Hold Tight Gently (46 page)

He started to shop, go to the movies, take a class to learn how to make puff pastry—he was already a wonderful cook whose repertoire included baking his own bread and making fresh strawberry sorbet. Then there was the “ecstasy” of ordering “a quintessential minestrone” at Café Benvenuto; of delighting in his collection of Betty Crocker fifties kitchen utensils; and of visiting his “favorite spot on earth”—the Huntington Gardens—the estate that contained seven different botanical gardens. Plus he read, and read, and “read some more.” “I’m in HOG HEAVEN!” he wrote a close friend. He still felt “raw and bloody from selling my soul to the movement” but now he let sixty-five phone messages that “should” have been returned go unanswered and didn’t go near—well, not for a while—the stack of correspondence and bills that had piled up. In retrospect, he couldn’t imagine how he’d done all that he’d done for so long. He hoped he’d one day be able to return to the hectic life, and even developed a very clear image, should he get lucky, of what he’d look like as an old man—“cantankerous, opinionated, frisky.”
⁶

Despite his lack of energy, those first few months in L.A. seem to have been something like a genuine honeymoon for Mike. But his doctors made it clear that it would soon end, that he would have to start chemotherapy if he was to last even the year or two that they’d predicted. His first treatment, in the spring of 1992, was largely uneventful. He had some “vague, flu-like symptoms which were completely manageable with aspirin and anti-nausea medication.” That made him totally unprepared for the trauma of the second treatment. It took only fifteen minutes and he left whistling, went to the gym and did yoga, soaked in the Jacuzzi while watching “all the naked gods walk by,” came home and fixed himself a feast of fresh fruit and vegetables, went to a movie, read, and went to sleep thinking it had all been a “piece of cake.”

Then—wham! He woke, at two a.m., with a high fever, teeth chattering, disoriented, and “with joints and muscles so aching that I literally couldn’t lie down or sit up. It was sheer torture.” Eventually he fell back to sleep, had a series of frightening dreams, and woke up
thirteen
hours later drenched in sweat and again disoriented. He called Joe Sonnabend in New York, who warned him that the effects from chemotherapy were cumulative and that from here on in he’d probably feel still worse. That shook Mike up. He didn’t know if he could face
“the geometric progression of traumatic side effects.” Since the treatments were spaced two to three weeks apart, he decided to hang in for the time being. He did let his mother know about the chemo, and although she was terrified of flying, she told him that should he need her she’d be on the next plane.

Yet he realized that—to his own surprise—he still
did
want to record another album, or maybe even two.
If
, that is, he could manage it physically and financially. He had a friend in Chicago who swore he’d be able to find the money somewhere, somehow, to produce at least one of the albums. Mike thought of declaring bankruptcy in order to avoid paying some of his bills, and he missed Richard’s practical-minded advice on such matters. He missed Richard, period. But he was also deeply angry at him, for what he saw as Richard’s rejection. When Richard failed to return a phone call, Mike called again and accused him of having turned his back on the news that he had KS of the lungs, of not wanting to deal with it. According to the account Mike sent to a friend, he yelled at Richard that “the point is, if you’d wanted to speak to me, you’d have called back or written or found some way, and you didn’t. I can no longer suffer such abuse, especially at this point in my life. I have my hands full. . . .
You
must sort out whether or not you’re up to being involved in my dying process. If you decide not, I’ll be sad, but I’ll be fine.”

Mike wasn’t “exactly bitter.” He was “still able to remember the good times,” was still grateful to Richard “and his willingness, at the lowest possible moment of my life, to [quoting Archibald MacLeish] ‘blow on the coals of my heart.’ ” But Mike did feel abandoned by him and even wrote about Richard in his occasional column, “Dinosaur’s Diary,” for
QW
magazine: “I miss my ex. To the extent that I ever thought about my death from AIDS, I always assumed he’d be there to help send me gently into . . . whatever. And his gruff forcefulness would be so
useful
to me now.
He’d
know what to do, my mind races. He’d sit me down and tell me what my priorities
ought
to be, and then he’d help me accomplish them. But the divorce has been unusually bitter and protracted. Now I’m very much alone.”
⁷

Richard read those lines in
QW
and felt deeply, deeply hurt by them. He knew—and so did Mike in his calmer moments—that they still loved each other, and he also knew that their relationship wasn’t over. But at the moment he was dealing with Patrick’s failing health, as well
as having to travel with various bands in order to provide for some sort of income. Their story wasn’t over, though what lay ahead would be equal parts comfort and desolation.

