An Identity Forged in Flames

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 twentysomethings. 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.