GMHC’s first president, Paul Popham, was a former Green Beret, a decorated veteran of the war in Vietnam, a businessman, a Republican, and a person of traditional values who was trying to remain in the closet. He wanted GMHC to remain strictly a service organization and not to become entangled in political advocacy of any kind. Larry Kramer—who had scorned gay politics throughout the seventies as not “chic,” denouncing the movement’s “pitiful marches” as consisting entirely of “loudmouths, the unkempt, the dirty and unwashed”—now, ironically, was the person in GMHC most strenuously calling for aggressive advocacy. Kramer also believed—as he’d already emphasized in his novel Faggots—that gay men piggishly “fucking their brains out” would, if it turned out that AIDS was transmitted through a virus, further decimate the community.13
Kramer was essentially thrown out of GMHC, which had rapidly become the largest AIDS organization in the country. Ideologically, his insistence that promiscuous gay men change their behavior ostensibly aligned him with the Sonnabend-Berkowitz-Callen axis, but that wasn’t an alliance either side particularly wanted. Kramer condemned all gay male promiscuity as unseemly and immoral, whereas Rich and Mike had celebrated sexuality, including sluthood, as a source of personal and political liberation—though fearing that the onset of the epidemic promiscuity had become too dangerous medically. Mike appreciated all that Kramer, who he personally knew, had done to alert the community and felt that “his heart’s in the right place.” But he also felt that Larry suffered from “ineptitude or tone problems” and that “ineptitude can actually be responsible for killing people. . . . The trust of a person is really a weighty thing.” As he put it to Berkowitz, “what’s making Larry frantic and sputter, is that no one is taking him seriously”—which was surely an exaggeration.
Mike wanted GMHC to pay for safe-sex posters to be put up in bathhouses and bars—posters that described in more detail which practices among gay men, like being the recipient in anal intercourse, were riskier than others. It should be remembered that in these early years of the epidemic Mike seemed to more established members of the organized gay community as a nobody who’d come out of nowhere—a legal secretary and part-time cabaret singer with no specific medical or scientific expertise (though he was in fact becoming far more knowledgeable than many of the self-proclaimed “experts”). GMHC did contribute a little money to the safe-sex posters but balked at the suggestion of explicit language warning against anal intercourse. The GMHC board feared it would be generally misread as “airing our dirty laundry in public” as well as interfering with individual decision making in particular. That didn’t satisfy Mike. He was in favor of the revolution and of individual choice, but also in favor of staying alive and helping others to do so as well. He and Rich were friendly with Howard Cruse, the gifted gay cartoonist, and Cruse volunteered to do a poster with more concrete graphics.
Along with his other activities, Mike got involved with the AIDS Network—an umbrella organization made up of representatives from various groups, including GMHC—that formed in the summer of 1982 to deal with a variety of civil rights issues; it was headed by the gifted, forceful Virginia (Ginny) Apuzzo, current head of the National Gay Task Force. Mike thought that Ginny, an ex-nun and ardent feminist, had “tremendous political savvy” and regretted that the same wasn’t true of the leadership at GMHC. He enthusiastically applauded GMHC’s army of volunteers but thought much less of its public representatives.
In these first few years of the epidemic, causes and treatments alike were essentially unknown, and the sharply rising number of those afflicted paralleled a heightened increase of terror. One measure of the desperation that was becoming widely felt was the increased willingness to try any sort of nostrum rumored to be beneficial. It became commonplace, as fear mounted, to volunteer for a wide array of treatments. One doctor in San Francisco started giving his AIDS patients huge intravenous doses of vitamin C, based on a Linus Pauling protocol for cancer; another experimented unsuccessfully with using DNCB (a photochemical used on warts) for KS lesions.
