of rows, notebooks out, eyes prowling the room for potential interviewees to supply provocative quotes. There would be no shortage of them after the judge announced his ruling.
For once, I was only a courtroom spectator, not a participant in the proceedings. The lawyers on the case were seated at their tables in front of the courtroom: plaintiffs’ counsel on the left, defendants’ counsel on the right. Their backs were turned to us in the gallery, but Kate Cassells’ bright red hair was instantly recognizable. Beside her, Wendell Thorne’s head was bent over a stack of papers. Across from them at the defendant’s table sat three white-haired white guys in impressive suits, staring directly ahead to the bench as though they’d been carved in granite.
The question before the court involved the interpretation of an obscure Election Code statute— not the sort of thing that ordinarily filled courtrooms. Six weeks before any election the secretary of state was required to mail to all registered California voters an official voter information pamphlet. Among other items in it the pamphlet contained the text of any initiative on the ballot and arguments for and against the initiative written by its proponents and opponents. The relevant statute said the arguments should not be either false or misleading.
In their argument in favor of Proposition 54, the proponents claimed: “AIDS is not ‘hard to get’; it is easy to get”; “Potential insect and respiratory transmission has been established by numerous studies”; and “There is no evidence for the assertion that AIDS cannot be transmitted by casual contact.” In other words, the supporters of the quarantine wanted 20 million California voters to believe you could catch the HIV virus from mosquito bites, shaking hands, or even breathing the same air as someone infected with the virus.
I was part of a roundtable of lawyers who’d met occasionally to discuss legal strategies to fight the initiative. The day Wen Thorne got wind of the casual transmission claims he called an emergency meeting.
“If they get this crap in the pamphlet,” he said, “we lose. What are we going to do about it?”
Our solution: an emergency lawsuit to have the statements declared false and the secretary of state ordered to strike them from the ballot pamphlet. That had led to this four-day hearing in front of Judge Leonidas Byrnes. Over the course of the proceeding a half-dozen experts, five on our side and one on theirs, gave the mild-mannered, seventy-something-year-old jurist an education in the sexual practices of gay men that often left him quite literally speechless.
“I’m sorry,” he said, after one exchange between a defense lawyer and one of our experts. “Did you say fishing?”
“No, Your Honor,” the witness replied. “Fisting.”
“And that means what?”
“The insertion of a fist into the anus,” defense counsel, playing to the media, said loudly.
For a moment Judge Byrne simply stared at him and then mumbled, “Is that even possible?”
“Oh, yes, Your Honor,” defense counsel continued helpfully, “it’s quite common among homosexuals.”
Wen Thorne jumped to his feet. “Objection to the characterization. There’s no evidence the practice is common or that it’s restricted to gay men. Moreover, Judge, there’s no evidence this practice transmits the virus. It’s completely irrelevant.”
“That’s true, Your Honor,” the witness said. “There are no reported cases of transmission through fisting. Given what we know about transmission, it would be, at best, a very low-risk activity.”
The judge looked at Thorne. “Mr. Thorne, are you asserting that heterosexuals also engage in this practice?”
The witness spoke up. “Yes, but it’s generally vaginal fisting, Your Honor.”
The judge nodded, then said, “Objection sustained. I think I need a recess. Ten minutes.”
And so it went, the defense attempting to drag out every ugly stereotype about gay men it could get into the record— child molesters, sexual predators, debauched sex fiends— while Kate and Wen tried to redirect the hearing to the actual subject matter of how people got HIV. The defense expert was a prim middle-aged orthopedic surgeon who had become famous when she refused to operate on HIV positive men because, she claimed, she was at risk of “aerosol” infection, that the mist of blood and air caused by surgical tools during orthopedic operations could transmit the virus.
