Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle (55 page)

We followed him into the street. As we swarmed around the cars stopped for a red light, the surprised drivers looked at us with a mixture of bemusement and irritation. We ignored them, scattering ourselves among the vehicles.

"Act up! Fight AIDS!" I shouted as someone began the chanting. The honking began as soon as the light turned green. We stood our ground, continuing to shout and wave our signs. A few feet away from me, a skinny Puerto Rican man waved a sign proclaimingYOU

THINK THIS IS INCONVENIENT ?TRY DYING . Behind me, a woman shouted, "More trials, fewer deaths!"

It was bedlam. Cars honked. Drivers shouted obscenities. We shouted back. And as Max had predicted, all too soon the police showed up. At first, they tried to reason with us, asking us politely to come out of the street. When we ignored them, they began taking us one by one and dragging us to the sidewalk. But because there were only a handful of them, the process was ineffective, and as soon as they turned their backs to go after another protester, the one they'd just dragged away would return to the street.

We lasted maybe forty-five minutes. Then, on Max's signal, we emptied the street. The police watched us go, but didn't follow as we made our way back toward the subway. I looked back at the traffic, hopelessly backed up, and felt a rush of excitement.

On the train home I wore my ACT UP shirt for all to see and held my sign face out. The suit-and-tie commuters eyed me warily, as if I might at any moment begin to rail about the end of the world, or ask them for change. A few riders, mostly men, nodded at me approvingly. When I got home, I was still feeling the adrenaline pumping through my veins. I hadn't felt so alive in a very long time. Every part of me was trembling with forgotten excitement, and to my surprise, I realized I was unbearably horny. Afraid the sensation might fade if I hesitated, I stripped and lay down on the bed. With a sense of urgency, I jacked off, thinking the whole time of Max.

CHAPTER 54

By the end of 1987, ACT UP had become the main focus of my life. I was not unique in this. Many of the group's members spent the majority of their time planning, protesting, or meeting. When we weren't actively doing these things, we were thinking about them, and when we weren't thinking about them, we were feeling guilty about applying our resources elsewhere.

I did nothing about my attraction to Max. He was, I told myself, too young, too beautiful, too focused on our work to be interested in me. Instead, I threw myself into being the implementor of his plans. I made posters. I leafleted. I made calls and wrung donations out of the people who signed up for our mailing list, which seemed to double every time we made appearances at community events. I did whatever I could to ensure that Max's ideas were made flesh. Because I could not have him, I turned him into a reason to keep going.

At first, Jack and Todd found my interest in activism a relief. I was getting out. I was happy. I wasn't moping. They supported my efforts, and listened to my stories over dinner. They themselves were slightly wary of ACT UP's tactics, finding them too confrontational.

"I understand their anger," Todd said one night while we ate at Clare's in Chelsea. "The problem is, all people see is a bunch of angry queers getting in their faces. That's not likely to make them feel more kindly toward us."

"They need to know what's going on," I argued. "Until they know, they're not going to do anything."

 

"That's true," said Jack. "But don't you think there are less offensive ways of educating them?"

"Offensive?" I said. "What's offensive is that we still don't have a vaccine, we still don't have enough money for AIDS research, and we still don't have enough drugs. That makes me angry, and if someone doesn't like that I'm angry, then tough shit."

I'd gotten very good at being angry. Fueled by the message of ACT UP, I'd started to see the world as Usvs. Them. "Us" was anyone whose life had been affected by AIDS and who had decided to do something about it. "Them" was everyone else, including the apathetic gay men who did nothing while their brothers died. Them I despised most, because I believed them to be cowards. Hiding their heads in the sand, they waited for AIDS to go away so that they could get back to fucking and sucking without worry.

