Hold Tight Gently by Martin Duberman Page A

father had given him exactly what he’d asked for: “honesty and directness”—two qualities that Mike held most dear. “For the first time,” he went on, you “articulated your feelings for me.” That, Mike felt, was grounds for hope about their future relationship. However—Mike was about to demonstrate just as much steel as Clifford—there could be no question about trying to act “straight.” To do so would be to deny who hewas and, further, to corroborate the common view that there was something wrong with being gay—“as if there is something to admit—something hidden and dark and secretive and dirty.”
    He asked his father to imagine “a society where [his own] love was viewed as a ‘strange and unnatural act,’ or a ‘crime against nature.’ . . . Since you don’t know what ‘caused’ your sexual direction, I suggest you stop flailing about trying to figure out what ‘caused’ mine. . . . Quite frankly, I just like to think I was lucky. . . . gay people are clued in at an early age to the duplicity in all things . . . [and] have a unique perspective that make us particularly adept at art.” Mike wasn’t merely defending his gayness as normal, he was suggesting that it might well be superior—politically, intuitively, and aesthetically. Overstatement was a common ingredient in the early rhetoric of gay liberation, a trope Mike indulged in with glee, viewing it as necessary compensation for the disparagement of gay lives that had long been common currency. After the extended reign and deep internalization of homophobic self-hatred, affirmation for Mike and others surfaced in the form of strenuous counterclaims. Hyperbole was a strategy for liberation, not itself liberation.
    Joe Sonnabend wasn’t the only doctor in the early 1980s puzzling over some of his patients’ unusual symptoms. Alvin Friedman-Kien, a virologist at New York University Medical Center, was so surprised when the biopsies from two of his gay male patients’ “bruises” came back from the lab with the diagnosis of Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) that he asked some of his colleagues if they’d seen anything comparable. Within a few weeks he learned of twenty such cases. A call to a San Francisco colleague, Marcus Conant, brought the total to twenty-six. In Los Angeles several doctors reported a slew of puzzling symptoms: diarrhea and “wasting,” chronic fevers, thrush, swollen lymph nodes, and a decline in CD4 cells. Something was clearly in the wind, something awful. But not everyone was alarmed. One member of the gay doctors’ organization Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights asserted that peculiar symptomatologies appeared more often than people realized—and just as quickly disappeared. Jim Curran of the CDC also sounded an optimistic note, and New York City’s most widely read gay newspaper, New York Native , initially published a piece largely dismissive of the earlier alarmist Morbidity and Mortality reports. 2
    One San Francisco physician suspected the culprit was cytomegalovirus (CMV), a herpes virus that can produce disease in those with impaired immune function. Joe Sonnabend, on his own, had also suspected CMV and theorized that those of his patients—like Mike—with a repetitive history of STDs had overloaded and compromised their immune systems, thereby allowing the virus to take hold. Sonnabend saw a certain consistency in the personal histories of all his patients who came in with symptoms of anal gonorrhea, herpes, CMV, fissures, and warts—all were self-described “bottoms” (their primary sexual pleasure was getting fucked), and all showed signs of immune deficiency. One out of three gay men were shedding CMV in their sperm and urine—as opposed to one out of twenty heterosexual men—and CMV was known to be immunosuppressive. So said not merely Sonnabend, but in the early years of the epidemic, the most respected scientific journals, including the Lancet , the New England Journal of Medicine,