Gay Liberation and AIDS

The weather this past weekend was perfect. Balmy, yet with cool breezes in the evening that made the outdoor dining at South Street Seaport a delight. Harbour Lights Café overlooks the East River and the night view of the Brooklyn Bridge from the balcony is magnificent. I was attending a retirement party there of an airport supervisor from my former employer, Air Canada. I hadn’t seen many of my old friends in nearly 30 years. While it was certainly a treat reminiscing with them about the days of our youth, the evening held a bittersweet quality that I couldn’t quite shake off.So many of my former workers with whom I’d had my fondest memories were missing.They were all dead from AIDS. The Gay Pride Parade took place on Sunday on Fifth Avenue and, according to some reports, thousands attended this colorful parade of excess. New Yorkers and San Franciscans have observed these parades as a celebration of the political progress made by the gay rights movement. I have always found them extremely sad. Like a character in a P.D. James novel, I can’t help but see the skull beneath the face. I worked at Air Canada before gay liberation and before AIDS became an epidemic. Most of my male co-workers were homosexual. We traveled together, went to discos, and generally had lots of fun. Rarely was the issue of sex ever discussed because they were more than their individual sex drives. They were artists and actors.They were not closeted, just discreet. It didn’t matter, they were all my friends with great senses of humor. Then in 1969, five days after the death of Judy Garland, the Stonewall Riots and the advent of the gay rights movement changed the lives of my friends forever. One of my supervisors, a kindly, distinguished gentleman suddenly discovered that he could now meet others openly in gay bars in the West 70s on Broadway.The stigma was gone. It wasn’t long, however, before he was brutally beaten and robbed by a predator he picked up one night. According to the Randy Shilts book “And the Band Played On,” an Air Canada steward, Gaetan Dugas, dubbed Patient Zero by the Center for Disease Control, was responsible for many of the early AIDS victims in America. He was extremely promiscuous even after being diagnosed with the fatal disease. “I’ve got cancer,” he would say after he’d sodomized a willing partner. “I’m going to die, and so are you.” Mr. Shilts, who died of AIDS in 1994, wrote one of the most thoroughly researched pieces of investigative journalism in this book, which traces the AIDS epidemic from 1976 to 1985 and the death of Rock Hudson.Yet much of his warning to the gay community is largely ignored and one has to wonder whether this is deliberate or a case of “head in the sand syndrome.” Many gay activists harshly condemned Ronald Reagan for allowing the AIDS epidemic to flourish during his administrations. Larry Kramer is one of the most vocal of these critics and yet Randy Shilts asserts that the gay organizations consistently fought efforts to save homosexual lives.Voluntary testing, they cried, would be the first step toward slapping pink triangles onto homosexuals and marching them off to the gas chambers. Last year, San Francisco talk-show host Charles Karel Bouley II wrote an op-ed piece posted on Advocate.com that suggests the AIDS epidemic might have been averted if HIV had been treated like SARS. “HIV should have been treated like a fatal communicable virus, just like SARS is being treated, just like any deadly agent of infection — it should have been handled however the medical experts deemed best,not the politicians, not the shouting homos crying that their rights were being violated, not a generation of victims, not the civic leaders, not the business people, not talk-show hosts or writers like menone of them.” Mr. Bouley, who lost many of his friends to HIV, can write scathingly of his community, which he says screamed for sexual freedom “and got to continue having sex however we wanted.” The removal of the secrecy, the anonymity,came at a heavy price.More than half a million deaths in the U.S. and millions worldwide, he writes. “And in the past 20 years, did we find a cure to make it all better, to salve our guilt for letting it spread unchecked? Nope…. Today we have parties in bigger cities where people actually go to have sex with HIV-positive people: bug chasing parties. It’s criminal.” Mr. Bouley is angry, and over the years each death notice erased another bit of my heart. I, too, wonder what would have happened if the only thing the Stonewall Riots produced was more tolerance instead of a powerful selfcentered lobby. It was soon after the Stonewall Riots, that my friend Steve, an extremely talented artist who had just quit the company to pursue his dream full-time, told me: “I think it was Margaret Mead who wrote that sexual repression led to great art but that liberation would lead to deviancy. I’m about to prove her wrong.” Steve was not at the party.