The Gay Metropolis (58 page)

“‘Why?' I asked—not a clue that anything could be wrong.

“‘'Cause I just read in the paper he's dead. He had AIDS.' And all of a sudden, my whole life flashed in front of me.

“Now I think to myself, if that night had been a little different—if he had either forced his way in you, or you had a few beers, chances are, you would have been infected. You would have come to New York, had sex with boys and girls, and because you would have been too scared to admit that you had unprotected sex or had AIDS, you would have infected other people. And oh my God—this is how it spreads among teenagers because the odds of getting fucked the first time are so tremendous. If it had been just a little different, my life might have been altered forever. When I hear teenagers [are] still contracting HIV, you want to go, This is crazy because this can be avoided. They're still young enough to be educated.”

IN
1984, Todd Alexius Long was twenty-three years old when he went on a blind date with Ethan Geto, who was then forty-one. Long was a recent graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology, where he had studied photography. Besides being a lot older, Geto was almost a foot taller than Long. “I said, Well, I could never go out with him,” said Long. “But then I did right away. I liked him very much. I guess I felt like he really listened to me. We just seemed to have a lot in common right away.” The blind date led to a long relationship, whose first phase lasted four years.

Three years later he decided to bury his past, and in 1988 he legally changed his name to “Xax”—because “I knew my Todd Alexius Long had nothing to do with me.” Five years later, he discovered the Radical Faeries, which were started by Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay. One reason Xax appreciated Hay was that the Faeries' founder “points out that we're not male or female—and why should we even want to be? We're just something other—and that's why I changed my name to Xax. Because it had no gender connotation, it had no connotation of anything.

“It was almost even nonhuman—just like an object. And that way whatever came to be ‘Xax' would just be whatever I became. It was a pure starting point. Because I always thought of myself as being omnisexual, omni … everything. Just completely inclusive.”

The same year that he changed his name is when Xax believes he caught the HIV virus—during his first threesome.

“I met this guy at the gym. Got together with him and his lover. Had a great time. Rubber broke. And in retrospect I knew, because the guy was
really
upset about that. And I was like—it was the beginning, I wasn't
really that concerned about AIDS yet. We didn't know much about it really. I was just like, I'm fine—nothing hurts me, I'm invincible. Blah blah blah. And he was just so concerned about it. In fact he would never talk to me after that. His lover kept in touch with me for a little while, I think just out of concern.”

A few months later Xax came down with shingles, which is sometimes an early indication of the onset of an AIDS infection. “And I was
so
sick for six weeks. And the doctor said we have to test you right away. And that's how I found out”—in February 1989.

But Xax had a very unusual reaction: “I've always looked at that as the most positive experience of my life: finding out I was HIV-positive. Because it was such a blessing in disguise for me that it made me rethink my life: ‘Oh, I do want to be alive—and these are the reasons.' Looking around and seeing that tree, ‘Well, wow, that's a good enough reason. Oh, that friend of mine—well, that's a good enough reason.' It starts to build the one thing on the next, so you think, Wow, I guess there really is a reason. And I was always very determined to conquer it. Like if there's only one person who conquers AIDS, I'm going to be the one. I don't care if everybody else drops dead, nobody's going to put me in the box of you'redying-tomorrow.

“I immediately went to all the meetings, and found out everything I could find out. I made up a newsletter called ‘Save the Humans.' I took the Save the Whale things and scratched out ‘Whales' and put ‘Humans' on them. I sent it to all my relatives and friends. I said this is what I've got, this is what is happening. Don't believe all the crap you hear on the television. This is what's known, this is what isn't known. And I will not accept being stuck in a box. I just knew that thinking that way would kill me faster.

“I took Zovirax when I had shingles, although I didn't take it fast enough because I always procrastinated about going to doctors. So it was caught just in time.

“So then I was very healthy. I didn't take any drugs, I still thought drugs were terrible, I took lots of vitamins, health foods. I was macrobiotic.

“Until I found out I was HIV-positive, I didn't want to be alive anyway because I was so depressed. And then, I became HIV-positive, and it kind of forced me to make a decision. It was like, well, here you go, this is what you wanted: take it or leave it or something. It's like, well, you always wanted to be dead, so here you go. Is this what you want?

“And then I changed my mind. It made me see things differently; it
made me make choices differently. Making choices toward living instead of against it.”

NINETEEN EIGHTY-SIX
brought gay people in New York City two glimmers of hope—one from politics and one from science—and one devastating defeat from Washington.

Hope sprang from the action of the New York City Council, where a gay rights bill had been introduced every year since 1971, only to be stymied by the council's majority leader, Thomas Cuite, who was a strong ally of the Catholic Church. “He was absolutely adamant against it,” remembered Ed Koch. “There was nothing I could do to get him to change.”

When Cuite finally retired at the beginning of 1986, Koch made a crucial deal: he agreed to endorse City Councilman Peter Vallone as Cuite's successor—in return for Vallone's promise that he would let the gay rights bill out of committee, even though Vallone did not support it himself.

Although Koch was frequently attacked by Larry Kramer and others for what activists considered a lackadaisical response to the AIDS crisis, the mayor had a strong record as a supporter of gay rights. In 1978, one of his first official acts as mayor was to issue an executive order prohibiting discrimination within the city government on the basis of sexual orientation. Most of the reporters in the city hall press room were horrified by this edict. Three years earlier, while serving as a congressman, Koch had been one of four cosponsors of a federal bill introduced by Representative Bella Abzug that would have prohibited discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations, and federally assisted programs on the basis of “affectional or sexual preference.”