Nor had Mike ceased to be political, even—when his stamina allowed—actively so. He feared that the conservative segment of the gay community was in danger of capturing the dialogue about sex, that a
majority
of gay men and lesbians had arrived at essential agreement with their oppressors about what were or weren’t “appropriate” forms of sexual behavior. Though Mike no longer patronized bathhouses and back-room bars, he continued to defend them—to defend any kind of sexual expression that wasn’t mainstream or heteroimitative—and he came to openly regret his role in helping the state to close the bathhouses and sex clubs in New York. Mike rejected any safe-sex guidelines that insisted on monogamy as the definition of “maturity”—let alone morality. He believed that gay men in the 1970s had “effected an unprecedented revolution in sexual practices” and the last thing he wanted was to see that legacy destroyed.

Mike was convinced that radical feminism continued to provide the best guide for safeguarding the sexual revolution. He agreed with its disavowal of the widespread notion that sex had been unchanging through time and across cultures, and he rejected the ingrained view that some forms of sex are “better”—healthier, more moral—than others. He felt it important to resist the notion that the particular sex acts
we
preferred “should” be the ones everyone preferred, and he deplored those countless “Eroticizing Safer Sex” workshops that parroted “politically correct” guidelines for all those “agonized, confused and conflicted gay men fearful of being drummed out of the fraternity of cool, AIDS-adjusted, post-AIDS babies.” “A vast ocean of silence,” he felt, “surrounds what gay men are actually doing—or actually want to be doing. There currently is no permission to discuss, calmly and rationally, the many gray zones of safe sex.” The relative risks of some sexual acts were still surrounded, Mike felt, with confusing, contradictory, guilt-inducing guidelines. He rejected the view that every lesbian who refused to use a dental dam when engaging in oral sex, or every gay man who sucked dick without a condom, had a death wish. Mike’s attitudes about current safe-sex guidelines prefigured a debate within gay male circles that was about to erupt. The gap between
public HIV prevention messages (the “condom code”) and the refusal in some gay male circles to abide by it was widening.
⁸

More and more gay men were feeling that the condom code was inhuman; they chafed against the tight strictures that circumscribed sexual pleasure. They’d significantly reduced their levels of risky sexual behavior but were unwilling never again to experience the satisfaction of skin-to-skin contact or the intimacy of exchanging semen. They’d accomplished a remarkable degree of self-policing, and doubted that many heterosexual men, with their attitude of entitlement, could ever have achieved a comparable level of behavioral change—hell, most of them couldn’t even sustain a diet or an exercise regime.

What’s most remarkable about Mike’s carefully composed arguments about issues relating to safe sex is that he still cared enough to make them. Here he was, undergoing the torments of chemo treatments, told that his life span would likely be about a year, living alone in a studio apartment in subsidized housing where the toilets still had pull chains and some of his possessions had been stolen from a storage room in the basement—and he was still employing what he called his “sick sense of obligation to others.” Had he not been essentially modest, he might have substituted “noble” for “sick.”

Essex, too, continued to engage with public issues, though his health was no less compromised than Mike’s. He joined with Audre Lorde to do a joint reading, “Gay Art Against Apartheid,” and when the prestigious
Journal of the History of Sexuality
—which at the time leaned heavily in the direction of LGBT content—published an essay by a black gay man that Essex found “ridiculous, pedestrian,” he used the occasion as a means to make a larger point: namely, that the journal did not have a single black gay male on either its editorial or advisory boards. In his letter of protest to the editor, Essex forestalled one familiar response by writing, “please don’t tell me there are no Black gay and lesbian scholars or scholars of color available to work with you all.” He offered his help in recommending “a number of very capable and brilliant scholars to you.”
⁹

