The Gay Metropolis (53 page)

All he had done, Frankel said, was to “let people know that whether they wanted to be openly gay, or whether they wanted to be relaxed, but not very openly gay, or whether they wanted to be secretly gay or lesbian, was their business, and essentially not mine.” Frankel said he had never been attacked by anyone after the paper expanded its coverage of gay subjects, with one exception. “When we ran a picture of the two guys in Connecticut kissing—then you get a couple of stray letters saying, ‘What the hell's going on? Are you going too far?'”

Within a few years, Sulzberger and Frankel had transformed one of the most homophobic institutions in America into one of the best places in the world for a gay person to work. And because of the influence of the
Times,
its example gradually had a huge impact on the way lesbians and gays were covered, and treated, at hundreds of other news-gathering organizations all over the country.

THE REPORTER WHO
would make the biggest difference in the way the AIDS catastrophe was reported did not work at the
Times.
Randy Shilts was a product of the nation's heartland. He was born in Davenport, Iowa,
and grew up in Aurora, Illinois, outside Chicago. As a teenager, this child of conservative and religious parents had founded a local chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom, which championed right-wing causes. But when he got to the University of Oregon in Eugene, he found himself.

At Oregon, Shilts studied journalism and became the managing editor of the student newspaper. Then he came out of the closet to head the Eugene Gay People's Alliance. After a stint as a writer at the gay newsmagazine the
Advocate
and reporting jobs with two different Bay Area television stations, he learned that the
San Francisco Chronicle
was looking for an openly gay reporter, and he got the job.

Shilts was the kind of journalist who requested the night shift when he arrived at the
Chronicle
so he could spend his days finishing his first book,
The Mayor of Castro Street,
a fine biography of the gay city supervisor Harvey Milk, who was assassinated by a colleague in 1978. Shilts said gays “know they have somebody they can call up who won't make queer jokes when they hang up the phone. And within the paper I think a lot of dumb things that are written because of ignorance, not malice, don't appear because [colleagues] can come to me and feel like they're getting things in clearer perspective.”

The young reporter inaugurated an admirable tradition of self-criticism among gay journalists. During his lifetime it brought him tremendous pain from the people he covered, but it would also inspire many of his gay colleagues to emulate him. “Writing about the gay community is like being a journalist in a small town,” he once explained. “You get immediate reaction. I walked down the street and had people shout at me. … Self-criticism was not the strong point of a community that was only beginning to define itself affirmatively after centuries of repression.”

Shilts was disgusted by how little attention the national media paid to the epidemic during its initial stages. In his landmark book about the first five years of the catastrophe,
And the Band Played On,
he was especially critical of reporters who ignored the politics behind the epidemic—among the scientists who were supposed to unravel it and between the legislative and executive branches in Washington.

It was true that none of the leading newspapers turned the story into a crusade, but a reluctance to write about homosexuals was only one of a number of reasons for that failure. Science writers are usually most comfortable writing about new discoveries; as a result, American newspapers have never done a very good job of covering the politics of science.

Especially at the beginning of the epidemic, the paucity of knowledge about the nature of the disease made it logical for the press to be concerned
about the danger of causing unnecessary panic—either among gay men, or in the general population. Gay leaders expressed similar worries: the idea that too much publicity could lead to hysteria, or even quarantine for gay Americans.

Shilts himself was intimately familiar with these problems. When a report was leaked at the end of 1982 suggesting that at least one percent of the gay men in the city's Castro District were already infected with the disease, a gay activist pleaded with him not to write about it. “They'll put barbed wire up around the Castro,” said Randy Stallings, a senior gay leader in the Bay Area. “It will create panic.” Shilts printed the story anyway. Later Shills deduced that the real proportion of infected gay men in San Francisco at that moment was probably closer to twenty percent. Subsequent investigations indicated that a new viral agent had probably infected gay men for the first time in 1976 or 1977.

