Hold Tight Gently (29 page)

When he’d first come to New York, Richard had seen an ad in the
Village Voice
advertising for gay jazz musicians to play five nights a week in a gay bar. The bar turned out to be a New York City branch of the Monster, the well-known Fire Island hangout. Richard thought he’d “died and gone to heaven.” It proved something less than that, but it did produce a steady gig for a while. One night the bass player turned excitedly to Richard and said, “Look over there, I don’t believe it! It’s Fred Hersch”—the jazz pianist who was also on the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music. Richard recalled the incident three or four years later as he looked through a list of recording studios in Manhattan and saw that Hersch owned one of them. Richard went and talked with him and Hersch couldn’t have been more accommodating: he gave Richard and Mike an exceedingly low rate—something like $25 an hour—and even included an engineer in the package. (Hersch was gay and HIV-positive but hadn’t come out—but after meeting Mike and being encouraged by him, he openly acknowledged both his sexual orientation and his health status. He was one of the few established figures in the jazz world to do so.)

Richard and Mike conceived of the record, which they named
Purple Heart
, as including several songs earlier recorded by Lowlife, and the rest of the album as pretty much just Mike singing and often playing the piano as well (though others did too, including his lesbian friend Marsha Malamet). Mike had written about 40 percent of the songs and lyrics, including the two that became best known, “Living in Wartime” and “Love Don’t Need A Reason (co-written with Malamet and her friend Peter Allen). What could be called Mike’s romantic view of love suffuses his lyrics, but no more so than his pervasive political awareness:

                        
They try to break our spirits

                        
try to keep us in our place

                        
They do it to the women

                        
and the poor of every race

                        
We face a common enemy:

                        
bigotry and greed

                        
But if we fight together

                        
we can find the strength we need

                        
we can find the strength we need . . .

(from “Living in Wartime”)

                        
Love don’t need a reason

                        
Love’s never been a crime

                        
And love is all we have for now

                        
What we don’t have

                        
what we don’t have is time . . .

(from “Love Don’t Need a Reason”)

The phrase “love don’t need a reason” derived, according to Mike, from reporters periodically dragging a reluctant Richard Dworkin into several interviews and invariably asking him something along the lines of, “Why would you get involved with somebody who has AIDS?” Richard’s moving reply was that “love’s a crazy thing . . . it doesn’t need a reason.”
¹¹

The uniqueness and beauty of Mike’s voice was immediately recognized by most people who heard it. Its tone bright and pure, it had a special keening, wry quality, a pervasive vulnerability. In terms of intonation, Mike was technically very good—that is, he sang in key, hitting the right notes, never slurring his words. Always the perfectionist, he would fault his rhythmic skill—“I’m just a white boy from the midwest,” he liked to say. In his natural voice, he could sing quite high, a characteristic of many popular male singers—such as Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, or John Fogerty (of Creedence Clearwater Revival)—and Mike could sing falsetto as well.

Singing publicly, unfortunately, was often “torture” for him. He felt that he’d inherited from his father “this absolutely impossible perfectionist system of judgment,” and he constantly judged each note as he sang it: “Was this the best note I could have possibly sung? Did I sing it well enough? Did I hold it long enough? Was it entirely in tune? Did the vibrato come in at exactly the right moment?” Eventually, Mike would be less hard on himself, but when he performed in the late 1980s, he kept “waiting for people to shoot me or start laughing.” Only the support of close friends and of Richard kept him going.

When
Purple Heart
was released, Mike was too ill to undertake a tour—which pre-Internet was the only practical way to sell an independent album. Mike would later remember that the album “dropped like a stone.” But either his memory was faulty or his modesty was working
way
overtime. The reviews were not only plentiful, but mostly raves. The reviewer in
The Advocate
, Adam Block, called it “the most
remarkable gay independent release of the past decade” and he especially loved one of the two sides—the bebop, rock-like one (the second side was mostly cabaret-style ballads, with Mike accompanying himself on the piano). The other critics outdid each other with praise. David Kalmansohn in the
Los Angeles Dispatch
called the album “startlingly sophisticated . . . a mature, original work.” Christopher Wittke in
Gay Community News
called
Purple Heart
“a great album,” David Lamble hailed it as “a virtually flawless debut” in the
Bay Area Reporter
, and Will Grega, in his
Gay Music Guide
, gave it a flatout rave: “Nothing less than the most stunning gay album recorded to date.” Two of the best cuts on the album had been recorded by Lowlife in 1985, and the least favorite among some of the critics was the hypersentimental “Love Don’t Need a Reason.”

