Eight (Presumably) and One

It happens every morning: two guys arguing at the top of their lungs—as well as their vocal range—in the middle of our bedroom.

OK—there are times when it’s a man or a woman, but until Rubén Sánchez of radio station WKAQ gets a sex change, there will always be at least one guy. And today, as it so often is, it was Sánchez and another guy, arguing in good Puerto Rican fashion: the Spanish accelerates to about 333,000 words per minute, volume crescendos to about 110 decibels, neither one is listening to the other, and the voices are pitched at least an octave higher.

Oh, and did I mention the interruptions?

“So whom was Rubén arguing with today?” I asked Mr. Fernández, since being closer to the offending radio, as well as speaking Spanish as his cradle tongue, made him more likely to know what it was all about. I had heard the term “matrimonio gay” (gay marriage) screeched around, and was curious to know what today’s fuss was about…..

“With whom,” said Mr. Fernández, a stickler for such things, who went on to say that he had only the dimmest idea, since he was going in and out of the morning snooze. 

Well, I can tell you what the issue was about, since today’s topic flew in on the front page of El Nuevo Día, the local rag. So what’s up? Our governor, Alejandro García Padilla, has nominated Maite Oronoz, an openly gay woman, to be an associate judge on the Puerto Rico Supreme Court.

Oronoz looks pretty credentialed to me: a BA from Villanueva, law degree from the University of Puerto Rico, and a master’s in law from Columbia. She’s worked with the Supreme Court as “oficial jurídico”—my guess would be law clerk—as well as in private practice, and in the Justice Department in high-ranking positions. She’s currently the legal director for the city of San Juan. So she’ll sail through to the nomination, right?

Not so fast, because all the tired old voices we’ve had to endure all these years are saying all the tired—and tiring—things. Here—and you should hope you don’t know Spanish—is one:

Me preocupa el ejemplo que presenta al tener una relación con una persona de su mismo sexo. Lo segundo que me preocupa es que si es confirmada al Tribunal Supremo va a tener en sus manos el poder para tomar decisiones que alteren los valores del pueblo de Puerto Rico”, señaló Vázquez. 

What’s the beef, according to Vázquez? It sets a bad example, and if approved, Oronoz will have the power to make decisions that “alter” the values of the people of Puerto Rico.

In a recent interview, Larry Kramer, the gay activist and author of The Normal Heart, told gay people to stop patting themselves on the back, we haven’t come anywhere near where we should be in the struggle for rights. And oddly enough, Jessye Norman, the black opera singer, said much the same thing about the rights of black people.

She gives two examples: both involved being asked to prove that she was a guest when she was using a hotel’s facilities, or even walking on their grounds. Big deal, you may think, but here’s why I think it is.

For those of us who are white and men, it’s hard to understand how being black or a woman completely infuses your life. I go into a store and nobody follows me around, five feet away. Or here’s another—when was the last time I worried about getting raped? And I see the point of a lot of black people: a gay person has some shelter—hint, it’s called a closet—but the black dude? He’s out there….

And in a certain way, it may be true that even the most out gay people consciously or not use the closet. I learned that by trailing a transgender woman in the last gay pride march: I was wearing shorts and a tee shirt; she was wearing a tight dress and three-inch heels.

And walking, for much of the way, on irregularly surfaces, iridescently blue cobblestones, for which the old city is famous. Lovely, especially when wet—the stones, not the woman—but three-inch heels? It was proof of how deeply important her sexuality was to her; it was also a testament to personal bravery. Because although she carried it off well, she was still taller than I, with my height of six foot three. No wonder that it was the drag queens that fought back at Stonewall.

The computer, by the way, has not red-squiggled that word, “Stonewall;” did I teach it to the computer or is it now in the lexicon? Or consider this anecdote, about a US Supreme Court justice who had just upheld—years ago—a state law criminalizing homosexuality. According to Jeffrey Toobin, the justice remarked to his clerk that he had never met a gay person. His clerk, who was gay, said nothing. Twenty years later? Sandra Day O’Connor was sticking her head into her office and directing her staff to send a congratulatory tee shirt to a gay couple on her staff who had adopted a child. (It said, “Supreme Court Kid,” or something….)