Shilts wrote that by the beginning of 1983, it was “virtually an article of faith among homosexuals that they would somehow end up in concentration camps.” While most heterosexuals were baffled by these fears, Shilts thought they were perfectly understandable: “Humans who have been subjected to a lifetime of irrational bigotry on the part of mainstream society can be excused for harboring unreasonable fears,” he wrote. “The general apathy that the United States had demonstrated toward the AIDS epidemic had only deepened the distrust between gays and heterosexuals.”

The power of Shilts's book came from the author's willingness to be equally critical of greedy bathhouse owners, who resisted efforts to close their establishments long after it was clear that they were a breeding ground for infection, and lackadaisical blood bank administrators who pretended that the blood supply was safe and expensive testing was unnecessary for years after the first strong evidence that patients were becoming infected by transfusions. (Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control had predicted infections through transfusions as early as January 1982.)

One of the most chilling moments in Shilts's account occurs between a San Francisco bathhouse owner and Paul Volberding, the director of the San Francisco General Hospital AIDS clinic.

“We're both in it for the same thing,” the bathhouse owner told Volberding. “Money. We make money at one end when they come to the baths. You make money from them on the other end when they come here.” Volberding was too horrified to reply.

Bathhouse owners were among the most successful businessmen in the gay community. They were also among the most generous, lavishing contributions
on gay political activists, as well as helping to finance early AIDS organizations like the San Francisco Kaposi's Sarcoma Foundation. Shilts suggests that particularly in San Francisco, some gay newspapers were corrupted by the money they received from bathhouses, which made them reluctant to give the epidemic the coverage it deserved.

In an excruciating irony, Shilts learned that he himself was HIV-positive the day he turned in the last page of his manuscript in 1987.

IN NEW YORK CITY
, the first gay writer to become alarmed about the epidemic was neither a journalist nor an activist. Larry Kramer was a novelist and screenwriter. He had an elfin look, bouncing eyebrows, and boundless energy to excoriate enemies and friends alike. He had spent years in analysis to try to overcome the self-hatred typical of the gay men of his generation who had come of age in the fifties, but he still seemed deeply discontent much of the time. His first important success came in 1969 when he wrote and produced an excellent film version of D. H. Lawrence's
Women in Love,
which featured a famously homoerotic wrestling scene between the two male protagonists. For many years, that was his only visible contribution to the gay movement. “I certainly wasn't interested in gay politics,” he wrote in 1989. “Like many others, when gay pride marches started down Fifth Avenue at the end of June, I was on Fire Island. Gay politics had an awful image. Loudmouths, the unkempt, the dirty and unwashed. … On Fire Island, we laughed … when we watched the evening news on Sunday night flash brief seconds of those struggling, pitiful marches.”

Most gay activists were unaware of Kramer until 1977, when he published
Faggots,
an inflammatory account of upper-middle-class white gay life in Manhattan. Because he had so much contempt for the movement, the novel naturally did not acknowledge its existence, much less any of its achievements. Kramer thought he was writing satire on the level of Evelyn Waugh, but gay activists considered his graphic accounts of fist-fucking and every other sexual excess of gay culture a blood libel. Others simply found the book so overdone as to be unreadable.

“Why do faggots have to fuck so fucking much?” Kramer's narrator asked. “It's as if we don't have anything else to do. … All we do is live in our ghetto and dance and drug and fuck. … There's a whole world out there! … as much ours as theirs … I'm tired of using my body as a faceless thing to lure another faceless thing.

“I want to love a Person.”

For thousands of young men mesmerized by their newly won sexual
freedom, this notion was truly radical. As the gay psychologist Joe Brewer told Randy Shilts, “Stripped of humanity, sex sought ever rising levels of physical stimulation in increasingly esoteric practices,” while Brewer's colleague Gary Walsh saw promiscuity as something more positive—“a means to exorcise the guilt … ingrained in all gay men by a heterosexual society.”

