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[Portland, Oregon, February 1994]
I can pinpoint precisely when this epidemic started for me.
There’s talk of a gay cancer back home.
A gay cancer? You mean, like we have our own?
Yeah, seems only queers are getting it. In New York City and San Francisco.
It’s September 1981, in a restaurant in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, talking with Peter who has just returned from visiting family and friends in the States. A gay cancer? We both think it sounds suspicious. We joke that the Moral Majority is probably behind it, coating Barbra Streisand records with carcinogens, and we move on to other, more relevant topics— like the beating the dollar is taking against the yen, or Reagan’s deep compassion for the wealthy, or Peter’s latest infatuation. I won’t give his comment another thought for many months. There’s nothing about a gay cancer in the English-language Tokyo Times or Mainichi Daily. Indeed, I’ll learn there’s no mention of it in most newspapers back home either, so how serious can it be? It will be almost a year— well into 1982— before I begin hearing of friends in Portland becoming ill, and no one knows why; and besides other queers, it seems no one cares.
Fast-forward to February 1994. I return home where over a half million Americans have been infected with HIV; more than 300,000 have already died, most of them gay men, though not, it turns out, from Barbra Streisand records.
• • •
I had been with Columbia AIDS Project two weeks before I met its executive director, Caleb Stern. He missed a lot of time, Sandy told me. Cal Stern had end-stage AIDS. We were in the conference room as people gathered for the monthly staff meeting. He sat next to Steve at the head of the large table, a waxy sheen to his skin as if he were the latest addition to Madame Tussaud’s museum, representing the AIDS epidemic of the late twentieth century for some future generation to stare at. Emaciated, with sunken eyes appearing too big for his face, he had the look of one not long for this earth.
“What’s he doing here?” I whispered to Sandy. “Shouldn’t he be home in bed?”
“He should be dead,” she whispered back. I was always struck by her bluntness. Sandy said what others only thought. “Besides, there’s nothing for him at home. His partner died three years ago. His family’s back in Oklahoma.”
It was like having death sitting in our midst. And yet, as if to dispel that image, when he looked at me, his eyes had a luminous quality I’d seen in the faces of others who had come to this point. Maybe it was their steadiness. Rather than darting about, looking here, looking there, as most of us do, his eyes seemed to linger on whatever they were seeing at that moment, taking it in, as if this might be the last time they would ever see this slant of light, or that person laugh, or this group of friends. When our eyes met, he smiled, nodded, his gaze slowly moving on.
I was drawn back to the other people in the conference room. With few exceptions, they were all young, most in their twenties, a rambunctious, boisterous group filling the space with much laughter and joking. This was the first time I had seen the full staff together. It was divided about half and half, men and women, with quite a few lesbians. God bless the lesbians. They were there from the beginning, in those early days in New York City and San Francisco and Los Angeles and Melbourne, when the hospitals were refusing to take gay men for fear of the uncertain contagion. These brave women, our sisters, joined our care teams, stayed with our friends in their homes, wiped up their vomit and diarrhea, held their hands as they died. I have often wondered, if it had been reversed, say, if there had been some strange little virus targeting lesbians, would we gay men have been there for them as they have been for us? Would I? In shame, I doubt it.
The meeting began with various introductions and updates. Next to Steve and Cal Stern sat Franklin Young son III, the finance director, a tall, thin man in his thirties, blond and not unattractive, but with pinched, narrow features suggesting less a physical disease than some spiritual malaise too deep for any drugs to cure. He held his head aloft, his thin, pointed beak of a nose turning here, turning there, like a hawk condescending to be among all these lowly sparrows. He and Charles, the volunteer coordinator, were the only ones wearing ties.
Steve chaired the meeting. Although it was only February, they were already planning this year’s staff and volunteer picnic in June and the AIDS Walk in September. A heated discussion was underway about the picnic. Most of the gay men wanted to organize an afternoon of Earth Games, noncompetitive group activities requiring cooperation where everyone wins and there are no losers, while the lesbians pressed for a down and dirty softball game, wanting to kick some serious butt. As problematic as stereotypes are, they usually contain an embarrassing kernel of truth.
It looked like it was coming down to a vote. Lionel raised his hand, and all faces turned toward him. A big, Black brawny bruiser of a man with smooth shaved head, he easily stood six foot two, with biceps larger than my thighs. He was on the HIV prevention team, coordinating the bar outreach program. “I vote for a softball game,” he announced in his deep baritone voice.
“Wait a minute,” said Chad, also on the prevention team. “Before the meeting, you agreed to vote for Earth Games.”
“Yeah, but Annie said she’d buy me a beer if I voted for softball.”
There was laughter. Annie sat next to him, petite, maybe one hundred pounds at most, very cute with elfin features as she blushed and whispered, “You weren’t supposed to tell them that.”
Chad was clearly exasperated. “Where are your principles?”
“Hey, I’ve got principles,” said Lionel. “But I also have priorities.”
The exchanges became more and more raucous, the lesbians gleefully casting aspersions on the gay men’s masculinity, and the gay men likewise casting aspersions on the lesbians’ masculinity. Above it all, sitting there with his gray, ravaged eminence, Cal Stern watched the proceedings with a gentle smile not unlike, I thought, the detached, compassionate smile one sees on statues of the Buddha, as if he had already taken leave of this world. There is a lame-duck quality to the dying. You could almost see the thoughts on his face: I won’t be here for the AIDS Walk this year. I’ll never see that. I wonder if I’ll make it to June. He looked at peace. One more thing he wouldn’t have to worry about, thank God. Or maybe he was just relieved he wouldn’t have to participate in the softball game. He knew lesbians played for blood.
The room hooted and howled, everyone laughing except Franklin who looked upon the proceedings with a kind of disdain, like an older child watching the antics of his rowdy younger siblings wrestling in the dirt. He caught my eye, shaking his head in a kind of assumed camaraderie of the superior. I smiled back and shrugged. Cal, too, was laughing, his frail body rocking with laughter, his eyes alight, and I thought, This is why he comes to work. Here there is life and energy. Here there is connection. No, he needs this. To be part of the still living.
• • •
“He really should resign,” said Sandy. She, Steve and I were leaving to get lunch. “For the sake of the agency as much as for himself. It’s a burden on us managers, trying to do his job as well as our own.”
“Yes, but he’s kind of an icon here in Portland,” Steve explained to me as we went down the back stairwell.
“That may be,” said Sandy, “but we
