His friend, of course, is dead now.
I finally make the call, three days late. My doctor tells me he has good news. “It won’t be necessary for you to start taking AZT yet.” Somehow I’ve managed to misplace thirty T-cells in the past quarter: another statistically insignificant drop. “Oh, and tests indicate that you’ve been exposed [which I register as
infected]
to Epstein-Barr virus.” My doctor asks me if I’ve heard of acyclovir, an antiviral that suppresses the herpes virus. Dumb fuck, read my chart. You’ve been prescribing it to me for the last year, twice a day. “Well, try it three times a day.”
Burroughs Wellcome, the kind people who brought us AZT at approximately $8,000 per annum, markets acyclovir under the trademark name Zovirax. Burroughs Wellcome is the de facto corporate sponsor of the October 11 demonstration at the FDA.
“Oh, and you should avoid stress,” says my doctor.
That’s real likely, living in New York City.
But why do I persist in going to all these endless ACT UP meetings and rallies and demonstrations? I wonder whether I have some sort of death wish.
ACT UP
ACT UP was formed in March 1987 in response to yet another angry tirade by the indefatigable Larry Kramer, one of the founders of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. According to the credo recited at the start of every Monday meeting by one of the two facilitators, “ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, is a diverse, nonpartisan group of individuals united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.”
Every Monday evening at 7:30, around two hundred cynical queers both male and female meet at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center. Everyone is named Michael. For clarity’s sake, I’ve given some of them pseudonyms. Periodically refugees from twelve-step programs meeting elsewhere in the building pass through.
Our logo is “SILENCE = DEATH”: To remain silent about the AIDS crisis is to be an accomplice to death. We’ve covered the city with stickers: a pink triangle (remnant from the Holocaust: Germans made Jews wear yellow stars of David, and fags pink triangles) on a black background, with the logo in white. At demos and rallies we chant “We’ll never be silent again!”
ACT UP has no leaders. Meetings are run according to a modified version of Roberta’s Rules of Order and are democratic to the point of near anarchy. The facilitator’s role is to try to allow as full a discussion as possible without letting things slide into complete chaos, and to lower the level of vituperative and personal aggrievement to an acceptable level.
Yet somehow, miraculously, things get done.
ACT UP had its first protest on Wall Street in the spring of 1987, stopping traffic at seven in the morning and hanging Frank Young (commissioner of the FDA) in effigy. “No more business as usual,” we chanted, protesting the exorbitant price of AZT (then $10,000 a year). Seventeen were arrested at this demo. Since then, ACT UP has held protests at
Cosmopolitan’s
headquarters (protesting an article stating that heterosexual women were not at risk), at Kowa manufacturers (when Kowa in Japan stopped selling dextran sulfate to Americans), at N.Y.C. Health Commissioner Stephen Joseph’s office (protesting municipal AIDS policies), at both the Democratic and Republican conventions, and hounded the Presidential Commission on HIV relentlessly.
But why are there so many crazies at ACT UP? And why are the paranoid ones the loudest? Vocal members include one-note maniacs like the members of the International Socialist Organization who respond to every issue like presidential candidates at televised debates by ignoring the question at hand and with the most tenuous association segueing into a canned speech; the AZT-is-poison lobby; the paranoid-government-conspiracy contingent; the radical with lips thicker than Sandra Bernhard’s who endlessly organizes kiss-ins; the self-proclaimed fattest and loudest megalomaniac who, in profile, bears a marked resemblance to Al Sharpton; the person of color who is constantly expressing extreme umbrage at any imagined slight; the fabulous dancer with the dazzling dangling earrings; the voice of Compassion, an out-of-work actress with a penchant for grandstanding with humor, who appeals to our deepest emotions and rarely our intellects (is this an
audition?);
the slender young cutie who demonstrates for the masses the latest fund-raising T-shirt on his own body; the Muscle Queen whose hopeless erudition continually mangles the English language (why can’t he just flex silently?); the Religious Fanatic who exhorts us in passionate sermons to perform acts of civil disobedience at St. Patrick’s Cathedral after Cardinal O‘Connor tossed Dignity, a gay Catholic group, out of the church (why doesn’t he just leave the Catholic faith, and what does this have to do with AIDS?); the radical with snot dribbling down his nose, screaming for more beds (there’s one waiting for him at Bellevue); the Voice of Reason; the Voice of Sarcasm; the Voice of Roberta Herself (an activist who spits out Robert’s Rules of Order by rote, letter-perfect); the Voice of Bitter Irony; the Voice of Despair; the Voice of Righteous Anger; the Voice of Utter Madness ; and several other affective disorders as yet unclassifiable in the general scheme.
