Hold Tight Gently

by Duberman, Martin

  The black church’s predominantly hostile attitude toward homosexuality has too often been equated with that of the black world in general. Though the evidence is somewhat contradictory and limited, at some periods in regard to some issues, it can in fact be argued that blacks on the whole are somewhat less homophobic than whites. A New York Times poll in 1993, for example, found that 53 percent of blacks supported equal rights for gay people but only 40 percent of whites did—and a Gallup poll that same year found that 61 percent of blacks favored lifting the ban on gays serving openly in the military, while only 42 percent of whites approved. The African American writer Cheryl Clarke has persuasively argued that the issue hasn’t really been well studied but that “the poor and working-class black community, historically more radical and realistic than the reformist and conservative black middle class and the atavistic, ‘blacker than thou’ (bourgeois) nationalists, has often tolerated an individual’s lifestyle prerogatives even when that lifestyle was disparaged by the prevailing culture.”

  The black writer and TV commentator Keith Boykin, further, has pointed out that with “a few high-profile exceptions,” a significant number of black leaders—including Jesse Jackson, Joseph Lowery, Coretta Scott King, Julian Bond, and David Dinkins—have been strong and public supporters of civil rights protections for gay people. In the House of Representatives, moreover, the Congressional Black Caucus has led the fight against gay discrimination. In 1998 the Black Radical Congress adopted Principles of Unity that included the statement “Gender and sexuality can no longer be viewed solely as personal issues but must be a basic part of our analyses, politics and struggles.” Fighting heterosexism is coming to be seen as a deeper problem than fighting homosexuality.

  But back in the early eighties, support from the black leadership was much harder to come by. Gil Gerald, who headed the NCBLG, has provided a telling account of the group’s effort to join the planned march celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the historic 1963 March on Washington. The NCBLG’s board of directors voted unanimously to endorse the 1983 march—at the time, the only national gay or lesbian organization to do so. The established black leadership initially greeted the endorsement with dismay, not delight. D.C. congressional delegate Walter Fauntroy, who chaired the administrative committee of the march, scornfully compared lesbian and gay rights to “penguin rights”—though later, under pressure, he denied having made the remark.

  Gil Gerald decided to contact the march coordinator, Donna Brazile, directly about getting the NCBLG listed among the endorsing organizations and to suggest as well that a gay or lesbian speaker—probably the well-known writer and activist Audre Lorde—be added to the roster. Initially Brazile was reassuring, but she then began ignoring Gerald’s phone messages. Unable to get a response from Brazile, a frustrated and angry Gerald left word with her office that he saw no alternative but to “declare war.” He consulted with Ginny Apuzzo, the progressive executive director of the National Gay Task Force, and the two decided to apply pressure on individual members of the march’s steering committee.

  Apuzzo ultimately did manage to get the cooperation of Judy Goldsmith, then president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), with the result that NOW let it be known that it might pull out of the march if an agreement wasn’t reached with the gay and lesbian community. By then a half dozen national gay organizations had joined in the campaign for inclusion and both the Washington Post and the Washington Times carried stories about the ongoing struggle. Donna Brazile finally picked up the phone and asked Gerald if he’d be available for a conference call with the march leaders. Backed by Apuzzo and Ray Melrose, Gerald’s closest confidant, he agreed. But he felt it was “ironic that I, a beneficiary of their struggles with racism in the 50s and 60s, should now be attempting to teach them something about oppression and civil rights.”

  Among the march leaders participating in the call that day were Walter Fauntroy, Coretta Scott King, Dr. Joseph Lowery, Benjamin Hooks, Donna Brazile—and both Ginny Apuzzo and Judy Goldsmith. Gerald’s voice cracked when he tried to convey his “feelings about the devastation that AIDS was already having on the Black Gay community,” and to convey as well the poignant need of the community for affirmation. The two-hour conference call was successful in the sense that agreement was reached to have a gay or lesbian speaker during that part of the program called a “Litany of Commitment”—but not during the time allotted for major addresses. It was further agreed that individually, not as a group, the black leaders would announce their support for the pending—and even now still pending—National Gay Rights bill in Congress.