The praise eventually sank in and Mike learned to be proud of the recording—though in a few years his voice would drop down about three semitones and what the deeper sound lost in vulnerability, it gained in maturity. This would be especially apparent on Mike’s final album,
Legacy,
which he would come to feel was “the best thing I’ve ever done.”

The release of
Purple Heart
in 1988 came soon after the publication of the 352-page
Surviving and Thriving With AIDS: Collected Wisdom,
volume 2, a collection of essays by many hands (volume 1,
Hints for the Newly Diagnosed,
had been half the size). Along with editing
Surviving and Thriving
, Mike contributed several essays and interviews of his own; Richard served as associate editor and Mike’s co-worker Jane Rosett (PWA’s virtual in-house photographer) as the art editor. Between them, they saw to it that the volume contained, along with a great deal of advice about sex, families, and treatments, two separate sections that were pathbreaking: “Women With AIDS” and “People of Color and AIDS.” Mike asked GMHC for help in distributing volume 2, but it refused after learning that it contained certain criticisms of the organization, and in particular of a GMHC editorial in its publication
Treatment News
that claimed “the preponderance of evidence to date is irrefutable” as to the positive value of AZT.

The book makes for poignant reading today. Many of its contributors have long since died, and most of the debates over treatment issues (such as the efficacy of lipids, AZT or AL-721) have long since been settled. But the bravery, determination, and valor that suffuse its
pages can never go out of date, representing as they do the remarkable gallantry so many showed in the face of what Mike called “the ineptitude and murderous lethargy of the federal government.” The volume also has historical importance. It documents how, despite suffering that was often acute, many people with AIDS managed to resist, to take charge of their own treatment, and to call public attention to the country’s catastrophic disregard (with some honorable exceptions, like Matilde Krim, Elizabeth Taylor, and philanthropist Judy Peabody) of those facing death in the prime of their lives.
Surviving and Thriving
—note the persistent optimism, against all odds, contained in that word “thriving”—demonstrated, in the same way that the fierce defiance of ACT UP and other direct-action groups did, the determination of the despised to battle for survival.
¹²

Mike took the battle to the annual convention of the American Academy of Dermatologists, where he gave that august gathering, and the federal government, a blistering rebuke. The slow pace of response to the enormous suffering and mounting deaths—the business-as-usual attitude—represented in essence “passive genocide,” Mike told his audience, the “political perception that the value of the lives affected by AIDS doesn’t justify a swift, humane or top-notch response.” Why, he asked the audience of physicians, had only eleven full-time staff positions for AIDS research been filled when Congress had authorized 127? Why hadn’t DHPG, gamma globulin, fluconazole, and foscarnet been approved for varying AIDS conditions when the data on them were at least as impressive as that supporting AZT, which
had
been approved?

To take just the example of foscarnet, Mike said, he’d recently come across an announcement from the National Eye Institute that its pending drug trial would be confined to “patients with non-sight threatening” CMV retinitis. “Excuse me?!” Mike indignantly asked. CMV retinitis
always
affected eyesight (often resulting in blindness), and it was already known that foscarnet was effective in treating 75 to 80 percent of those cases. Similarly, Dr. Arye Rubenstein had had a great deal of success in extending the lives of infants with AIDS by using gamma globulin. Yet the medical establishment still opposed its release without a traditional placebo-controlled trial. In Mike’s view that amounted to criminal misconduct; who would not recoil, he asked, at “the thought of sick infants being strapped down in order to
receive an IV saline solution as a placebo, when we ‘know’ from clinical experience that gamma globulin will extend their lives?”