Sometimes I wonder, if I had a boyfriend, would I bother with the endless Monday meetings? I’m an ancient fossilized nightmare on the other side of the age of trust (i.e., thirty-plus): too old to rock and roll and too young to die. What am I doing in the midst of all of this youthful energy, these cute radicals? By the time the meetings are over at ten-thirty I’m too exhausted to cruise and I just want to crawl back into my coffin.
I go to the Monday meetings and about half of the demonstrations, and once I even went to a poster party on a day when it was around fifteen degrees above zero at some dyke’s apartment in Tribeca (she didn’t have a buzzer and she was on the phone for fifteen minutes so we froze in the winter wind until she hung up and let us in), where we made posters for a demo and I was chastised for being messy.
I should be doing more.
I am totally suffused with Catholic guilt, despite the fact that I was born Jewish.
At the Monday-night meetings, we plan actions and zaps, vote on expenditure of funds for our activities, and have endless arguments over procedural matters and AIDS-activist theory. We also have elections (the old high-school popularity contests) for facilitators (it’s important to have decorative elements to look at during procedural matters). A cute but inarticulate fag wins by popular acclaim, followed by a mysteriously well-liked dyke. The sage and acerbic feminist who remarked in her statement that being a facilitator was “the closet thing to having my own talk show” collects several votes. We discuss whether to incorporate as a nonprofit organization for an hour and a half on a day when both temperature and humidity top ninety, before eventually tabling the matter until Halloween. The sexy socialist from the ISO with the tight, well-worn jeans ripped in just the right places says he isn’t going to pay taxes to murderers, but then, what would you expect a commie pinko fag to say? We spend hours debating the merits of whether national health insurance should be one of our basic demands on every flyer we send out. We spend moments discussing whether we should start every meeting with a kiss-in.
We have a heated debate about whether to include a person of color and a PWA (Person With AIDS) whenever we send representatives to an AIDS-activist conference or a meeting with officials. I have trouble with the parity and quota system. I mean, when they talk about people of color, who am I, Mister
Cellophane?
Am I colorless, odorless, transparent, and lethal? So say some of my exes. And can I even ask these questions without being accused of sexism, racism, xenophobia, and homophobia?
I kibitz with pals on the sidelines, exchanging sarcastic comments during the Monday-night meetings. Cynicism generally sets in after eight months of involvement with the group.
My Larry Kramer Problem
Larry Kramer has this annoying habit of founding organizations and then renouncing them. It would be easier to treat him as the Lyndon LaRouche of the gay movement, another member of some insane fringe, and simply ignore his rantings and ravings as those of a demented lunatic. Unfortunately, beneath the spleen and venom, he usually is right.
Ten years ago he wrote an amusing novel called
Faggots
about homos doing the disco-gym-Fire Island circuit and fornicating like bunnies. The moral of the story being that this wasn’t particularly healthy emotionally, and it would be better to have relationships of a deeper resonance. Of course, he was immediately attacked in the pinko fag left-wing press for being anti-sex, a moral puritan.
And now I suppose if we had all taken his advice and stopped having sex with more than six thousand partners, we wouldn’t be in this mess today. But to draw any analogy between the two seems the most specious form of logical analysis. I place it under the category of brutal irony and leave it at that.
Larry Kramer helped found the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which was originally organized to help fund medical research for a cure for AIDS. After considerable internal squabbling, which he documented in the thinly veiled
pièce-à-clef The Normal Heart,
a political diatribe in the guise of a play (in which he attacked Mayor Koch for his response to the AIDS crisis, and GMHC for its nonactivist behavior), he was ejected from GMHC. Since then he has written a series of screeching editorials in the
New York Native
and
The Village Voice
about the pitiful city and federal response to the AIDS crisis.