As panic mounted, so did internal squabbling. As usual in such circumstances, raging helplessness found its most available targets close at hand. Mike was far more sensitive to people, and more generous about their apprehensions and actions, than either Berkowitz or Sonnabend. Both of them, for example, disparaged Dr. Larry Mass. Berkowitz—and Sonnabend still more so—insisted that Mass, in Sonnabend’s words, “doesn’t have the credentials to be writing in this area. . . . It’s a highly technical subject. . . . He actually makes me angry.” When Mass told Sonnabend in one long discussion that “there’s so much epidemiological stuff for the single virus” theory, Sonnabend reported his own reaction as: “Well, like what? And we waited and he had nothing to say. Just silence . . . his intellect [isn’t] working . . . his intentions are good . . . he wants to help . . . he’s not a bad man.” Mike told both Berkowitz and Sonnabend that they were being “arrogant” and predicted that “before it’s all over with [Mass will] be on our side.”14
Much as Mike admired Sonnabend, at this early point in the epidemic Mike felt it important to emphasize—adapting the view from feminist health manuals like “For Her Own Good”—that in truth “there are no experts,” or if there were, then “we are the real experts. . . . We need to have forums on creative and medically safe ways to have sex: lovers, condoms, jerk-off clubs, closed circles of buddies are just a few of the creative and safe alternatives.” A devout believer in self-empowerment and in political representation of the disenfranchised, Mike found it shocking that no members of the GMHC board were themselves PWAs (the first PWA wouldn’t be elected to the GMHC board until 1987). Mike strongly disapproved of what he regarded as the organization’s dishonest attempt to soft-pedal the truth about gay male sexual practices and to exaggerate the threat of AIDS to the general population; Larry Kramer had at one point declared that the epidemic could just as easily have happened to housewives in New Jersey. The attempt to mainstream AIDS based on the few cases that had as yet appeared among heterosexuals was in Mike’s view mendacious. He was a consistent truth teller. He rejected the argument GMHC and others were pushing—in order to extract increased federal funding—that the spread of AIDS to the heterosexual world was imminent. (For complex reasons still not well understood, that did become true in Africa, but in the United States AIDS was and remains primarily a disease that disproportionately affects gay men.)
Sonnabend insisted from the beginning that the notion the country was on the verge of an explosion of AIDS into the heterosexual world was “rubbish.” He predicted, moreover, that spreading such a notion would have serious consequences: a significant uptake in violence against gay men as the “originators” of AIDS, a bizarre spiral of accusations within the straight world, and a woeful neglect about the true cause of AIDS transmission. Joe told the story of a call he got one day from a man who’d been with a female prostitute three months before; he wanted to know if it was safe for his daughter to drink out of the same glass as he did. Heterosexuals who did come down with AIDS in the coming years by and large became infected through IV drug use, contaminated blood products, or same-gender “adventuring”; for women, through sex with an infected male partner (some bisexual men, in an effort to keep their male-to-male sex secret, would insist they were strictly straight); or, finally, a female passing the infection to a male, which would remain exceedingly rare. Since people often don’t tell the truth about drug use or sexual activity, it would be many years before panic about a heterosexual epidemic could be laid to rest. In 1984, for example, there were exactly four purported cases of men getting AIDS from sex with women; in 1985, the figure went down to two; in the 1990s, about fifty such cases were claimed, but researchers and scientists came to agree that nearly all of them were men who injected drugs or shared hypodermic needles. Sonnabend—and Mike as his surrogate—were widely denounced for putting a damper on the notion of a heterosexual plague, but they went right on speaking the truth
as they saw it. And science has largely validated their view.
In San Francisco, Bobbi Campbell (“Sister Florence Nightmare”), a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a gender-queer group that sported religious garb, was one of the city’s first diagnosed cases of AIDS, and the very first to go public as a PWA. Early in 1982 Campbell began a column in the San Francisco Sentinel describing his experiences and offering recommendations to others. Like Mike Callen, Campbell had continued to believe that sexual liberation—sex as recreation and pleasure—should remain at the heart of the gay movement. Both men also agreed that sexual freedom had to include responsibility for one’s own health and that of one’s partners.15
As Mike said in a speech early in 1983: “Walking into the baths and backrooms with the delusion that you can check your responsibility at the door with your clothes is an act of personal and cultural suicide. Either you do not love life or you do not know death. What is over isn’t sex—just sex without responsibility.” What was now needed, he went on, was to “begin to formulate a long overdue sexual ethic. . . . The formulation of this ethic will require a change radical in its simplicity: We will have to talk to each other. Yes, even before sex and maybe even after. And we will have to learn to listen to each other. . . . Our challenge is to figure out how to have gay, life-affirming sex, satisfy our emotional needs, and STAY ALIVE. Hard questions for hard times, but whatever happened to our great gay imagination?”