So how far have we come? Well, today’s front page has “Abogada Gay al Supremo” as the lead. But when will we have “Abogada Straight al Supremo?”

Oh, and by the way, are there openly straight people? I didn’t know, so I asked Sunshine, the guy who makes me the espresso.

“Yeah, I’m straight, but I have a lot of gay friends,” he says. Then he goes back to polishing one of the windows.

Jessye Norman grew up in a world where there were signs over the two water coolers: “Whites Only,” “Colored Only.” I grew up in a world of Boys Beware, a lurid educational film—à la Reefer Madness—that advised against taking a ride from strange men. Why?

“He paid for the ride with his life,” intones the voice from the sixties (curious how different decades have different voices—anybody looked into that?). The driver, you see, was a known homosexual.

Wait—I didn’t get a gasp out of you!

It may be, in fact, that society’s coming out is just like our own coming out. It’s layer after layer, this peeling of the onion, until all that’s left is taste, aroma, zest. All the acridness, everything that made you cry has vanished, or rather, been commuted, transformed, and transmogrified into something wonderful, tasty and…

…delicious.

The Unmentionable Odour of Death

It was written nearly thirty years ago; it was controversial then, and it’s controversial now.

Or it may be that the author, Larry Kramer, has a peculiar talent for rubbing people the wrong way; in his book Faggots, he criticized the disco-loving, druggy, superficial lifestyle of the seventies and eighties. News flash—it was a period when some of us were having a lot of sex with a lot of people, not all of whom we knew.

So when Larry Kramer wrote The Normal Heart, in 1985, he had already pissed off a substantial portion of the gay community by making a quite unequivocal statement: gay men were going to have to stop having sex.

OK—let’s back up and revisit those days. For a generation now, AIDS has been a chronic and manageable disease for—you listening, here?—those people blessed to live in developed societies and blessed to have health insurance. But it really isn’t possible to imagine the sheer terror and fear that some of us lived with for the first decade of the epidemic.

Consider the times: Stonewall, yes, had happened a decade and a half earlier, in 1969, but having gay sex was illegal in many, many states and cities. In 1998, for example, a Texas sheriff arrested two gay men who were having sex in their bedroom—the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which at long last threw out the sodomy laws in 2003. And in how many states was sodomy still a crime? Ten.

But it was hardly that being gay—or acting on it—was illegal. Being gay was treated as either the darkest sin imaginable, or as the most horrifying consequence possible of bad parenting. It was shame, dishonor, a disgrace. Oh, and did I mention that if your parents ever, ever found out, it would crush them, ruin them, flail them for every minute of their—very likely—now shortened lives?

“You must never tell the parents, it would kill them,” wrote Eric, my eldest brother, when I wrote to tell him I was gay.

It has to be said, coming out is as much an internal as an external process. Which is to say that you have to weed out a number of prejudices, assumptions, habits, ways of thinking. We had come out to everyone, or so we thought, but had we shed all those years of crushing negativity?

The other problem? We were having a lot of sex in a lot of sleazy places—parks, bathrooms, the baths, and of course, the backrooms of bars. And a lot of us didn’t feel too good about it; there was a good deal of shame and guilt left in us, which came stinging back to us those mornings after those nights of drugs and orgies.

To be fair, there were relatively few outlets besides the bars and the baths: they were virtually the only outlets for gay men, besides the gay choruses. And to come out was to put a wall between you and the straight world—yes, you had straight friends, whom you saw and with whom you hung out before…

…you headed out to the bars.

Since it was denied us, we had decided that we didn’t want it: marriage, we argued, was a heterosexist, patriarchal system enforcing submission and subjugation on women (in heterosexual relationships) or on the more compliant party in a gay or lesbian relationship. So unbridled sex was part of being “liberated,” of fighting off the repressive, heterosexual stereotypes that we had decided we were above living.

“Hey, Jorge, when did you move to San Francisco?”

“1989,” says Jorge, taking a break from mopping the floor.

“Wow—right in the worst years of the epidemic,” I say, “so what was it like.”

