City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [133]
In 1981 all that came to an end. Gays of my generation were especially unprepared to accept the new reality since for us, as I’ve mentioned before, gay liberation had meant sexual liberation and gay culture still meant sexual access and abundance. Now we were being told to limit the number of our partners, to know our partners’ names, or to abstain from sex altogether. Later we were told to suck not fuck, but even so the definition of safe sex was highly unstable, and to this day, almost thirty years into AIDS, no one seems certain exactly which practices are safe or unsafe.
Sontag followed the developments carefully and soon began to see that the demonizing of the gay population because of AIDS was not unlike the previous blaming of patients with tuberculosis and syphilis in the nineteenth century or cancer in our own day. She thought that she might add an appendix about AIDS to Illness as Metaphor, her 1978 study. Charles Silverstein and I thought that our influential The Joy of Gay Sex should be revised to include warnings about AIDS, but with still so little information about it, no one knew how to frame that cautionary advice. The revision did not come out until several years later. My own 1980 States of Desire: Travels in Gay America read like a period piece just two years after it was published. The cheerful promiscuity and the civil rights struggles I’d described had all been discarded or eclipsed by the sudden, unexplained appearance of a virus.
I was the first president of GMHC, though I quickly retired in favor of Paul Popham, an attractive macho businessman who was far more competent. Almost from the beginning Larry Kramer was sharply critical of the other members, and by 1987 he had founded a much more militant group called ACT UP. Certainly we all made lots of mistakes. Instead of instantly enlisting the help of the federal government, we organized a disco fund-raiser. We thought small. We thought ghetto. We didn’t understand that we were watching the beginnings of an epidemic that would soon enough infect forty million people worldwide. To be fair, no one else had that sort of apocalyptic prescience any more than we did. Nor was Ronald Reagan even willing to mention the disease by name until years later.
Because we were moralistic Americans, we thought promiscuity was the enemy and fidelity the solution. We were incapable of understanding that it was safer to have safe sex with ten men at the baths than to be faithful to one lover—and to be unsafe with him.
New York didn’t change right away, but a feeling of dread was now in every embrace, the odor of death in every spurt of come. What had seemed innocent revels now felt like the maneuvers of a death squad. What had felt warm and sticky with life was now the cool syrup of mortality. Those gangs of tall men in leather jackets walking joyfully down the street, their engineer boots ringing sparks off the pavement, now broke up, dissipated into the night, melted into furtive individuals. Whereas in the late 1970s everyone wanted to be bisexual, the height of trendiness, now people were starting to deny they’d ever had experiences with members of the same sex. People who’d been fashionably skinny the year before now were beefing up to prove they weren’t besieged by a wasting disease.
I didn’t want the party to stop. A Boy’s Own Story came out, with Susan’s blurb, and was a success all over the world and was translated into many languages.