June 9, 2023 • 50 mins
As the AIDS crisis worsens, gay men in New York City improvise a response, forming alliances and drawing battle lines.
You can find a list of books, articles, and documentaries we used in our research at bit.ly/fiascopod.
If you like this series, mark your calendars: a new season of Fiasco is coming July 27, 2023, exclusively on Audible. Fiasco: Vigilante tells the story of a shooting that took place in 1984 on the New York City subway, leaving four Bronx teenagers gravely wounded and turning a man named Bernie Goetz into a national folk hero. Fiasco: Vigilante offers a panoramic but intimate view of how this era-defining story unfolded, giving voice for the first time to key players, and immersing listeners in the gritty, paranoid world of ’80s New York City. Listen to the trailer now at adbl.co/vigilante, only on Audible.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, this is Leon Napok. I'm the host of Fiasco,
but you may also know me from the podcasts Slowburn,
Think Twice, Michael Jackson, and Backfired the Vaping Wars. I'm
excited to be sharing with you the next season of Backfired,
titled Attention Deficit, which is now available exclusively on Audible.
Backfired is a podcast about the business of unintended consequences.
(00:20):
In the first season, my co host Ril Pardess and
I dove deep into the world of vaping and how
the well intentioned quest for a safer cigarette went awry.
Now we're tackling ADHD and how the push to destigmatize
this hard to define childhood diagnosis has led to an
explosion of stimulant use in kids as well as adults.
It's a story about the promise of psychiatry to fix
(00:41):
our brains and the power of the pharmaceutical industry to
shape how we and our doctors think about what's wrong
with us. To hear both seasons of Backfired, go to
audible dot com slash Backfired and start a free trial
that's audible dot com slash backfired. Fiasco is tended for
mature audiences. For a list of books, articles and documentaries
(01:04):
we used in our research. Follow the link in the
show notes Previously on Fiasco.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
It's mysterious, it's deadly, and it's baffling medical science.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
A new deadly disease that no one understands, a great
medical puzzle.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
There was virtually no coverage in the mainstream media.
Speaker 5 (01:27):
I just thought that the more I talked about it,
the better it would be for other people in my community.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
When Sean Strube arrived in New York in nineteen seventy nine,
what he found was a city full of gay men
having the time of their lives. It was exactly what
Strube had been looking for when he decided to transfer
from Georgetown to Columbia.
Speaker 6 (01:54):
I really moved to New York to be free and
to be gay. I didn't know anybody there. I literally
been there a few weekends and met one person, spent
a weekend with him, and fell in love with the city.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Strube had only recently come out to his parents. His
mom had cried and his dad awkwardly asked him if
he was the man or the woman in his relationships,
but Strube still felt a lot better afterwards. He was
a twenty one year old fresh out of the closet
with an apartment in Hell's kitchen. Nothing his parents could
say was going to put a damper on that. A
(02:31):
few weeks after he arrived in New York, Strube attended
the Gay Pride Parade for the first time in his life.
Speaker 6 (02:39):
I couldn't believe all these people were gay. I'm like
walking through and looking that one and that one and
that one, and I was astonished in Central Park. I
had no idea there were that many homosexuals in the world.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
The first Gay Pride Parade had taken place about a
decade earlier. It celebrated the Stonewall Uprising of nineteen sixty nine,
a series of demonstrations that erupted after police rated a
popular gay bar in Greenwich Village. Stonewall was a major
turning point in gay life, not just in New York City,
but across the country.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
A gay liberation movement is challenging a society that abhors homosexuality.
Speaker 7 (03:16):
Tell me, what do you feel about the Harliflow movement.
Speaker 8 (03:18):
I think it's really dynamite, and I think the only
way to achieve it is from force and march is
like this.
Speaker 9 (03:23):
You know, other groups have their own holidays, you know,
their own marshes and things like that.
Speaker 10 (03:28):
This is our day.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
The gay liberation movement was about civil rights and being
able to live openly. It was also about sex and
having as much of it as you wanted.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Freedom of sexual expression is as much an issue of
the gay movement as civil and legal rights are.
Speaker 6 (03:45):
This was sort of the peak of the explosion in
gay male sexuality in the years after Stonewall, right after
this sort of intense repression and this new era of
liberation in the seventies, and everybody was getting it's axually
transmitted infections.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
In my life, there were lots of different diseases circulating
around New York. With treatment, they were rarely fatal. That
they were everywhere.
Speaker 6 (04:10):
Whether it was you know, goanrhea or crabs or herpes.
You know, at the time, herpes was the biggest concern.