In an interview published in 1982, the French theorist Michel Foucault explained the prevalence of promiscuity among gay men this way: “In Western Christian culture homosexuality was banished and therefore had to concentrate all its energy on the act of sex itself. Homosexuals were not allowed to elaborate a system of courtship because the cultural expression necessary for such an elaboration was denied them. The wink on the street, the split-second decision to get it on, the speed with which homosexual relations are consummated: all these are products of an interdiction.”

Kramer's novel had focused on the emotional damage he thought had been inflicted by nonstop sex. But like Edmund White's pre-AIDS speculation about the possible cost of gay fantasies of San Francisco—“Did we know what price these dreams would exact?”—something else Kramer wrote would soon sound like an ominous prophecy. Everything had to change, said the narrator of
Faggots
—“before you fuck yourself to death.”

Until the onset of the epidemic, almost everyone speaking publicly for the movement had assumed that an unfettered and unlimited sexuality was one of its most important achievements. For many, this was the main reason they were glad to be gay, and they reveled in their outlaw status. Gay people who had accepted themselves had created new lives by ignoring conventional advice. Thousands were addicted to danger; thousands more were addicted to sex. Unlimited access to sex was used like a drug to cure whatever ailed you. These attitudes deafened many gay men to the earliest warnings about the possible dangers of their behavior.

Philip Gefter recalled the Fire Island scene at the height of the seventies: “The Ice Palace in the Grove was the most fabulous disco I'd ever been to in my life because there were two thousand writhing, drugged, beautiful bodies dancing on this dance floor. By 6:00
A.M
., we were outside around the pool, and we were dancing under the stars as the sun was coming up. And I believed at that moment in time that we were having more fun than anybody in the
history
of civilization had ever had. Because there was the combination of that sexual tension among all of these men, in concert with the drugs we were taking and the electronics of the music—and the
sun coming up. It created a kind of
thrill
and excitement and sensation that I believe no culture had ever experienced before.”

Then there was the Meat Rack—a sexual meeting ground in the woods between the two gay Fire Island communities, the Pines and the Grove. “The Meat Rack, basically, is this enchanted forest,” said Gefter. “I remember walking through the Meat Rack, thinking, This was my
wildest
fantasy when I was in summer camp. There were either couples or
clusters
of men in various permutations of sexual activity. I remember once when I went there on the way back from the Ice Palace with Peter and Eric at 7:00 in the morning. And there were these three or four men, naked. They were all, like, playing with each other's hard-ons and sucking each other off, and sniffing an ethyl chloride rag. It's like poppers, but it's somehow more extreme. Basically it just renders you brainless. I never did it.

“So we were watching this cluster, and they just kind of reached out and grabbed us, drew us in. So we found ourselves—
six
of us in this cluster of men, in this
beautiful
path in the woods—with our pants down to our knees, in various permutations of sucking and fucking.

“That's kind of what the Meat Rack was like.”

Faggots
“angered everyone, of course,” Kramer recalled, “particularly the gay political leaders who told everybody they should have as much love as they want.” But Kramer thought that “having so much sex made finding love impossible. Everyone I knew wanted … a lover, and everyone was screwing himself twenty-four hours a day … to what turned out to be to death. … You could have sex twenty-three times just going to the market.” After
Faggots
was published, it was made “pointedly clear” to him that he was “no longer welcome” on Fire Island.

At the beginning of the epidemic, because no one knew for sure whether AIDS really was a sexually transmitted disease, anyone recommending reduced sexual activity as a sensible precaution ran the risk of being attacked for “internalized homophobia” or “sexual fascism.” And because Kramer had already attacked promiscuity for other reasons, he was particularly vulnerable to this criticism.

He went to his doctor three weeks after the
Times
article to ask him what he could do to avoid the new disease. “I'd stop having sex,” his physician told him. One month after that appointment, his first warning about the epidemic appeared in the
New York Native,
a gay newspaper that pioneered coverage of the disease: