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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 35

INVINCIBLE AIDS

An Identity Forged in Flames


The wildfire of the AIDS epidemic has made gays a community
even as it has consumed their lives

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III


    Michael McDade, who earned a Bronze Star fighting in
Vietnam, came to believe the war was an unwinnable folly. But
opposition to the conflict never got him marching in protest.
Nor did Watergate prompt him to activism, even though he grew
so disgusted he "no longer felt allegiance to the government."
What did radicalize him, he says, was "having to bundle up and
transport my increasingly ill lover to a welfare office every
few months so bureaucrats could go through the pointless charade
of recertifying a dying man's disability to work." So he began
to join group after group and march in every demonstration he
could find. This month the poet and floral decorator took on a
new career, completing a certificate course at Boston University
to become an AIDS educator. He plans to focus on racial
minorities. "I had a lot of anger that I had to turn into
something productive," he says. "We live in a society so numbed
by statistics that we have begun to normalize something that
should never be considered normal. It's the Vietnam body count
all over. And gay white men are already better organized than
other communities. I wanted to be sure others didn't have to
reinvent the wheel on this epidemic."

    In his anger, his politicization and his activism, McDade
embodies the experience of many of the country's 10 million
adult gay men. They feel they have been living through a war,
watching comrades fall by the battalion. During the dozen years
of the AIDS epidemic, they have witnessed the premature death
of virtually a generation of leaders, role models, neighbors and
friends. While some gay men have been touched by unexpected
compassion from heterosexual acquaintances, a majority have been
embittered by what they see as widespread hostility or neglect.
They overwhelmingly believe that government at all levels has
scorned and abandoned them, that the nation's leaders either
actively welcome their suffering or, at best, do not much care
whether they live or die. They are infuriated by talk of
"innocent" victims of the disease, with its implication that gay
victims are all guilty and deserve their fate. They are enraged
that ostensibly sympathetic heterosexuals, including their own
families, may voice concern but fail to grasp the depth of the
emotional exhaustion, isolation and sense of loss. And many gay
men, even when they test negative for the disease and
meticulously avoid behavior thought likely to transmit it, live
with a constant sense of doom, an anguishing irrational
certainty that this virus will someday, somehow, come to get
them too. "It's always in the back of my mind, except when it's
in the front of my mind," says Mark Mobley, an arts critic at
the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. "Whenever you are in a room with
someone, the question is always there: Is AIDS in the room with
you too?"

    AIDS has been the great defining moment in the history of
the U.S. gay movement. By a macabre irony, the disease that
wiped out so many gay men has given their survivors a sense of
mature purpose. The crisis turned an often hedonistic male
subculture of bar hopping, promiscuity and abundant
"recreational" drugs -- an endless party centered on the young
and the restless -- into a true community, rich in social
services and political lobbies, in volunteerism and civic
spirit. It made civil rights issues suddenly vital to young
middle-class men who had not previously expected to seek help
from the government. It awakened many gay men, sick or well, to
spiritual values. It partly bridged a widespread gap between gay
men and lesbians, a chasm based on arcane feminist dialectics
or simple lack of shared life-style, because those concerns
seemed trivial when compared with life and death. Says Eric
Marcus of San Francisco, author of Making History: The Struggle
for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, a new oral history of the
movement: "In the mature sense of the word community, you can
make a case that there really wasn't much of one for a great
many gays before AIDS." Thus it has become almost an incantatory
mantra within gay circles to say the catastrophe "has not been
without its gifts."

    In terms of gay relations with the wider world, the AIDS
era brought more general acknowledgment, by the news media and
the government, of the sheer numbers of U.S. gay men and women
-- a minority roughly as numerous as blacks or Hispanics, four
times as numerous as Jews. It brought frank, nonjudgmental
discussion of their lovemaking, including anatomical mechanics,
into the nation's newspapers and even some of its classrooms.
The epidemic helped prompt big-city mayors and police
departments to appoint liaisons to their gay communities. It
opened the doors of charities and foundations, of newspaper and
TV editors, even of Governors and Congress members, to leaders
of gay organizations that previously had not been taken
seriously -- or that, in many cases, had not even existed.

    Despite a strong sense among gay leaders that AIDS has
deflected energies that might more happily have gone into the
legislative battle for civil rights, the disease may actually
have spurred that long and bumpy struggle. Gary Kaupman of
Atlanta, former editor of Southern Voice, the city's gay and
lesbian weekly, argues, "AIDS has broken the playboy stereotype
and exposed our humanity to the rest of the world, and that has
allowed us to touch it better ourselves. We have been seen as
more serious people, and we have become more serious people. I
don't think we would have anywhere near the political allies we
do without it."

    At the same time AIDS has coalesced an emerging gay
community, however, the disease has also divided it. The most
obvious chasm is between those who are already infected with the
disease, or at least the virus that brings it on, and those who
test negative for it. HIV-positive men, especially those still
healthy, feel they are entitled to a normal life as long as
possible; HIV-negative men fear imperiling their physical and,
even more, their emotional health. The greatest concern of many,
if not most, HIV-positive men is to ensure that someone will be
around to ease them through their final illness, whenever it
comes. The greatest concern of many HIV-negative men is to avoid
becoming that care giver, with all the soul-depleting effort it
implies.

    Jerry, a suburban Atlanta therapist in his late 20s, knew
he was running major risks when he fell in love half a dozen
years ago with a man some years older. From the first date, they
practiced safe sex. But there is no prophylactic protection
against grief. When the relationship was less than a year old,
his lover was found to have AIDS. Jerry says he never considered
leaving during five harrowing years. But he adds tearfully that
he could not imagine involving himself with an HIV-positive man
again.

    Yet however ruthless they may be on the surface about
isolating themselves, uninfected men are widely burdened with
what scholars of war call survivor guilt. These gay survivors
see no moral reason, no legitimate distinction, that accounts
for why they are alive and their friends and acquaintances are
dead. Perhaps they simply preferred acts that proved to be less
risky. Many did all the same things as their friends, just as
frequently, and have somehow escaped -- so far. In the space of
three years, Stephen Petty, an Atlanta theater director, lost
his seven closest friends from their teen days in Dallas. The
loss of his entire circle -- in effect the loss of much of his
personal history -- tumbled him into years of drinking and
depression. He still tests negative for the virus. "The irony,"
he says, "is that I was always the wild one, the instigator --
as one of my friends pointed out to me on his deathbed. That was
a painful day."

    Psychologists and social workers who specialize in
treating the gay community see the condition of survivor guilt
with growing frequency. "We gay men are living under a pile of
corpses that we can't bury emotionally," says Franklin Abbott,
a psychotherapist who practices in Atlanta. In extreme cases,
he says, when a lover has died, a patient may feel unworthy to
be still alive. In his own life, Abbott adds, any word of an
acquaintance's early death would have reduced him to tears a few
years ago. Now he hears such news matter-of-factly, numbly,
without flinching. He replenishes his sensitivity by leaving the
U.S. on vacation two or three times a year, always to places
where AIDS is far less rife and the disease is not apt to come
up in conversation.

    Almost every other dichotomy within the community -- young
vs. old, rich vs. poor, radical vs. mainstream, even male vs.
female -- has been profoundly influenced by the split between
those who are infected and those who are not. Probably the most
conspicuous split is generational, says author Neil Miller,
whose In Search of Gay America profiles rural and small-town
gays and whose new book, Out in the World, depicts gays in a
dozen other countries. AIDS divides older gays, the generation
most at risk because it was active during the years before
people knew about safe sex, from the teens and twentysome
things. Explains Miller: "A lot of younger gays have practiced
safe sex their entire lives without any sense of deprivation,
and they often see this disease as belonging to my generation,
not theirs." These older men, even when healthy, are surrounded
by dying friends and mournful memories. Their juniors have lived
through fewer funerals and resent the disease politically more
than they lament it emotionally.

    Some of the generational split is ideological. The younger
gays are more apt to be publicly outspoken about their
sexuality and militant about social issues. They provide the
bulk of the manpower for ACT-UP and Queer Nation, the two
largest militant groups, and they are the gays most likely to
endorse such extreme tactics as "outing" -- exposing the secret
homosexuality of people who are judged to have hurt the movement
or, sometimes, simply to have failed to do enough to help it.
Older gay men are more apt to be somewhat closeted, to emphasize
working within the system rather than confrontation, to be more
interested in private socializing than in activism.

    Economically, AIDS exacerbates the general split in the
U.S. between those who have health care and other job benefits
and those who do not. For the former group, the chief concern
is getting government approval for innovative high-tech
treatments that may prolong their lives. For those lacking
benefits, the problem is to get care and shelter of any kind.
With AIDS treatment often costing well into six figures and
patients frequently surviving years while unable to work, those
who lack benefits -- or who are manipulated out of them by
employers or insurers -- may find themselves reduced to public
charity or living on the street.