You know, people say, oh, if I ever got herpes,
I'd kill myself. And then everybody got herpes and they
didn't kill themselves, so it was commonplace.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Not long after he started at Columbia in the fall,
Strube noticed the lymph nodes on one side of his
neck were badly swollen. He went to University Health Services,
where they told him he might have a contusion or
maybe even leukemia. It was concerning, but the swelling eventually
went down and Strube stopped worrying about it. Then he
started experiencing other symptoms.
Speaker 6 (04:47):
I was having night sweats, and I'd lost weight in
the year after I moved to New York as well.
But I was a tall, skinny kid. My weight fluctuated.
I didn't pay any attention to that, and then I
got hepatitis and I ended up, you know, in bed
for about six weeks and had to drop out of Columbia.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
After he recovered from his bout with hepatitis, Strube started
volunteering at a gay newspaper that had recently opened an
office on fifty seventh Street.
Speaker 6 (05:15):
I was a volunteer copy editor at the New York Native.
Speaker 11 (05:19):
Okay.
Speaker 6 (05:19):
I was dating somebody who worked there, and I would
go in and read the you know, the galleys for
typos and things like that.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
For years, gay New Yorkers had been without a major
news outlet of their own. San Francisco had The Bay
Area Reporter, DC had The Blade, Boston had Gay Community News.
The Native had sprouted up to fill the gap in
New York, and it became a hub of news criticism, advertising,
and local gossip. Did you get on newstands or were
(05:49):
there boxes or how did it get distributed.
Speaker 6 (05:51):
I'd either get it free from the office, or I'd
get it at the newsstands. It was distributed everywhere. I
mean it was in Lower Manhattan anyway, it was everywhere.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Read the paper every two weeks. As soon as it
came out. In the spring of nineteen eighty one, he
came across an article headlined Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded. It
accompanied the first news story ever to be published about
what would turn out to be AIDS.
Speaker 6 (06:15):
And I read it and had, you know, kind of
the gamut of reactions people had, you know, oh my god,
this is scary too, Oh my god, this is fear mongering.
You know, this can't be true.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
The central takeaway from the article was that an exotic
new disease was said to have struck the gay community
in New York, but that, according to health officials, there
was for now no reason to panic. Soon there would be,
and as the disease spread, people like Sean Strub decided
they couldn't wait for scientists, doctors, and government officials to
(06:52):
help them. They were going to have to help themselves.
I'm Leon Napok from Audible Originals and Prologue Projects. This
is fiasco.
Speaker 12 (07:04):
I know about this disease, and I know it may
strike me tomorrow.
Speaker 7 (07:08):
I am there.
Speaker 4 (07:10):
I have swollen glands, I had night sweats, I have fevers.
Am I dying?
Speaker 11 (07:13):
We had no other resources but ourselves.
Speaker 6 (07:16):
We started keeping up a list of who was sick,
and then when people die, you know, we'd cross him off.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
Every gay man who was unable to come forward now
and fight to save his own life is truly helping
to kill the rest of us.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
In this episode, how a handful of gay men in
New York improvised their own response to the outbreak. The
article in the New York Native Disease Rumors, Largely Unfounded,
was written by a physician named Larry Mass. Mass had
(07:54):
a medical degree, but he'd realized that he wasn't all
that interested in being a doctor, so he became a
writer instead, and he started using his expertise to cover
medicine and sex for the Native. In nineteen eighty one,
Mass heard from a source that a few gay men
in New York had come down to the rare lung
infection numisistus pneumonia.
Speaker 11 (08:15):
I got a call from a colonae in what I
call community medicine, trying to help these underserved communities, gay
men and rejects from mainstream medicine and health, and she
said there's something going on.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Mass's source sounded nervous and uncertain. She had been cautioned
not to discuss the issue, but according to Mass, she
thought that someone in the gay community should know.
Speaker 11 (08:43):
She said, there's some cases in New York City intensive
care units and emergency rooms. There's been a couple of deaths.
That's it. I can't talk about it. They told me,
I can't talk about it. I could basically after talking
for a minute and a half like that, it was
basic hung up.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Mass followed up on the tip by calling a doctor
the New York City Department of Health. The doctor reassured
him that unless someone was severely immunocompromised, they didn't need
to worry.
Speaker 11 (09:12):
They said, there are these cases, and there's a few
of them. We don't know if they're related to one another.
We don't know if it's just a coincidence that we're
seeing a few cases and if they are in any
way connected, And that was what became the first piece
disease rumors largely unfounded.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
When Seaun Strew read the article, it didn't even occur
to him that it might have anything to do with him.
