Two Diseases, Two Presidents

I wrote yesterday that my husband and my mother-in-law and I all went to the opera—and the biggest issue we faced was the bizarre idea that two operas could be “updated” to the 1930’s. Well, that was last Saturday’s problem. But 25 years ago? The problem was that there was a chasm between my in-laws (well, some of them—OK, the parents…) and me, and it didn’t look like it would ever be bridged.

“No, it’s not all right for your mother to send me a message that I can come to…” whatever family event it was, “…she has to call me and invite me herself!”

Was I being a jerk? If she was trying to open a door—however indirectly—was it wise to slam it shut? I had been told: I wasn’t welcome in the house. On those (very few) occasions when we met in public, we greeted each other cordially, and I understood: Nothing personal, Marc, but we don’t agree with your and Raf’s lifestyle.

Because people “chose” lifestyles, in those days, which meant that we could hypothetically wake up one day and say, “gee, why not be straight?” And so, since people could choose a lifestyle, other people—guess whom I’m talking about?—could choose to approve, or disapprove.

It’s something nobody wants to talk about, but both sides have flipped on the issue. Because in the 1950’s, the “homosexual” was sick, deeply and almost certainly incurably sick: only the most determined patient with unlimited funds for the best psychiatrist could—maybe—hope to paddle upstream and take the other fork in the river of sexuality.

I tried telling this to Montalvo, a month ago, on the same day that he showed me a picture of himself at the Gay Pride March, with his mother. And his mother was impeccably dressed, but Montalvo? He was wearing nothing but an imitation leopard skin G-string.

At 21 (Montalvo’s age), I was afraid to go into a gay bar, because what if someone saw me? What if the bar got raided? When we said, “it would kill my parents if they found out I was gay,” we weren’t speaking entirely metaphorically. In those days, it would have lanced, no, gored my father’s heart; who knows how much stress he could have borne before his health suffered?

And so I try to tell Montalvo how it was. I tell him about “Boys Beware,” which featured a sinister man in sunglasses wearing a Peter Lorre mustache, driving around town, looking for young men…all right, I’ll give you what the narrator says: He paid for the ride with his life!

Montalvo, of course, completely doesn’t get this, so I tell him about the Men’s Room of the fourth floor of Memorial Library. Yes, it was where guys went to cruise, and yes, I went there too. Why? Because beyond the X-rated bookstores, and the bars, there wasn’t anywhere else to go. And so guys would write notes on toilet paper, or matchbooks. People would tap their feet. The whole elaborate ritual of cruising would go on, and if you ended up taking someone home, it was clear: no last names.

And at this time, we rebelled at the idea of intrinsic homosexuality, and we were instead choosing to express our sexuality, and what we had chosen was…well, being gay. This, in fact, is what a female relation of Montalvo’s had done: been in a relationship with a woman before marrying a man. And throughout history, many a man who was predominantly gay married a woman, and was able to get on well enough. So when we said we were choosing our sexuality, that’s what we meant: we were not going to suppress, repress, pretend.

What happened?

I think…AIDS.

AIDS is to Montalvo like the common cold—all right, that’s an exaggeration, but by the mid-90’s, the disease had gone from a death sentence to a chronic condition. But that had happened only because gay men, seeing all too clearly that the Reagan administration and the CDC and FDA would do nothing, started fighting to get attention, to get funding, and to get the process of approving new treatments sped up. Here’s what we were up against:

My criticism is that [the gay movement] isn’t just asking for civil rights; it’s asking for recognition and acceptance of an alternative lifestyle which I do not believe society can condone, nor can I.

And who is the “I?” Ronald Reagan, speaking in 1980 in a campaign.

Well, we had chosen, right? And had we made the right choice, we who had been cruising in bars and bathrooms, who had had thousands, tens of thousands, HUNDREDS of thousands of illicit sex partners? And now the chickens had come home to roost, so don’t come crying to me…..so went the thinking.

True enough, we had spent a decade of living on the edge: it was a rare gay guy who had said “no” to the sexual revolution, and the ideology of the times was that having the most sex of the most extreme sort was a political act—what wasn’t, in those times—that was challenging the patriarchal, puritanical, sexist forces that were oppressing us. So—let’s fuck!

So now everybody had a problem, since the circumstances dictated that the conservatives had to say that we were choosing our sexuality instead of being intrinsically gay (read, sick). And gay people had to clarify: what we had chosen was to acknowledge our sexuality, which was innate.

Nobody worried too much about all this, because we were too busy: all too many of us busy dying, the rest busy taking care of the sick or the dead, the others doing the protests and throwing the blood and the ashes on the White House lawn.

So where am I going, here?

Don’t tell me, anyone, that Ronald Reagan was a great president. Don’t tell me he doesn’t have blood on his hands. Here’s Wikipedia again:

Even with the death from AIDS of his friend Rock Hudson, Reagan was widely criticized^{[citation needed]} for not supporting more active measures to contain the spread of AIDS. Until celebrity Elizabeth Taylor spoke out publicly about the monumental amount of people quickly dying from this new disease, most public officials and celebrities were too afraid of dealing with this subject.