Like Mike Callen, Essex roused himself to protest despite increasingly precarious health. His T cell count—the prime indicator of the health of an immune system—had been steadily falling. “I have so
little energy and I’m faced with so much to do,” he wrote his agent, Frances Goldin. He did manage to complete his residency at the Getty Center, but his spirits were only “fair.” Yet he did remain ambulatory, and even managed, occasionally, to travel and give a reading or talk. The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) put on an “An Evening With Essex Hemphill” in 1993, and, before a packed audience, he gave a vigorous, energetic performance and at the dinner for him afterward managed to more than hold his own in a brisk, even forceful conversation.

The effect of AIDS on public opinion had, with the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992, become something of a double-edged sword; heightened fear of gay men as “carriers” had become increasingly counterbalanced by mounting sympathy for their suffering. In 1993, Hollywood released the big-budget film
Philadelphia
about a sympathetically drawn gay lawyer with AIDS, played by Tom Hanks (for which he won an Oscar). The film went on to earn $125 million at the box office. Soon after, the singer Elton John came out, and a year after that, Greg Louganis, the multiple gold medal winner in Olympic diving, not only came out but revealed that he was HIV-positive.

None of which, needless to add, produced better treatments for AIDS, let alone a cure. By the early nineties, a pronounced demographic shift was taking place: 15 million people in sub-Saharan Africa were becoming infected, the large majority, in contrast with the United States, through heterosexual intercourse. This difference in transmission routes has never been fully examined or explained, though the dominant theory currently suggests that blood products rather than sperm is in Africa the primary culprit. In the United States by the mid-1990s, there were more new cases of AIDS among blacks than whites, with the large majority resulting from male-to-male contact (though a significant number did not self-identify as “gay”).

The
New York Times
had greatly increased its coverage of the epidemic over the years, beating out all the other major dailies in the number of published articles on the epidemic. Yet only a shocking 5 percent of AIDS stories published between 1981 and 1993 focused on African Americans, and a mere 1.4 percent on Latinos—and most of those articles were about celebrity blacks like Magic Johnson and Arthur Ashe. (The figures would later go down still further. A Kaiser
Family Foundation study published in 2004 surveyed
all
media coverage on AIDS from 1981 to 2002 and found that only 3 percent focused on minorities.)

Nor was there a steady and reliable uptake in mainstream sympathy. When President Clinton ran into a barrage of opposition to his suggestion that the ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military be lifted, he quickly scurried for cover, settling on the “compromise” solution of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—which would remain official policy for another twenty years.
Newsweek
would (weirdly) write in 1993 that gay people were “the new power brokers,” yet the early nineties saw a 30 percent increase in assaults and hate crimes against them. The dragon of homophobia had hardly been slain, and the seeming increase in respect and attention mostly amounted to a fragile inclusion pretty much confined to those gay people who looked and behaved like “normal” folks—meaning primarily middle-class white men who put their faith in polite lobbying, eschewed the confrontational tactics of a group like ACT UP, and shied away from any left-wing identification.

When I took part in the April 25, 1993, March on Washington, it seemed to me a bland, juiceless event that was more parade than protest—especially when contrasted with the earlier, more overtly political gay marches of 1979 and 1987. And the issue of AIDS no longer seemed in the forefront of concern, as it had been during the 1987 March. It was now one issue among many. If any theme was sounded with frequency, it was the new issue of “gays in the military”—an assimilationist goal that marked a new kind of gay movement, one that included AIDS as one among several issues of concern—along with the right to marry—and, further, replaced the raucous, direct-action demands of ACT UP with a “we’re just folks” façade that no longer indicted social inequities but rather
requested
permission to “join up.” Left-wing gays, now relegated to the sidelines, deplored the limited new agenda as an affront to the multiple sacrifices made and a dishonest disavowal of the special history and insights of a distinctive subculture. AIDS was being shoved to the margins by a polite new gay movement emphasizing an agenda of traditional values. More and more of its adherents felt it safe to emerge from the closet—even as they pushed the issue of AIDS into it.