But then a few months later, a follow up story
and the native got his attention. This one was about
a group of gay men in Los Angeles, all suffering
from the same three symptoms, swollen lymph clans, weight loss,
and night sweats.
Speaker 6 (09:59):
I remember reading that article and getting the feeling in
the pit of my stomach that that's me. I have
all those things.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Strube went to see a doctor who specialized in treating
gay men. Strube called him a classic clap doctor, someone
who prescribed antibiotics for things like gonn rhea and syphilis
and treated patients who, for various reasons, couldn't turn to
their regular physicians.
Speaker 6 (10:23):
He had an office in the same building this apartment
was in. I think he had had difficulty holding on
to his license, and you know, he kind of showed
up at his apartment and his specimen jar for urine
specimens was a skipy peanut butter jar.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
The doctor told Strube that he was probably fine, he.
Speaker 6 (10:41):
Said, Oh, don't worry about it, that's nothing. He says,
just wash up after you. I think he used some
vulgar colloquialism for having sex, you know, wash up, be
a boy scout, you'll be fine. That didn't comfort me.
I didn't have that much of faith in what he
was telling me.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Anyway, Strube's experience wasn't unusual. All Over New York, gay
men were dealing with doctors who didn't have the slightest
idea what they were up against. Unlike the specialists you
heard about in our first episode, most clap doctors weren't
paying attention to the latest alerts from the CDC or
engaging in any organized effort to figure out how to
(11:21):
treat their patients. Mainly, these doctors were helping people maintain
their sex lives. At a moment when it seemed like
everyone was walking around with some variety of std there
were all.
Speaker 4 (11:33):
These articles in the gay press saying, look, if you're
sexually active gay man, you need every three months to
go and get checked up to make sure you don't
have siphlist and connorrhea.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
This is Richard Burkowitz. He was twenty three when he
moved to New York to study film at NYU.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
The responsible gay man who cares about his community. Every
three months get to a clinic get tested because the
rates were skyrocketing.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Berkowitz was young, handsome, and and he quickly figured out
that he could make a lot of money as an escort.
It wasn't long before he had occasion to visit a
community clinic for gay men in Greenwich Village.
Speaker 4 (12:11):
And I was really fortunate because my chart just happened
to be handed to whatever doctor was available at the moment.
And in that moment, it was doctor Joseph Sonoband who
became my personal e Moses.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Joseph Sonoband was a virologist originally from South Africa. He
was gay, and he had dedicated his practice in New
York to helping men like Richard Berkowitz stay healthy. Berkowitz
became close with Sonoband after getting infected with hepatitis A.
Sonoband told him that he needed to contact all of
his sexual partners and tell them to come see him.
Speaker 4 (12:46):
Most guys when he said that would just like roll
their eyes. It's like, how do you contact a guy
from the bath? How do you contact a guy from
the Saint Balcony. You couldn't do partner tracing when you're
going to the baths and having affected five different people.
But I had a sex worklog of every client I'd seen,
and I had a lot of phone calls to make
(13:07):
that day.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
When Sonoban looked at Berkowitz's blood work, he noticed that
his patient was showing signs of immune deficiency. He called
Burkewitz back to his office, at which point he also
noticed a number of swollen glands.
Speaker 4 (13:20):
He started putting his two sets of fingers under my neck,
under my arm pit. He said, Oh my god, there's
another swollen glen here. There's another swollen glen here. There's
another swollen glan here. And I'm like freaking out, getting
like gnauseris.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Sonobin suggested Berkowitz get a biopsy, and at first Berkowitz refused.
He was scared, and he avoided going back to Sonoban's
office for several months.
Speaker 9 (13:46):
Hello hello, Hi, are you huh?
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
In the meantime, Berkowitz and his friends would talk on
the phone about the gay cancer And I.
Speaker 13 (13:54):
Had this big article in the paper about this this
gay cancer con man. Yeah, will you say this for.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
The Burkowitz recorded many of his calls and collected them
in a personal archive. He and his friends would talk
about people they knew who were getting sick and what
they were going through.
Speaker 7 (14:10):
He's got it, but he's not saying he's got it.
He's keeping it a secret from everybody.
Speaker 13 (14:15):
And you do something you don't want to tell people
when you have cancer. They don't want you in your house,
they don't want you know what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 7 (14:19):
If you have cant catchy want they can't belive in catsne.