Mike quoted Joe Sonnabend on the inherent conflict between the concerns of a researcher and those of a private doctor. The researcher was willing to withhold prophylaxis—to let people die—in the name of rigidly controlled lengthy trials, even when clinical data had already confirmed a given treatment’s efficacy. In other words, researchers would deny the best available patient care and insist on placebo trials because “we haven’t developed reliable laboratory markers of disease progression.” “Well, I for one,” Mike declared, “am not willing to die for the greater good of others because I believe there are other ways of approaching AIDS treatment trials which can produce good data without sacrificing my life.” This was precisely why CRI in New York was exploring “dose comparison trials, historical control trials and the development of reliable laboratory markers of disease progression beyond T-cell subsets. . . . We simply do not believe it is ethical to sacrifice individuals in the name of some arbitrary standard of proper science.”

The ACT UP activist Jim Eigo came up with the notion of “parallel trials”: they would enroll anyone with HIV “who had no available treatment options,” which in 1988 meant “an overwhelming number of people with AIDS,” who’d been “routinely excluded from trials due to gender, illness, or conflicting medications.” Eigo argued that the data collected from parallel trials wouldn’t be “clean enough” to secure a drug its final approval,” but rigorous Phase 2 clinical trials would be proceeding simultaneously. Eigo and the members of his affinity group in ACT UP sent the proposal to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of federal AIDS efforts. Within a few weeks, Eigo detected phrases from their proposal in some of Fauci’s speeches, and soon after, Fauci came out publicly in favor of the activists’ position—which then became standard.

When the gay/lesbian Whitman-Walker Health clinic in Essex’s hometown, Washington, D.C., ran a series of ads urging gay men to “try living without anal sex” entirely—even anal sex with condoms—Mike spoke out angrily against the proposal. Precisely who had the right, Mike asked, to issue value judgments on the varying forms of sexual expression—to say nothing about the difficulties of trying to enforce those judgments. He suspected that behind the suggestion of
forgoing anal sex was “squeamishness about the asshole—the subtle self-loathing that buys the libel that sodomy is ‘against nature’ and that AIDS is some divine retribution for such an ‘unnatural’ act as taking-it-up-the-tush.”

Mike had been mounting the barricades on this issue as far back as 1985, when GMHC had distributed a recommendation, based on guidelines formulated by the New York Physicians for Human Rights, that gay men “try to avoid anal sex.” Mike had blasted the suggestion. “Those who enjoy getting fucked,” he wrote at the time, “should not be made to feel stupid or irresponsible. Instead, they should be provided with the information necessary to make what they enjoy safe! And that means the aggressive encouragement of condom use!” Yes, he acknowledged, condoms could break, but it should be left to the individual to decide how much risk he was willing to take, to weigh the value of his life against the value of a particular form of sexual expression—especially since “AIDS is the day to day management of uncertainty. . . . We cannot say with absolute certainty how risky a particular sex act with a particular individual might be. . . . Fucking is so important to some of us that we’re willing to take some risks that others might not be willing to take.”

What the Whitman-Walker clinic
should
be doing, in Mike’s opinion, was spreading the word that a scientific study completed in 1985 had proved the general ability of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS. It should also, in his view, be leading the demand for stricter standards for condom manufacture and inspection (to minimize leakage and tears), educating gay men about the
proper
use of condoms and lubricants, and demanding a national AIDS educational campaign “which speaks bluntly in non-clinical language that people can understand.” Given Mike’s incensed tone, he got back a surprisingly placid, understanding letter from Jim Graham, administrator of the Whitman-Walker clinic. “I do not think you are ‘too harsh’ on . . . the Clinic,” Graham wrote. “These are difficult times for us all, and there are bound to be strong disagreements. I know we are acting in good faith with the best motivations as I am sure you are as well.” He did point out that when the FDA tested 204 batches of latex condoms in 1987, it found that 20 percent had a failure rate (leaking water under pressure). Yet he agreed with Mike that people “don’t always use condoms the right way, even when they think they are.” Mike had become so used
to raising his voice in order to be heard at all that Graham’s calm response must have taken him by surprise.