Dr. Marcus Conant, a dermatologist in San Francisco who would become a leading figure in the struggle against AIDS, had a patient named Dan Turner who’d also been diagnosed early. Conant suggested that Campbell and Turner meet each other. Along with a few other PWAs, they gathered at Turner’s house in the Castro hills, and out of that meeting emerged PWA San Francisco—the first organization “of, for and by people with AIDS.” The principle was thus established that “people with AIDS themselves should be an integral part of AIDS service organizations,” a principle not yet accepted at GMHC in New York, though a few board members (Paul Popham, for one) had already been diagnosed. The members of PWA San Francisco were asked to choose for themselves which boards to serve on. Bobbi Campbell went on the KS/AIDS Foundation’s national board, and Dan Turner was elected to the board of the San Francisco chapter of the KS/AIDS Foundation.
In New York, as Mike told it, he and other PWAs had been feeling “growing frustration” at attending GMHC forums where they’d “sit silently in the audience” and hear assorted “experts”—from doctors and nurses to insurance and social work specialists—tell them what it was like to have AIDS. “It would be akin,” he felt, “to having a conference on sickle cell anemia at which no blacks were asked to attend or participate.” Mike himself suggested to GMHC that it hold a forum on the impact of AIDS on sexual behavior. Initially GMHC responded enthusiastically, and both Mike and Joe Sonnabend were asked to serve on the panel. Feeling strongly that GMHC and its board members had a “low consciousness” about feminism, Mike urged that women also be included. Ginny Apuzzo and Gloria Steinem were then added—but both Mike and Joe “mysteriously dropped.” When Mike asked why, a GMHC spokesperson first denied that Mike had ever been invited and then told him that he’d “become too prominent lately.” Outraged, Mike viewed the occasion as “the beginning of real war” with GMHC.
It apparently occurred to several PWAs at the same time—including Artie Felson and Tom Nasrallah, who were reasonably well known in the community—that they were the true experts on AIDS and that they should make their voices heard. In the fall of 1982, Mike and Rich Berkowitz formed a New York City group called Gay Men with AIDS (GMWA). Its stated goal was “to support each other by sharing our personal experiences, our strength and our hope,” and it became oriented more toward therapy than politics. At the same time both Mike and Berkowitz joined the peer-run support group started by Dr. Stuart Nichols of Beth Israel Medical Center—possibly the first such group in the city. Another member of that group, Phil Lanzaratta, whom Mike adored and called a “sweetheart,” had already done a number of TV and print interviews and is sometimes called the “granddaddy” of the PWA movement in New York.