Speaker 13 (14:21):
Yeah, but still there's a stigma that goes along with
having cancer. It's like, you know, stay away.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Burkowitz heard about other people who seem to be developing
symptoms of the new disease. The stories hit close to home.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
I had a lot of the escorts who were friends
of mine, and one of them was Hibiscus, and I
heard that he was sick from other escorts.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Berkowitz was told that Hibiscus had gone to a hospital
in the village. Then the news spread that Hibiscus was dead.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
And that freaked me out because we shared a client.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
After that, burke Whitz finally got his biopsy. When he
got home, he decided that his days as an escort
were over. He and Hibiscus had advertised in the same magazine.
Their ads were right next to each others.
Speaker 4 (15:11):
I walked over to the phone. I called near a telephone.
I said, disconnect both my phone numbers. I'm done. I mean,
I thought that said I'm going to die twenty six.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Berkelwitz asked Sonoban to level with him.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
I said everything I'm reading everyone with AIDS dies. You know,
I have swollen glands, I have night sweats, I have fevers.
I had epichatius. Say it eppatatus, b am I dying?
And he looked at me and said, well, actually no.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Sonoban then shared his theory of the new disease. Unlike
some doctors and scientists who were convinced from very early
on that AIDS was caused by a virus, Sonoban believed
that gay men living in cities like New York and
San Francisco had simply burned out their immune systems. They
had had too much sex with too many partners, done
(16:01):
too many drugs, and gotten too many sexually transmitted diseases. AIDS,
Sonobin told Berkowitz was the cumulative result of too many
bad decisions, and he.
Speaker 4 (16:11):
Said, Richard, you need everything possible to protect your immune
system and stay as healthy as you can to fight
off whatever's causing this. You know, this notion that you
know it's just a virus, it's just stupid. You're getting
repeatedly infected with hepatatus say hepatatus be, syphilist gunner rhea,
stomach parasites. I mean, do I have to go down
(16:32):
the list? Herpes a, herpes be? I mean it was
like exploding, he said. Anybody who thinks that there's not
a cumulative consequence to constantly be infected with this, he said,
they're you know, they're in denial.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Whatever this new thing was. Sonoban said it was not
just one virus that you could catch from a single
sexual encounter. Rather, it was an avoidable outcome of certain behaviors,
one that might even be reversible.
Speaker 4 (16:58):
He said, you need to understand that it's not a
hopeful situation. And if you stop exposing yourself to all
these things, you know, I think you're going to be
all right.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Sonobin wanted to get the word out about his theory.
Here he is talking about it on a local news broadcast.
Speaker 14 (17:16):
I suppose the most simplistic and easiest way to view
this is that there was a new biological agent that
was being transmitted from group to group.
Speaker 4 (17:24):
You believe that, of.
Speaker 14 (17:25):
Course, not on this absurd It's just totally absurd, and
it's based on the whole superstructure of conjecture.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
Berkowitz embraced Sonoban's theory wholeheartedly. He excitedly told his friends
about what he'd learned.
Speaker 13 (17:37):
Well, I spoke to my doctor with this week. I
just wanted to talk to him. Yeah, for he said,
first of all, the only people who get this are
that hardcore, heavy duty you know, Friday Sunday, every weekend
drugs and fucking baths and orgies back rooms. And you're
trying to say this cancer comes from a good ten
to fifteen years of every weekend drugs, multiple sex, and
(18:00):
kinky sex. That's what this comes from, every weekend.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Sonobin's theory of AIDS came to be known as the
multi factorial theory. It was wrong, and though Sonoban eventually
did soften his views and allow that AIDS was caused
by a virus, his longtime skepticism earned him a somewhat
uneasy place in the history of the disease. It's important
to realize, though, that back in nineteen eighty two, Sonoban's
(18:27):
ideas weren't competing with some widely accepted scientific consensus. As
you'll hear later in the series, the theory that AIDS
was caused by a virus took years to confirm. In
the meantime, Sonobin distinguished himself by being one of the
first doctors anywhere to start researching AIDS and treating people
who had it, and his faith in the multifactorial theory
(18:51):
led him to advocate for an idea that even his
critics acknowledge was right on the money. Gay men needed
to start having safer sex. In Richard Burkowitz, Sonoban found
an enthusiastic messenger.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
When Sonoman told me that I was going to live,
that there was a good chance I could live, I
said to him, I just quit my job. I never
told my escort it. I said, I just quit my job.
A good all this time? What had you to help?
And he said, well, I have another patient I wants
to help. I know it was rough for you and
your brother.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Sonoban's other patient was a twenty seven year old named
Michael Callen. He was a singer who performed at piano
bars around New York.
Speaker 12 (19:36):
If you could see through my eyes.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Like Berkowitz, Callen had recently been diagnosed with AIDS. Berkowitz
actually recorded the first few seconds of his first ever
phone call with Callen from nineteen eighty two. Sadly he
taped over the rest, but it's still kind of magical
to hear it.