Her claims were debunked, and she had been fired from the San Diego hospital where she worked. Now she made her living pushing a conspiracy theory that the medical establishment under pressure from the powerful “gay lobby” was lying about HIV transmission. According to her, HIV could be transmitted by any contact with an infected person. Wen and Kate had challenged her expert credentials— she had no experience as an HIV researcher— and had moved to have her testimony stricken, but the judge had allowed it, which seemed to me to be a very bad sign.
We had assembled this morning to hear Judge Byrne’s ruling.
From my seat in the last row of the gallery I watched people continue to file into the courtroom. Congressman Schultz, the author of the proposition, entered the room with a retinue that included a man who looked familiar to me. I saw him only in profile at first but when he turned in my direction, I recognized him as “Dan,” the man who had been looking for alternative treatments for his AIDS-stricken son. He saw me. Panic flashed across his face and he quickly turned away and burrowed into a seat on the other side of Schultz. I remembered how he had asked if someone in government could get his son into the AZT trials. A Congressman? Schultz? Who was this guy?
There was a commotion at the entrance to the courtroom as a group of QUEER activists flooded in, holding up cardboard pink triangles inscribed with the names of people who had died of AIDS-related disease, including Rock Hudson. The bailiff rushed them. Sensing trouble, I followed.
“You can’t have those in here,” the bailiff was telling Laura Acosta.
“Why not?” she asked. “This is public property.”
“Hello, Laura,” I said and then said to the bailiff, “I’m Henry Rios. I’m a lawyer and I represent this group.”
“Then you explain why they can’t be waving these signs around.”
The disturbance had attracted the attention of the media, and the TV cameras swung in our direction; the reporters began to circle like sharks.
“As long as they don’t pose a security threat or disrupt the proceedings, I don’t see why they can’t hold up their signs.”
“Holding up the signs does disrupt the proceedings,” he said.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ve tried murder cases where the families of the victims come in holding photographs of the victims. No one says anything about that. This is no different. The names on these signs are people who died of AIDS.”
“Sir,” he said, in the voice cops use before they arrest you. “I’m telling you they can’t hold up their signs.”
Wen Thorne approached us. “What’s going on, Henry?”
I explained the situation to him.
“Look,” he said to Laura, “I appreciate the support but I’m asking you to keep the signs down until after Judge Byrne makes his ruling. Then you can do whatever you want. If he comes out here
and sees there’s a demonstration, he could clear the courtroom or, worse, adjourn. It’s been a tough case. The last thing we need now is to piss him off. Please.”
Laura said, “We’ll caucus.”
They huddled in the corner for a few minutes of loud back-and-forth whispering and then returned.
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll keep them in our laps for now.”
“Thank you,” Thorne said, relieved but pissed off, too.
••••
The bailiff returned to his post and I to my seat. A moment later, the buzzer sounded on the clerk’s desk, which was the sign the judge was about to take the bench.
“Please rise,” the bailiff said. “Department 33 of the Los Angeles Superior Court is now in session, the Honorable Leonidas Byrne presiding.”
Byrne sat down, looked mildly surprised at the mobbed courtroom, and began to read from a paper on the bench. “This is an action for declaratory and injunctive relief by which plaintiffs seek to enjoin the secretary of state from publishing certain statements in support of Proposition 54, commonly known as the AIDS quarantine initiative in the voter’s information pamphlet for the November 1986 election. Those three statements involve whether the HIV virus can be casually transmitted by means other than by blood or semen. The relevant statute is Elections Code section 3576. Pursuant to that section, any statement that is shown by clear and convincing evidence to be false and misleading shall be deleted from the pamphlet.”
He looked up and paused, showing a keener sense of theater than I would have credited him with. “After listening to all the testimony, and considering the points and authorities filed by both sides, I conclude that the plaintiffs have sustained their burden and shown by clear and convincing proof that the three statements in question here are false or mislead—”
The rest of his words were drowned out by applause and hoots of approval from the QUEER activists.
••••
“Congratulations,” I said to Wen and Kate when I finally made my way through the crowd.
“Now all we have to do is win the election,” Kate said.