  After the conference call Gerald contacted a number of gay leaders—Essex was not yet well enough known to be among them—for their opinions, including Melvin Boozer, Ray Melrose, Dr. James Tinney, Billy Jones, Barbara Smith, and Audre Lorde, and got mixed reactions. Some felt additional pressure should be applied, others were satisfied with what had been accomplished, even though it wasn’t ideal. At the press conference preceding the march, Joseph Lowery introduced the scheduled speakers and made the unauthorized, matter-of-fact—and memorable—comment that “twenty years ago we marched, and one year later, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed. It is now time to amend that act to extend its protections to Lesbians and Gay Men.” Audre Lorde was listed in the official program as representing the gay and lesbian community, and from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, twenty years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, she spoke these resonant words:

  We marched in 1963 with Dr. Martin Luther King, and dared to dream that freedom would include us, because not one of us is free to choose the terms of our living until all of us are free to choose the terms of our living. . . . We know we do not have to become copies of each other in order to work together. We know that when we join hands across the table of our difference, our diversity gives us great power. When we can arm ourselves with the strength and vision from all of our diverse communities then we will in truth all be free at last.

  Back in 1982, Mike and Rich Berkowitz had helped form a small support group called Gay Men with AIDS, where those who were ill could share personal experiences and coping mechanisms with one another. They became aware, the following year, of the New York AIDS Network—formed by Harold (Hal) Kooden, Ginny Apuzzo, and Dr. Roger Enlow of the Office of Gay and Lesbian Health—with a different agenda: to serve as a political forum for sharing information and ideas. At one of the Network’s meetings, discussion turned to an upcoming national AIDS gathering called for May 1983 in Denver. Bobbi Campbell and others in San Francisco urged major service organizations like GMHC to sponsor one or more people actually diagnosed with the disease as delegates.

  The idea enthralled Mike. He may have been a self-described “bottom” but had never confused that with being temperamentally passive. “I knew,” he once said, “I was going to live or die by my wits and by my knowledge.” He believed deeply in self-empowerment in all areas and had already expressed anger at GMHC for failing to give those with AIDS a direct voice in its deliberations even as it provided them with immensely important services. As Mike saw it, GMHC had been treating them as “clients” and themselves as ladies bountiful, dispensing charity to the afflicted. Among other criticisms, he thought GMHC showed a racist disregard for less educated, poor black and Hispanic youth, “who cannot reasonably be expected to read between the lines of the white persons’ [vague] double-speak.”

  For its part, the majority of GMHC’s board was uncomfortable with Callen’s and Berkowitz’s determination to speak plainly about gay male promiscuity and the hazards of specific gay male sexual practices, regarding both as upstart radicals lacking the needed clout (and common sense) to court the white establishment. Though GMHC had refused Mike’s earlier request to help distribute copies of How to Have Sex in an Epidemic, its board did accept his suggestion for a local forum on “AIDS and Sexuality”—but then kicked him off the panel because, as Mike saw it, he “lacked the p
roper professional credentials” and was too controversial to boot.

  Mike and Rich both made it to the Fifth National Lesbian and Gay Health Conference in Denver in June 1983, thanks to a wealthy donor with AIDS who paid their way. Once there, they caucused with others from around the country who were now insisting on being called “People With AIDS” (PWAs)—not “patients” or “victims”—and together this group of about twenty drafted a manifesto that became known as the “Denver Principles.” At its heart was the feminist health movement’s credo that “there are no experts on peoples’ lives except those people themselves.”—which Mike would later come to see as an overstatement. According to him, they “stormed” (Mike’s word) the closing session of the conference and asked the nearly four hundred delegates (mostly health care professionals) that PWAs henceforth be regarded as having the “right to control their lives, their healing and their own destinies.” According to one newspaper account, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, and the keynote speaker, Ginny Apuzzo, had to wait ten minutes before the audience was able to compose itself. The PWA self-empowerment movement had been born.9

