An Intimate Life (29 page)

I asked Kevin the usual questions about what he liked best.

“Definitely when you went down on me. I’d forgotten how much I liked that.”

I was surprised by his answer because I remembered him saying that he and Diane had oral sex and that it was then when he typically lost his erection.

“Does Diane not like to give you blow jobs?”

“She does it, but it hurts me.”

“What about it hurts?”

“She uses her teeth and they scrape against my penis.”

“Have you talked to her about this?”

“No, I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to hurt her feelings.”

“Kevin, you can tell her about this without hurting her feelings. You’d want her to tell you if you were doing something that hurt, right?”

“Yeah, but . . . what if she thinks I’m criticizing her?”

“Well, I can’t promise how she’ll react, but there are communication techniques that can help limit the chances that she’ll take this as a personal criticism.”

I asked Kevin if Diane was open to talking about sex.

“Yeah. She really wants to understand what’s stopping us from having it. She jokes about sex a lot, and she’s not shy in bed. She was happy when I told her I was coming here because she wants to, well, get laid.”

“That’s a great starting point.”

I sat down next to Kevin on the bed and shared some of the best communication techniques I know.

“Start by explaining that you want to talk about this because you love her and find her attractive and you want your sex life to be mutually satisfying. If you help her to see the ultimate purpose of the discussion, she’s more likely to want to participate in it.”

Kevin listened attentively.

“Use ‘I’ statements. No accusing or scolding. You might say something like, ‘I really love when you go down on me, but when you press down with your teeth I feel some pain and it diminishes my hard-on.”

“What if she gets embarrassed?”

“Remind her that you want to know if you’re doing something that doesn’t feel good to her. Give her the same opportunity she’s giving you.”

“I wonder if I am doing something she doesn’t like,” Kevin said.

“Talking honestly and openly with each other is the only way to find out. Let Diane know that you want the lines of communication to stay open. Your likes and dislikes may change and hers might too. You have to be able to talk to each other about that as you grow and age together.”

For the first time Kevin blushed and he averted his eyes from me. He looked embarrassed.

“How are you feeling?”

“Well, a little silly to tell you the truth.”

When I asked him why, he said it was because the solution to his problem had been there all along, and now it seemed so simple.

“It may look simple, but remember, few of us are taught how to communicate about sex.”

“I just . . . just assumed we couldn’t talk about that for some reason.”

“You just needed the encouragement and reminder that you can. There’s nothing magical here. These are simple skills that you can learn. Are you going to try to talk to Diane today?”

“I don’t know. It seems like it should be easy, but I get scared when I think of telling her about this.”

Kevin and I role-played some possible scenarios that might unfold between them. A quick study, he became more and more adept at communicating his concern without criticism as we practiced.

Kevin and I saw each other for two more sessions. At our last one he told me he had finally gotten up the nerve to talk to Diane.

“She was so happy that I told her. She said she wished she had known sooner,” he said cheerfully.

For the first time in months, they had had intercourse.

I was happy that Kevin had finally been able to have sex with Diane again, but I was happier that he had opened the communication between them and laid the groundwork for an ongoing fulfilling sex life. He had learned one of the essential secrets of all great lovers.

16.

isn’t that your daughter?

T
he backlash was on. In 1986, we were in the thick of Ronald Reagan’s second term and the United States was moving ever more rightward. The gains of the Sexual Revolution and other social movements were imperiled by an alignment of traditional conservative forces and the Religious Right. It seemed as though we were turning the clock back to a time when sexuality was demonized and sexual concerns were suppressed.

Reagan remained mum about AIDS until 1987, after thousands had already been felled by it. The Moral Majority and other right-wing activists appropriated the disease as a political weapon and took aim at the gay community, one of their favorite scapegoats. Unalloyed victim blaming and withering condemnation spewed from the grassroots bullhorns to the fundamentalist pulpits to the national media channels open to government officials. “The poor homosexuals—they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution,” Pat Buchanan, Reagan’s communications director, inveighed in
The New York Post
in 1986. The time was ripe for an attack on reproductive rights, sexual minorities, and women; the march backward had begun.

It was naïve, but I sometimes thought if these hateful bullies would simply listen to one of the legion of AIDS patients who they summarily damned they might see that they were talking about real human beings and not a mass of faceless demons. If they could listen to my dear friend Steven Brown, for example, they might change their point of view.

By the early ’80s, Steven and I had become fixtures on the training staff at San Francisco Sex Information. We met twice a year to train new crops of volunteers who kept the organization thriving.

In the winter of 1986, we prepared a class of fifty people. On the first day of training, Steven, myself, and other teachers traded off addressing the group, answering questions, and running through dozens of hypothetical scenarios they might encounter as phone volunteers.

When our lunch break rolled around, an unannounced rain crashed down on the city, and neither Steven nor I had an umbrella. We pulled our coats over our heads and headed to a Chinese place just a couple of blocks from the SFSI training site. About halfway there we started running, and by the time we swung the door open to the warm restaurant we were both out of breath and laughing like school kids.

We wedged ourselves into a red vinyl booth, and the waiter placed a steaming pot of tea between us. Steven poured a cup for me and then one for himself. I wrapped my fingers tightly around the ceramic mug to warm my hands. The sizzling noise of stir-frying came from the kitchen and mingled with the savory smells of pepper and garlic. I realized I was famished. We ordered and sipped our tea while we waited for lunch.

“Good group this time around,” I said.