At roughly the same time, Mike, Berkowitz, and Sonnabend began to work on what became a self-published forty-page pamphlet, How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, which appeared in May 1983. Mike used the refund from his own tax return to pay for the publication; he found a typesetter on King Street who for a fee let him, Berkowitz, and Richard Dworkin use his IBM typesetting machine. They made it clear at the top of the pamphlet that their recommendations were based on the multifactorial theory of AIDS but claimed—accurately, as it would turn out—that the guidelines would prove equally valid for reducing risk of contagion even if a new, as yet unidentified, virus was discovered to cause the disease. Whichever theory you believed, they emphasized, promiscuity was central to the health crisis. The National Cancer Institute had itself reported that “AIDS is occurring in a specific subset of homosexual men, possibly but not exclusively defined by the number of lifetime sexual partners.” Repeated exposure—whether to a specific virus or to an accumulation of infections—was at the heart of the matter. There were rumors of monogamous or sexually celibate gay men developing AIDS, but to date no such case had been produced. Nor was it accurate to say—as two articles in the left-wing Toronto-based gay paper, The Body Politic, had argued in 1982—that panic and “an anti-sexual sense of guilt” were blowing a minor health problem out of all proportion.16
As Mike put it, “I have tried to be a ‘good gay’ and ‘wear my sexually transmitted diseases like red badges of courage in the war against a sex negative society,’ ” but as the numbers of those afflicted with AIDS steadily mounted, the stakes had simply become too high. Too many doctors, moreover—and, in some of its printed material, GMHC as well—were advising gay men to “cut down” on the number of different sexual partners and to have sex only with “healthy” ones. But as Mike asked with exasperation, what specific behavior was being advocated by the advice to “cut down”? Does that mean three partners a week instead of six? Does it mean going to the baths once a month instead of once a week? And were gay men being advised to ask their partners if they were healthy? Besides, some infections, at least initially, were asymptomatic, and the partner might not know himself whether or not he was “healthy.” Even if he did know, “what does it say about our community that there are gay men having promiscuous sexual encounters knowing that they’re ill?”
A fierce debate would soon spring up within the community about whether to close down the bathhouses. When it did, Berkowitz would turn out to approve closure, but Mike would argue strenuously against. He wasn’t a believer, as he put it, in “legislating health risks; I have never and will never suggest such a thing.” But that didn’t mean that in the current crisis nothing at all needed to be done, and he tried to get safe-sex literature and condoms into the bathhouses. Most owners refused, arguing that “the atmosphere” would be “ruined.” In How to Have Sex, Berkowitz and Mike argued that it was essential—this was the pamphlet’s core recommendation—that one should avoid “taking in your partner(s) body fluids” (an injunction that resonates to the present day). That was the key to avoiding infection. The pamphlet emphasized that “sex doesn’t make you sick—diseases do. Gay sex doesn’t make you sick—gay men who are sick do.” Mike and Rich wanted gay men to examine their lifestyles, but they discouraged “misplaced morality masquerading as medical advice.” The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s had made it clear that sex and love are not inevitably or ideally linked, but “the 1970s,” they concluded, “are over. Taking ignorance to the baths and backrooms is not sexual freedom—it’s oppression.”
In the face of raging fears of contagion, the pamphlet gave lucid, detailed advice about what was or was not “safe” sex and also underscored the importance of talking openly with sexual partners (whether intimates or strangers) about which practices or behaviors were riskiest in terms of dis
ease transmission. The guidelines Mike and Rich suggested are still largely followed: sucking your partner without a condom isn’t 100 percent risk-free; fucking someone probably poses no threat, but one should always use condoms during anal sex for the bottom’s protection, though they weren’t designed for assholes and might rip during penetration; getting fucked without a condom posed the greatest risk; S/M practices almost never did; fist fucking, which could produce anal tears, could be “extremely dangerous.” Bathhouses and back rooms were full of disease, but if one wanted to partake, the four “musts” had to be followed: talking, washing, light, and condoms. Safest of all were “creative” masturbation, closed circles of fuck buddies, and jerk-off clubs.
In a transcribed phone conversation, Mike told Berkowitz that the more he became involved in politics, the less he felt he understood it. Why did it seem so impossible to separate issues from personalities? He told Rich that he’d done a lot of reading in feminist literature and as a result began to understand that you can disagree with somebody about an issue without insisting that the other person was “gross and disgusting.” He wished that more gay men would avail themselves of feminist insights: it would do wonders for cutting down the personal abuse that seemed to accompany the struggle against AIDS. He perhaps had in mind the comments made by Dr. Peter Seitzman, president of the New York Physicians for Human Rights, who’d written in the Native a few months before the publication of How to Have Sex about those people—naming Berkowitz and Callen—“whose guilt is shouted from the rooftops.” Mike was probably thinking, too, of Dr. Larry Mass, who’d characterized the two men as “sex-negative propagandists” intent on “blaming the victim.”
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