  An ecstatic Mike and Rich returned to New York and, once back in the city, placed an ad in local gay papers calling for the formation of “a rabble-rousing group of PWAs”—this was a full four years before the formation of ACT UP, with a comparable goal. As a result of the ad, PWA–New York came into existence, though due to a combination of deaths and internal dissent, it soon transformed into the PWA Coalition (PWAC). From the start, the coalition’s mission was in line with the goal earlier laid out in the historic “Denver Principles”: PWAs were entitled to full explanations from the “experts” so that they could make “informed decisions” regarding every aspect of their own treatment. It wasn’t till 1987, when GMHC began putting publicly identified PWAs on its board of directors, that the two organizations would work together much more harmoniously.10

  Mike and his San Francisco ally Bobbi Campbell had disagreed about one matter during the intense discussions in Denver. Mike had urged the inclusion of the principle “People with AIDS have an ethical obligation to apprise potential partners of their health status.” Campbell believed that the foundational axiom of gay liberation had been the separation of love and sex: “Hey, if you’re here in this bath house, that’s your business. You want to suck my dick, that’s your business, and I don’t have to tell you anything that’s going on with me.” Besides, Campbell insisted, people in a bathhouse or in a jerk-off session typically don’t talk, and “it’s silly to say you have an obligation to wave your hand and say, ‘Hello, everybody, I have AIDS.’ ”

  Mike argued that at the very least, one had the moral obligation to be truthful about one’s health in a dating situation, where the possibility existed not only of sex but of some sort of future relationship. He didn’t press the matter in Denver, not wanting to jeopardize the PWA group’s unity, but he continued to feel strongly that while gay liberation was based on sexual freedom, it was also based on bonds of brotherhood, on emotional concern for and connection to one’s fellow gays—even during brief, “anonymous” sexual assignations. “Affection is our best protection” is how Mike phrased it on a 1984 poster, a phrase he would repeat in many speeches.

  The debate about the separation of love and sex has a long history and was but one example of how AIDS came to represent a host of political issues and values that emerged from and yet transcended the disease itself. The very notion of self-empowerment was another. Many gay men—and particularly those more affluent white gay men who’d had no involvement with the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s—had often internalized deference to authority (including submission to the psychiatric view of homosexuality as “pathology”). Moreover, in a society that worshipped science, including medical research, some gay men had trouble believing they could or should play an active role in determining their own health.

  According to Mike, many of the women involved in the AIDS movement “got it instantly”; they immediately understood that scientists made real contributions but weren’t the ultimate authorities. Starting in the 1960s, feminists had established the view that patients should be partners in any policies or decisions relating to their own health and that women being in control of their own bodies was a political issue. (Later on in the AIDS movement, many focused on getting “drugs into bodies,” buyers clubs proliferated, and with the formation of ACT UP in 1987, the Food and Drug Administration came under direct attack for failing to accelerate the research process.)

  But Mike understood much earlier the underlying principle that people, especially the disenfranchised, had to become active on behalf of their health. After the Denver conference, he and Campbell spearheaded a self-empowerment movement that took the organizational form of PWA coalitions, culminating in the National Association of People with AIDS. Speakers went out to various venues, including colleges, to spread reliable information about how to continue to have sex, but to have it safely. The San Francisco AIDS Foundation headed up the movement on the West Coast, and in New York Mike had the inspiration for PWAC to sponsor a new publication, Newsline, which became widely read and kept readers up-to-date on a myriad of developments. Mike became both Newsline’s editor and the president of PWAC. He understood that most gay men remained closeted, unaffiliated with any movement organizations, and therefore unlikely to be abreast of the latest information. To reach them, he saw to it that Newsline was surreptitiously photocopied after hours in an unsuspecting law office and left anonymously in a wide variety of bars and public places.