“Yeah, every year they seem to arrive better educated.”

“Remember when we started in the seventies? How little most of us knew?”

Steven said nothing. He turned his cup around with his fingertips and fiddled with his silverware. Then he looked me in the eyes.

“Cheryl, I have to tell you something.”

His mood had turned serious and I felt a sudden dread.

“I got tested,” he said.

Oh no, I thought.

Our egg rolls arrived and we both looked at them and then at each other.

“I’m HIV positive.”

“Oh, Steven . . . ” I said, and felt my stomach drop.

How much longer will he live? It was an eerie thought. What he told me was that he was HIV positive. What I heard was that he would be dead soon. I imagined his handsome face drawn and sallow.

“Steven, I . . . ”

“Cheryl, it’s okay. The truth is, I wasn’t shocked to get the news.”

Steven had enjoyed a lot of partners. Maybe I shouldn’t have been shocked either, but I just sat there unable to speak.

“I’m learning everything I can about how to stay healthy. I’m going to fight this for as long as I can, and I’m not alone,” he said.

I squeezed Steven’s hand. “No, you’re not. Not at all.”

When we returned to the training that afternoon, I marveled at how Steven dove back into his work without hesitation. I never would have guessed that anything was wrong as he cracked jokes and addressed the class in his usual animated and dynamic style. Steven was up against a pitiless disease, but he was facing it with the same positive, take-charge spirit that made me and so many others fall in love with him.

True to his word, Steven became a lay expert on HIV and AIDS. He educated himself and his friends on the best self-care after diagnosis. Before his diagnosis, Steven frequented the bathhouses, where gay men met to engage in casual sex. What was left of the bathhouse scene now included volunteer safer sex patrols and he signed on to be part of them. He became part of a crew that monitored the Sutro bathhouse to ensure that everyone engaged in safer play. In addition to taking a drug cocktail, he maintained a healthy lifestyle and a positive attitude. Steven continued to work as a surrogate, and he was scrupulous about telling all clients upfront about his condition and using condoms and other safer sex measures.

Most days it felt like I helplessly watched as the hard-won triumphs of the ’60s and ’70s became the targets of this new era. The only thing I could do was talk—publicly. I could at least try to present my perspective, one that was being drowned out by the shrill cries of the revived and energized Puritans and professional finger-waggers. I had been interviewed for local TV and print media in the past. I wanted people to understand what surrogates do, but I also wanted to do my small part in demystifying and destigmatizing sex by making it part of the public discussion. That took on a renewed importance now.

It wasn’t uncommon for Steven and I to do media together. “The Steven and Cheryl Show,” as we dubbed ourselves, began in the mid-’80s when we appeared on a local Bay Area program called
People Are Talking
. Often producers who found one of us would ask if we could refer them to other surrogates. Some media handled our work thoughtfully; others played up the most sensational aspects. It was always a gamble, and I wasn’t sure how to best hedge my bets. Was it worth having a sensational piece for the larger mission of changing the public discussion, or did it just feed into all the same old stale, misleading narratives and myths?

The Steven and Cheryl Show got its national TV break when
Larry King Live
booked us for an interview in 1989. This was one of the first national programs to take on surrogacy work and I was nervous. Larry King was a TV legend, and what if my parents stumbled on it? They had only a vague idea of what I did for a living, and the last thing they would do was press for more details. They knew it involved sex and sexuality, so it couldn’t be good.

The producers of the show arranged for us to film in a Los Angeles studio so we didn’t have to fly to DC where the program was based. Unlike some other shows I had done, I wasn’t expected to show up “camera ready.” As soon as we arrived at the studio, Steven and I were whisked off to makeup artists. When I was done I had so much makeup on that I feared I looked clownish. “Don’t worry, you’ll look great onscreen,” the makeup artist assured me. I took another look in the mirror and hoped she was right. I felt and looked like I had on a mask.

An assistant then led me on to a soundstage where Steven was waiting for me. It had been close to two years since his diagnosis and he still looked handsome and fit. The doctors marveled at how well Steven was doing, and I was eternally grateful for it.

“Hey, Bruce Willis was the last person to sit in this seat,” a giddy Steven said to me.

“Really? Who sat here last?” I asked one of the crew members, pointing at my chair.

“Zsa Zsa Gabor,” he answered.

“Wow, Zsa Zsa’s was the last butt to touch this seat. How about that?” I said to Steven.

“Bruce, Zsa Zsa, Steven, and Cheryl. It was meant to be,” he said.

We both laughed until a sound engineer clipped microphones on us.

There were three cameras on us, and the producer explained that a red light would indicate which one was taping. We should look into the active camera throughout the show. I took some deep breaths and told myself to stay calm and confident. Then Larry appeared on a monitor, and within minutes we were live on the air. King asked reasonable questions and he allowed us to answer them fully. Only one caller was overtly hostile. When it was over, Steven and I both felt like we had been given a fair opportunity to explain what we do and why it matters.

When I got home I watched the video that Michael made of the show. The makeup artist was right! For once, I looked good on TV.

A few days later I called home to check in on my parents. Exactly what I had feared had happened. My father’s friend had recognized me and called him. “Bob,” he said, “isn’t that your daughter on
Larry King Live?
” Here we go, I thought when my father told me he had watched the interview. To my surprise he simply said, “So that’s what you do.” “Yes, Dad. I educate people about sexuality and help them feel more comfortable with it,” I answered.