Right—it took an aging, mega-rich celebrity, who had nothing to lose but did have a good heart, speaking out publically before anybody else could. And what would have happened if Taylor hadn’t spoken out? How many more deaths would there have been. Because, according to Peter Staley of Huffington Post, the press waited 17 months from the first report of AIDS and almost 600 deaths before anyone got around to asking if the White House was following the situation. Here’s a transcript of the exchange in the press conference:

Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement -- the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic and have (sic) over 600 cases?

MR. SPEAKES: What's AIDS?

Q: Over a third of them have died. It's known as "gay plague." (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it's a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the President is aware of it?

MR. SPEAKES: I don't have it. Do you? (Laughter.)

Q: No, I don't.

MR. SPEAKES: You didn't answer my question.

Q: Well, I just wondered, does the President --

MR. SPEAKES: How do you know? (Laughter.)

Q: In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?

MR. SPEAKES: No, I don't know anything about it, Lester.

Q: Does the President, does anybody in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry?

MR. SPEAKES: I don't think so. I don't think there's been any --

Q: Nobody knows?

MR. SPEAKES: There has been no personal experience here, Lester.

Q: No, I mean, I thought you were keeping --

MR. SPEAKES: I checked thoroughly with Dr. Ruge this morning and he's had no -- (laughter) -- no patients suffering from AIDS or whatever it is.

Q: The President doesn't have gay plague, is that what you're saying or what?

MR. SPEAKES: No, I didn't say that.

Q: Didn't say that?

MR. SPEAKES: I thought I heard you on the State Department over there. Why didn't you stay there? (Laughter.)

Q: Because I love you, Larry, that's why. (Laughter.)

MR. SPEAKES: Oh, I see. Just don't put it in those terms, Lester. (Laughter.)

Q: Oh, I retract that.

MR. SPEAKES: I hope so.

Q: It's too late.

Well, there was quite a lot of laughter as Larry Speakes fended off—or tried to—the question of whether anyone in the White House was on top of the situation. It was a joke, it could be laughed off—those six hundred people who had died, the thousands more to come. Yes, funding eventually for AIDS ended up being 1000% greater at the end of Reagan’s two terms than at the beginning, but the amount was paltry from the start, and the real increases came too late. A common observation in the gay world?

Twenty-nine members of the American Legion died in 1976 at a convention in Philadelphia. The National Institute of Health spent $34,841 per death of Legionnaire's Disease. In contrast, the NIH spent $3,225 in 1981 and about $8,991 in 1982 for each person who died of AIDS.

Now then, how do I—a gay man who lived through AIDS in its worst days—see Ebola? And how do I view what Barack Obama is doing about it?

Well, I’m also a former nurse, so I can imagine the scene in the Texas hospital, when Thomas Duncan presented himself in the ER—only to be sent away. Because yes, I’d like to think that, had I been the nurse attending Duncan, I would have been screaming my lungs off for this patient to be put in isolation immediately, for the CDC to be woken up, for the White House situation room to be alerted. But guess what? Nothing happens in a vacuum, so there would have been a couple of gunshot wounds, a heart attack victim, various street people hallucinating, plus a guy going through the DTs and screaming at the green monster crawling up the wall. And the doctor—who sent Duncan on his way while I was compressing the gunshot wound to stanch the bleeding? Hadn’t seen him in hours….

The case for the CDC? Right—harder to make by a good country mile.

But to say this, as Frank Bruni (with whom I usually agree) did in a New York Times op-ed of 18 Oct 14?

It (Ebola) is ravaging Americans’ already tenuous faith in the competence of our government and its bureaucracies.

Before President Obama’s election, we had Iraq, Katrina and the meltdown of banks supposedly under Washington’s watch. Since he came along to tidy things up, we’ve had the staggeringly messy rollout of Obamacare, the damnable negligence of the Department of Veterans Affairs and the baffling somnambulism of the Secret Service.  

Well, the VA has been a mess for decades, and now has veterans from two wars spanning a decade to cope with. The rollout of Obamacare? Horrible, but there is an Obamacare, and it seems to be working. The Secret Service? Who knows, but why do I suspect a sort of clandestine sabotage?

What do I know? Obama canceled a fund-raising trip and is reportedly furious and barking orders at people. Here’s the New York Times from three days ago:

“It’s not tight,” a visibly angry Mr. Obama said of the response, according to people briefed on the meeting. He told aides they needed to get ahead of events and demanded a more hands-on approach, particularly from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “He was not satisfied with the response,” a senior official said.

And here’s the headline:

The worst thing about the AIDS crisis? The uncertainty about what caused it—could you get it from mosquitos? Was going to the beach safe? And what about amyl nitrate—alias poppers? And that dentist in—where was it, Atlanta? How the hell did he get it?

The second worst thing? Knowing that our government was coolly letting us die: it was business as usual, as Randy Shilts described in his book, And the Band Played On.

So we have a disease about which much is known—especially about transmission—and we have a government which is—news flash here—screwing up. And heads are rolling—or will be—in Washington.

What don’t we have? A president clenching a handful of jellybeans, as he snoozes his way through cabinet meetings….