In early 1988, we began preaching the message of safe sex. Suddenly, rubbers were hot, or at least we tried to convince people that they were. Latex barriers were eroticized, and we proved it by holding demonstrations in which we rolled condoms onto bananas using only our mouths and donned examination gloves and simulated fisting. We let people know that sex was once more an option, although we knew that most of them had never stopped having it in the first place. It was Max's idea to promote kissing as an intimate act. Where before many of us had regarded it merely as foreplay, now it became one of the safer forms of physical connection. We decided to hold a kiss-in, where pairs or groups would make out for the edification of the masses, demonstrating both that mouth-to-mouth contact was not a means of transmitting HIV, and that it was one alternative to riskier activities. The first one was planned for the Friday before Valentine's Day, with groups gathering at strategic locations throughout the city.

I was assigned to Grand Central Station, where I went with Max and two dozen others. Spacing ourselves beneath the dome of the great hall, we prepared to shock the commuters who would soon be passing through on the way to their trains. It was dusk, and the lights that covered the ceiling above us glowed faintly, forming the astrological constellations for which the hall is famed.

"Who's your partner?" Max asked me as people paired up.
"I don't have one," I said.

"You're with me, then," he said, counting heads to make sure everyone was accounted for. I started to protest, but it was too late. As five o'clock neared and the streams of passersby grew noticeably heavier, we began our demonstration. Facing me, Max put his arms around me and pressed his mouth to mine. I stiffened, and he pulled back.

"You can do better than that," he said. "Just pretend I'm some guy you have the hots for."

We tried again, and this time I gave in, kissing Max passionately. He responded, slipping his tongue into my mouth and moving his hands lower on my back so that he could press himself into me. Oblivious to the stares of the people heading home to Westchester, Croton-on-Hudson, and Mahopac, we kissed without stopping for what seemed an eternity. When we finally stopped, Max cleared his throat and said,
"Do you want to take this back to my place?"

Few things spark passion as easily as revolution. In Max's bedroom, we explored lovemaking with an energy born out of our shared convictions. When his mouth moved down my chest toward my belly, I reminded him to beware the stickiness already seeping from my aroused cock, and when later on he entered me, it was with the protection of not one, but two, rubbers. Our ejaculate remained a safe distance from any vulnerable tissues, and afterward we cleaned ourselves separately and well. I expected our exchange to be a onetime event, and was surprised when Max suggested we do it again. I agreed, and soon we were regularly spending time in one another's beds. We became known as a couple within ACT UP, and it pleased me to watch Max lead an action or invigorate a group and know that he was my boyfriend.

Because it was an election year, our attention was on the race for president. Vice President George Bush (we had only the father to worry about then, and so did not feel the need to use either his initials or

"Sr." to distinguish him) had proven to be as ineffective and uncompassionate as his mentor when it came to AIDS, and we were dearly hoping for a changing of the guard in November. Encouraged by early polls that showed Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis leading Bush by a margin of ten points, we dared to hope that perhaps the tide was going to change.

Throughout the summer, we continued our campaign for safer sex and improved resources for PWAs. Max and I also added Dukakis to our list of pet projects, organizing several events within the gay community to raise both money and awareness for the beetle-browed governor of Massachusetts. We were constantly on the go, running from meeting to meeting, from march to rally. I had little time for anything or anyone else, and consequently saw little of Jack, Todd, or Andy during the first half of the year.

In August, the tide began to turn. We watched, dumbfounded, as Dukakis slipped in the polls, his margin narrowing point by point until, by July, it had been halved. In August, we sat glued to the television in Max's living room during the four days of the Republican National Convention. On the final night we watched as Bush officially won his party's nomination and took the podium for his now-famous speech. Standing before a crowd of adoring fans, he spoke in his familiar nasal twang. "This has been called the American Century," he declared, "because in it we were the dominant force for good in the world. We saved Europe, cured polio, we went to the moon, and lit the world with our culture. And now we are on the verge of a new century, and what country's name will it bear? I say it will be another American century."

"I don't think I can stand it," Max said, burying his head in my chest. I put my arm around him and held him while the former head of the CIA continued.

"This is America: the Knights of Columbus, the Grange, Hadassah, the Disabled American Veterans, the Order of Ahepa, the Business and Professional Women of America, the union hall, the Bible study group, LULAC, ‘Holy Name'—a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky."