    In gender terms, AIDS has advanced lesbians to positions
of leadership, in part because so many of the erstwhile male
leaders are dead or dying. It led many gay women to reconsider
their theoretical feminist rejection of homosexual men as simply
a more extreme version of the "masculinist" enemy. But some
lesbians increasingly complain that despite their new power,
their own agenda of women's issues -- including pay equality,
affirmative action and legal recognition of gay marriages --
keeps getting pushed aside in deference to the epidemic.

    Perhaps the least visible division, if the most profound
in its implications, is the split between those who
scrupulously practice safe sex and those who make some
compromise. Solid statistics are impossible to get. But
anecdotally, the second group seems to be growing dangerously.
While a few years ago the rate of new infection among gay men
seemed to be slowing down, or even declining, studies in San
Francisco and elsewhere have raised questions about that.
Therapist Abbott briskly describes what many gay men report:
"There is an awful lot of safe-sex recidivism. People who know
what they are supposed to do and have been doing it for a while
are finding it irresistible to return to their dangerous old
ways."

    This recklessness may be more common among the young, some
of whom still think of their generation as immune. Others are
mired in fatalism and despondency. Says Thomas, a 23-year-old
New Yorker: "Soon, almost everyone I know will be HIV
positive." Says his friend Jordan, 20, who is not infected: "I
think I am going to have a good future -- assuming I live." New
York City's Hetrick-Martin Institute, a counseling agency for
young gays, reports that more than half of the 136 respondents
to a survey admitted having sex without condoms. According to
the U.S. Surgeon General, 56% of adolescents who got tested for
HIV infection did not go back to find out the results.

    The gay bathhouses where AIDS was spread by promiscuous,
unprotected sex have been closed in many cities, either by
government crackdown or just by a declining marketplace. The
same thing happened to most of the "back room" bars where, in
dim or unlit areas, patrons had anonymous sex. But at some
establishments the era of reckless abandon never ended, and at
others it is coming back.

    Of course, gays have no monopoly on imprudent defiance of
common sense. Americans by the millions continue to overeat,
smoke, drink to excess, take "recreational" drugs, drive too
fast and do other things they take pleasure in even though they
know these practices could kill them.

    For the most part, gay men find safe sex cumbersome,
intrusive and unromantic, and HIV-negative men long for a
monogamous relationship with another HIV-negative man in which
both can throw caution to the winds. The problem is that the
tests can be inaccurate, a lover can have unsafe sex outside the
relationship and become infected, or a lover can simply lie
about the results. Some gay men assert that they have been found
HIV negative when in fact they haven't taken a test; they simply
feel O.K. and don't think they have done anything especially
risky.

    The first wave of gay response to AIDS was fear, mixed
alternately with denial and paranoia. The second wave, the past
few years, has been a therapeutic anger, an opportunity for the
grief-stricken to vent their pain and for the dying to give
meaning to their premature passing. The third and current wave
of gay response to AIDS is once again dominated by fear, this
time based on a sense of grim inevitability. The medical news
is not good. The civil rights struggle is taking far longer than
most people thought. The gay leaders during the first decade of
the plague are almost all gone now, either dead or dying or
emotionally depleted by the struggle. Some organizations just
a few years old are in their third or fourth generation of
leadership. While the heterosexual community has shown recurrent
compassion, it is unlikely to feel the same sense of desperate
necessity that gay men do. Says novelist and playwright Larry
Kramer, who was a founder of Gay Men's Health Crisis and ACT-UP:
"AIDS is just one of many things. If I were a straight married
man, I'd be worried about the quality of education in the
schools. That's one reason why it's so hard to get support on
AIDS. It's `Leave me alone, I want to take care of my little
garden.' "

    A recurrent fantasy among gays has been that one day,
unexpectedly, every homosexual and bisexual in America will wake
up purple, and when friends, relatives, neighbors, co-workers
and other acquaintances see how many gays there are, and how
many of these people already hold their trust, bigotry will
vanish. In a sense, AIDS has done this. Fatal illness has forced
some celebrities out of the closet and prompted others to assert
their sexuality as an act of conscience. The sheer volume of
suffering has made homosexuals less exotic and more sympathetic.
Slowly the message is getting across that gays neither invented
the disease nor bear special responsibility for transmitting it,
that the epidemic is universal. But however much AIDS may have
brought a community together or advanced its cause, the price
has been far too steep and it will go on being far too painfully
paid.