Tom Stoddard, who by now was serving as the legislative director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, drafted the New York City bill that prohibited discrimination in housing and employment on the basis of sexual orientation. Stoddard “was an extraordinary lawyer,” Koch remembered. “Even though he never retreated, he would find a way to explain, to placate and convince opponents that his approach was reasonable, rational and one they could accept. That's a gift.”

Despite a huge last-minute push by John Cardinal O'Connor—who said the measure would offer protection to sexual behavior that was “abnormal” and a “sin”—the bill finally passed the council on March 21,1986, by a vote of twenty-one to fourteen. Ethan Geto was one of the principal lobbyists on behalf of the legislation. The vote was greeted “by cheers and tears from supporters,” Joyce Purnick reported in the
Times.

“God, I can't believe it—after all this time,” Stoddard told reporters.

The temperature dropped into the twenties that evening, but more than a thousand demonstrators gathered in Sheridan Square at the site of the original Stonewall riot to celebrate. “Psychologically, people can come out of the closet now,” Christopher Mountain exulted.

The passage of the law encouraged thousands of New Yorkers to declare who they really were during the coming decade. Among journalists, for example, in 1980 Joe Nicholson was the only publicly gay reporter at a New York daily; by 1996 more than three hundred of his colleagues at other media outlets had emulated him.

The law also put an end to some blatant examples of discrimination. As late as 1992, the Board on Professional Standards of the American Psychoanalytic Association was still resisting pressure from analyst and activist Richard Isay to promise to accept lesbians and gay men as training analysts. In April 1992, Dr. Isay asked William Rubenstein, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, to write a letter to the association which pointed out that its continuing failure to promise not to discriminate was illegal under the New York City statute. Just one week later, the executive board of the Psychoanalytic Association finally passed a resolution stating that homosexuals were just as qualified as heterosexuals to become training analysts.

THE OTHER HOPEFUL DEVELOPMENT
in the spring of 1986 was an announcement from the National Cancer Institute that a new drug called azidothymidine, or AZT, seemed to help some AIDS patients. Encouraging signs included “fewer fevers, the disappearance of infections, improved appetite and weight gain.” In years to come the drug's effectiveness—and toxicity—would be fiercely debated within the gay community, but when AZT was first introduced, it was the only medical treatment that provided any optimism at all. Roy Cohn and the Broadway choreographer Michael Bennett were two of the first AIDS patients to be treated with it.

But most of the good feelings provided by the city council's action and this scientific development were blotted out three months later by a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court.

In 1976 the Court had infuriated gay leaders by affirming a Virginia sodomy statute, without bothering to hear any arguments in the case.
^*
Ten years later, activists convinced themselves that the national climate
had changed enough to ensure a reversal. They also believed that they had found the perfect test case to use for a new challenge. Michael Hardwick had been at his home in Atlanta when a policeman barged in to serve him with a warrant to appear in court—because of a ticket for public drinking which Hardwick had already paid. After a roommate waved the policeman toward a back bedroom, the officer found Hardwick performing oral sex with another man and immediately arrested both of them.

At the end of March 1986, the Court heard arguments in
Bowers
v.
Hardwick.
Appearing on behalf of Hardwick, Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe told the Court that the Constitution protected private homosexual and heterosexual acts between consenting adults, while an assistant attorney general of Georgia countered that such a finding would undermine states' efforts to maintain “a decent and moral society.”

When the justices first met privately to discuss the case two days later, there were five apparent votes in favor of striking down Georgia's sodomy law. John Paul Stevens was part of that initial five-member majority, even though he had told a colleague, “I hate homos.”

The other justices who initially joined in that majority decision were William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, and Lewis Powell. Perhaps because Tribe's argument was considered so persuasive, rumors quickly spread through the gay community that a favorable decision in the case was likely. But less than a week after their first meeting on the matter, Justice Powell wrote a new memorandum to his colleagues indicating that he would probably reverse his vote, thereby providing a majority to
uphold
the antisodomy law.

When the Court rendered its decision on June 30, Justice Byron White took the unusual step of reading large portions of the five-to-four majority opinion from the bench. White was contemptuous of the arguments that Professor Tribe had offered. “To claim that a right to engage in [sodomy] is ‘deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition' or ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty' is, at best, facetious,” White declared. Chief Justice Warren Burger enthusiastically agreed in a concurring opinion: “To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching,” Burger said.

But Harry Blackmun filed a fierce dissent: “The majority has distorted the question this case presents,” Blackmun stated. The case was really about “the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men,” namely “the right to be let alone”—as Justice Louis Brandeis
had written in an earlier case in 1928. “The right of an individual to conduct intimate relationships in the intimacy of his or her own home seems to me to be the heart of the Constitution's protection of privacy,” Blackmun continued. “Depriving individuals of the right to choose for themselves how to conduct their intimate relationships poses a far greater threat to the values most deeply in our Nation's history than tolerance of nonconformity could ever do.”

A Gallup poll revealed that of the seventy-three percent of those who knew about the decision, forty-seven percent disagreed with it, while forty-one percent approved of the Court's action.

Tom Stoddard, who by now had become executive director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, called the decision “a major disaster from our point of view.” He continued, “For the gay rights movement, this is our Dred Scott case,” referring to the 1857 Supreme Court ruling which held that blacks were not citizens and therefore could be slaves. Stoddard felt the Court's action rested on “nothing more substantial than the collective distaste of the five justices in the majority for the conduct under scrutiny.” Justice Powell, who provided the key vote upholding the sodomy law, told an astounded clerk that he had never met a homosexual. Court historian David J. Garrow noted that Powell was “apparently unaware” that he had “already employed numerous gay assistants during his fifteen years on the Court.”