"LULAC?" I said. "The Order of Ahepa?"
"Latin Americans and Greeks," Max said, sitting up. "He's just throwing everything in there." "Except gays and lesbians," I said.
"It doesn't matter," said Max. "He's saying just what America wants to hear."

He was right. Following the convention, Bush's numbers soared. His "Thousand Points of Light" speech was quoted everywhere. Dukakis and the Democrats attempted to bring the focus of the election back to the state of the union, but they had nothing to counter with. On election night, Todd and Jack threw a party, although since we expected defeat, the mood was more somber than celebratory. As we watched the numbers come in and saw the states on the graphic map of America turn red one by one, with only a handful of states going blue for Dukakis, we knew we had lost.

"Even California voted for that dickhead," Max raged. "What is wrong with people?" "They're afraid of change," Todd said.
"They're just afraid," said Jack.

In the end, Bush only won 53% of the popular vote, but it was enough to get him 79% of the electoral votes, making it a landslide victory. And that's exactly how we felt waking up on November 9, as if we'd been buried in a landslide. I remember Max and I turned on the television, hoping against hope that some miracle had occurred between our going to bed and the sun coming up. But Bryant Gumbel informed us that it had not, and we reluctantly got up and prepared for life under George Bush. The election changed us. Overnight, we went from being filled with enthusiasm to feeling tired and worn out. While I expected the threat of another four years under Republican control to energize our movement, it seemed to have the opposite effect. The ACT UP meetings started to feel repetitive to me, as if we were saying the same things over and over and over (which, of course, we were, since most of the problems we were fighting had yet to be solved). I continued going, however, and in December participated in a mass protest at St. Patrick's Cathedral to voice opposition to the Catholic Church's homophobia and views on safe sex education. The action resulted in widespread media coverage, but resulted in a black eye for ACT UP when the public decried the behavior of a single protester who grabbed a communion wafer and threw it to the floor.

Not only the public was angry at us. Noted AIDS activist Randy Shilts published a scathing diatribe against the St. Patrick's action, calling ACT UP irresponsible, morally wrong, and strategically stupid. While Max fumed over the article and vented his frustrations at everything from the Church to "gay conservatives," I couldn't help but think that maybe Shilts was right. Maybe we had gone too far. And maybe I had gone far enough.

I told Max that I was going to cut back on the amount of time I spent with the group. I had planned on going to visit my mother and Walter for Christmas anyway, and now I looked forward to the trip as a chance to get away from the responsibility of being a professional AIDS warrior. New York had begun to feel like an inescapable island to me, and when Jack (who brought Todd with him) and I boarded an Amtrak train for the trip to Philadelphia, I had the discomforting feeling that I was on a lifeboat leaving a sinking ship.

I returned a few days before New Year's. The night I arrived back in New York, I had dinner with Max, who picked nervously at his spaghetti carbonara until I demanded to know what was bothering him.

"I can't see you anymore," he said.
"Why?" I asked him. "Because I don't want to spend so much time with ACT UP stuff?" "No," Max said. "Because you're not positive."
I stared at him from across the table. "You're kidding," I said. He shook his head. "It's been

bothering me for a while now," he said. I put my fork down. "What difference does it make if you're positive and I'm not?" I asked. "We talked about that when we started sleeping together, and I told you that it's not a problem for me."

"See," he said. "That's it right there. My being HIV-positive is a ‘problem' that you have to accept."

 

"I didn't say it was—" I began.

"Not you," Max interrupted. "I didn't mean you specifically. Anyone. Us positive guys, we're the ones who have something that negative guys have to deal with. When you sleep with us, it's like you're doing us a favor. Do you know how that feels?"

"Have I ever made you feel like I was doing you a favor?" I asked him.
"No," he admitted. "But it's how I feel."
"Then isn't it something you have to learn to deal with?" I suggested.

"I shouldn't have to deal with it," said Max. "And if I was with a poz guy, I wouldn't have to. I wouldn't worry that if the condom broke, I might be infecting him. I wouldn't have to worry if we got carried away and he swallowed my cum."