  As the issue of whether or not to close down the gay bathhouses started to heat up in 1984, Mike agreed to become a member of the Safer Sex Committee chaired by Dr. Roger Enlow, director of the New York City Office of Gay and Lesbian Health Concerns. Mike thought Enlow self-important and defensive but felt the committee might itself prove influential. The controversy over the baths flared first in San Francisco, then in New York. On the West Coast, public demonstrations against closure (one protester carried a sign that read “Today the Tubs, Tomorrow Your Bedroom”) failed to stop the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s decision in October 1984 to close down the city’s bathhouses.

  To prepare himself for the debate in New York, Mike decided to give himself a tour of the bathhouse scene, marking the first time in two and a half years that he’d entered one. At his first stop, the Club Baths, he saw no one having unsafe sex but noted that its bulletin board had no risk-reduction information on it, even though by that point GMHC and the Safer Sex Committee had produced and distributed posters and brochures to dozens of establishments. He also noted that most of the customers were black or Hispanic and reminded himself that the Coalition’s materials needed to be translated into Spanish.11

  The East Side Sauna was his next stop. He had a West Villager’s “chauvinistic disdain for anything even vaguely ‘Upper East Side,’ ” but he did his “totally demoralizing” duty. The sauna was packed, but he saw none of the spontaneity and abandon that had previously characterized the bathhouse/back-room bar scene. A way of life was over. The expressions on the patrons’ faces reminded him of “the endless Life magazine photos of children of war.” An image stuck with him “of little boys lost—each wandering around aimlessly . . . holding on to his penis for what small comfort might be left in this hostile, frightening world.” Once again he found a bulletin board with various announcements tacked to it—gay Front Runners, tickets to an Alvin Ailey concert, and so on—but once again nothing at all relating to precautionary measures in regard to AIDS. And this time he did see some unsafe sex—men fucking other men without condoms.

  A similar scene awaited him at Everard’s, the oldest and best known of the city’s gay bathhouses. It was filthy and Mike could smell mildew and mold everywhere. “The management” had put up a number of signs: “No Drugs”; “We Reserve the Right to Refuse Admission to Anyone”—even one that urged the patrons to “Shower Between Contacts.” B
ut nothing at all was posted about AIDS and safe sex.

  After his grim tour of the bathhouses, which had proven utterly lacking in AIDS or safe-sex information, Mike launched into the debate about the pros and cons of closing the bathhouses. He understood the civil liberties issues involved and disliked the notion of authorities of any kind dictating permissible individual behavior. He also recognized that the bathhouses, ideally at least, represented a place where a cross section of individuals could meet: “I don’t want to make too much of the democracy of gay life,” he wrote in notes to himself, but where else but in a gay bathhouse “could you find a Park Avenue doctor and a Puerto Rican delivery boy, stripped of all outward appearances of social rank, naked in mutual need.” He knew, too, that the baths were among the few places where closeted or married men would allow themselves to go.

  Mike had also long advocated lots of sex as a necessary antidote to society’s erotophobia. He stood by the view that “bathhouses potentially promote healthy abandon”—but “potentially” was of course the sticking point. If the baths promoted disease as well as abandon and barred safer-sex information on the premises, weren’t they then a liability? Abandon could be achieved elsewhere. Then again, it was also true that it was safer—in terms of violence, not disease—to have sex in an indoor bathhouse than, say, in an outdoor parking lot prey to violence-prone homophobes.

  Mike insisted that in the original 1982 article he’d written with Berkowitz (”We Know Who We Are”), they’d “never suggested closing down the baths”—as their critics had claimed; rather, they were the first to warn about the threat of the government doing so. “Ultimately,” they’d written, “it may be more important to let people die in the pursuit of their own happiness than to limit personal freedom by regulating risk.” But that was in 1982. Mike’s recent tour of the bathhouses apparently led him to shift the balance and come down on the side of closure. “These men are too nice to die,” he now decided. The few patrons he’d talked to directly during his tour did not seem well informed about how AIDS might be transmitted or about how to protect themselves and their partners. And the bathhouse owners were obviously not going out of their way to enlighten them; they were, predictably, far more concerned with maintaining their margin of profit than with the health of their clients.