“Terrible, horrible. You would see deadly ill, pale, gaunt, skeletal figures everywhere. They were everywhere in San Francisco, not hidden away, but everywhere. I remember seeing this handsome guy coming out of his house, and coming down the steps to get on to his motorcycle. And then I realized—he was carrying his partner on his back, so I stopped to help. And the partner was so weak that the healthy one feared that he couldn’t hold on, so he strapped his sick lover to him, and they rode off to the hospital together.”

People were dying agonizing deaths—and very often the people who were dying were cared for, if they were cared for at all, by someone who was also infected. Friends abandoned you; family abandoned you.

Not, of course, in all cases. But a lot of gay men ended up in New York or San Francisco for a very good reason—the climate in those cities being considerably more welcoming than, say, Macon, Georgia. Not a few parents were dealing with the discovery that their son was gay at the same time that they were hearing that he had a death sentence.

“The only treatment was AZT,” said Jorge—and getting that was a struggle: any nurse who had access to the drug in the clinics was besieged with requests to steal it.

Death was everywhere, in medieval proportions; skeletons walked the streets, and had to be carried up steps. The black marks of Kaposi’s sarcoma disfigured faces; it was routine to see the bones of the lower arms under the saggy skin of the victims.

The fear was of backlash. They hated us, the thinking went, they’re terrified of this disease. The Alex Joneses of the day were saying it outright—they (for me, we) should be quarantined, for the sake of everyone, especially the children.

Hysteria time—is it safe to eat with someone who has AIDS? What about going to the beach? What happens if a mosquito bites the guy lying next to me—and he has AIDS—and then the mosquito bites me? What if a kid—often a hemophiliac—starts to bleed, and my kid comes into contact with it?

Since nobody had any idea what was going on, nobody could give answers, and so the health “experts” were issuing vague reassurances that made the situation worse.

And they knew nothing because, guess what? Nobody was funding research, because—and it was hard in the general hysteria of the time not to be paranoid—it was after all a “gay” disease, so who cared? When the Legionnaires got sick in Philadelphia, or wherever it was, how much money did they spend? But a bunch of sick faggots? Huh—they’ll let us die with smiles on their faces!

Yes, for a time, it was very much “us versus them,” and it had to be, if anything was going to change. Reagan was dozing away in the White House, the FDA was perfectly happy with a testing process that took over a decade, the mayor of New York was an unmarried gentleman—Ed Koch—whom everybody thought…well, here’s Gay City News:

He was 88 years old and died without ever publicly acknowledging his homosexuality. And his inaction during the crucial early years of the AIDS pandemic –– which emerged in 1981 on his watch –– has never been forgiven by large numbers of gay men and others who lost so many loved ones and friends to the virus.

The article, by the way, is titled “Ed Koch: Twelve Years as Mayor, A Lifetime in the Closet.”

And certainly one of the men who never forgave Koch was Larry Kramer, who cofounded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and later Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). And Kramer was never one to worry about getting into someone’s face and screaming. Which, in fact, turned out to be the right thing to do, as well as necessary. In the clips below, you see people “dying” on Wall Street, or in the office of the FDA or the New York Commissioner of Health. For all his stridency, for all his arrogance, Kramer had a part to play.

And so in 1985, Kramer came out with his play The Normal Heart, which features a man quite intentionally resembling the author. Which means that for much of the play, it’s an extended rant against, on the one hand, a bureaucracy perfectly content to watch the eradication of a generation of gay men, and those gay men themselves, who won’t stop fucking. And after years of having various people hold the film rights to the play, it’s finally been made into a movie, and will show on May 25 on HBO.

Not everyone is happy, of course. One critic, Charles O’Malley, notes that Kramer’s play is mawkish, sentimentalizing what was a decade long horror scene. And it’s all about upper-class gay men—no women, no people of color. And the message is anti-sexual and self-hating.

O’Malley fears that seeing this film will somehow assuage the liberal hearts of some viewers—that was then, this is now; O’Malley quotes Manohla Dargis: “it’s about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation.”

Yes or no? I won’t know until I see the film, since it’s been years since I’ve seen the play. But I have gone to reread September 1, 1939—the W. H. Auden poem from which Kramer took the title, “The Normal Heart.” And came across this fragment, which only hints at how terrible those days really were….

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.