Larry Kramer spoke to gay groups on numerous occasions. At one talk at the Community Center he said, “Look to your left, look to your right. Half of you will be dead from AIDS in ten years. Why aren’t you fighting for your lives?” He inspired a group of people to form ACT UP. But, once again, the organization got away from him. And after the six-month saturation period, he, too, became bitter and cynical. ACT UP, originally organized to speed up drug testing and treatment, had evolved into a democratic organization to the point of near anarchy and grown into two-hundred-member Monday meetings and a myriad of committees and subcommittees (Issues, Treatment, Prison, Election, Majority Action, Women‘s, Fund-raising, Media, Outreach, and more). Larry had offered to front the money for a fund-raising letter, so we wouldn’t have to divert money needed for actions and demonstrations. Three months later he retracted his offer, with a bitter letter accusing ACT UP of losing its focus. He also chided ACT UP for not being sufficiently mature enough to spend the organization’s own money on its goals. Indian giver. At that point it was necessary to find another person to write the cover letter of the fund-raiser, because who could tell if Kramer wouldn’t publicly denounce ACT UP in three months?
The fund-raising chair read Kramer’s letter with controlled fury and told us that, as usual, Larry had a lot to say, and we should ignore the tone and concentrate on content.
What I hate most about Larry Kramer is—his prose style. There. I said it. I can’t read him anymore. Who does he think he is, Noam Chomsky writing about transformational generative grammar? That’s the mark of a fag. Here we are in a life-and-death situation, and what am I doing? Rearranging the furniture on the
Titanic;
making stylistic complaints. The amount of chaff in his writing is so thick I can barely make it through his prose to get to his points. Somewhere along the line he lost his sense of humor. I don’t know why losing a hundred and twenty friends and acquaintances to AIDS would do that to someone, but let’s face it, it did. And now Kramer is consumed by so much anger that he can offer only venom and accusations. Larry Kramer—the fag that cried wolf, Cassandra, the prophetess of doom—shrieks his diatribes into the wind, and no one listens.
CD Training
Anyone who wants to get arrested must attend a civil-disobedience training session. Great. Another fucking ten-hour meeting.
At last week’s Monday meeting, John told us that the FDA’s public relations had asked him exactly what ACT UP was going to do on October 11. He replied, “We’re going to take over the FDA. We don’t think that it’s being run effectively, and frankly, we think we can do a better job.”
In the seventies, an earring in the left ear meant you were queer on the East Coast; on the West Coast, it was the right ear. To avoid semiotic confusion, to dispel all doubts, our virile leader, Gregg, wears an earring in each.
During the endless CD training, we go over the reasons for our siege at the FDA: because we disagree with the principle of placebo testing for life-threatening illnesses; because the FDA isn’t releasing drugs fast enough; because the current three-phase drug-approval process is ineffective; because trials exclude women, minorities, and former drug abusers, who may have different reactions to these drugs; because the FDA refuses to accept foreign data, and a drug like dextran sulfate, which has been in use for more than twenty years in Japan to lower blood pressure, must undergo toxicity tests; because the bureaucracy is inactive; because the FDA blocks underground buyers’ groups; because we want informed choice for treatments; and so on.
We talk about nonviolent civil disobedience (avoid physical abuse; don’t carry anything that could be construed as a weapon; no verbal abuse to the police; if you’re being beaten, don’t fight back; get support from other demonstrators) and discuss the non-violence guidelines that ACT NOW (AIDS Coalition to Network, Organize, and Win, a national coalition of AIDS-activist groups throughout the country) had agreed upon. We role-play blocking FDA employees from entering, explaining our position to members of the media, getting arrested by the police. Gregg tells us that there are degrees of noncooperation with the police: Once we are arrested, we can continue nonviolent civil disobedience by refusing to walk to the paddy wagon; refusing to cooperate with processing by giving false identification information; refusing to pay fines and bail. Gregg describes the process of action, police warnings of arrest, booking, arraignment, and trial. I am intensely distracted by a dazzlingly attractive youthful playwright with green eyes to die for, until he confesses to me that he’s attracted to Brits.