Speaker 7 (19:56):
Oh yeah, Michael Callen, Callen, Hi, my name is Rich Burkowitz, right, yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
We had both been woken up to Sonobin's ideas that
it was actually possible to survive this thing that everyone
was calling the end of the world. Once you get it,
you're dead. It was the first way of hope, and
so in that moment we connected.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Berkowitz and Kllen bonded over the energetic sex lives they
had led prior to their diagnoses. After Berkowitz told Callen
he'd been an escort, Kllen confessed he had been with
approximately three thousand men. He had done the math because
the CDC had just recently interviewed him for a study.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
He said, well, I've had three thousand minute my butt,
You're a whore. What are the perfect ones? Start writing?
About Sonomin's ideas.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Berkowitz and Callen got to work right away. At the time,
Callen was a full time paralegal, and when he left
the office at five o'clock every day, Berkowitz would meet
him at his Greenwich Village apartment. Together, they started writing
an essay, a kind of open letter in which they
would address their fellow gay men.
Speaker 4 (20:59):
In between the writing, he would sometimes bake the most
delicious cookies. He had a beat up piano in his apartment.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
I know, I said, it would be a kid.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
He would like play some music and I would sit
on the fire scape and I'd look at it at
the city Scotland and think, oh my god, just like
a storm coming. It's gonna kill so many people. And
it's up to us to try to weak people up,
to get, you know, to duck for cover. Honey, I
know you must go.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
As they worked on their essay, Berkowitz and Callen attended
an early support group for gay men with AIDS. There
they found like minded people who also didn't want to
resign themselves to an inevitable death. The experience informed Burkowitz
and Kwen's writing, and after a few months they came
up with a piece that was straightforward, a little funny
in places, and full of knowing references to the lifestyle
(21:52):
the authors have been enjoying until recently.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
Michael said to me, we're gonna call this we Know
Who we Are. We live this lifestyle, we loved this lifestyle,
and we're going to talk to you like sluts, like
gay men of our generation, and we're going to tell
you like it is, and we're going to talk to
it in a language that you'll recognize and understand as
part of your community. Not the whole community, but the
sexual active community.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
When Berkowitz and Kallen were done with We Know Who
We Are, there was really only one publication they could
imagine submitting it to.
Speaker 4 (22:24):
We knew we had to go to the Native, you know,
to try to get published, because it was the only
newspaper in town that was the outlet for getting information
about the ads out to gay men.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
We Know Who We Are ran in The Native in
November of nineteen eighty two with a subtitle two Gay
Men declare War on Promiscuity. In it, Berkowitz and Kallen
urged caution the obvious and immediate solution to the present crisis.
They wrote, is the end of urban gay male promiscuity
as we know it today?
Speaker 6 (22:54):
Can I get you to read from We know who we.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
Are as we must care enough about ourselves to begin
this reevaluation. Gay men are dying as a community. We
must initiate and control this process ourselves. Be assured that
if we aren't willing to conduct it, others will do
it for us. The federal government, to the Centers for
(23:18):
Disease Control is already taking a long, hard look at
our behavior.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
The article wasn't all bracing rhetoric. Berkowitz and Kalen also
shared some pragmatic advice about how gay men could have
safer sex. For example, they suggested that the concept of
fuck buddies could be modified to become pods of healthy
people who only had sex with each other. But ultimately,
Berkowitz and Kalen were unequivocal.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
We could continue to deny overwhelming evidence that the prison
health crisis is a direct result of the unprecedented promiscuity
that has occurred since Stonewall, but such denial is killing us.
Denial will continue to kill us until we begin the
difficult task of changing the ways in which we have sex.
Let me tell you that paragraph. It's not me, that's
(24:06):
Michael talking with depressing urgency of disease and death.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Sean Strube, the young Columbia student turned copy editor at
the New York Native, remembers when the article came out, every.
Speaker 6 (24:20):
Gay man who had any consciousness about being gay or
part of the.
Speaker 11 (24:24):
Gay read that article.
Speaker 4 (24:26):
You know, it was absolutely read by everybody.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
The article resonated, even if some people didn't want to
hear what Burkowitz and Callen were saying.
Speaker 6 (24:34):
It was like a splash of cold water in this
community because people couldn't read that article and not see
themselves in it. To one extent or another. There was
a lot of denial. You know, I'm not that promiscuous.
I don't go to that place. I don't do that
particular sexual practice. But underneath it they knew.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Many readers were furious at berkowitzen Callen for what they
saw as a demand to halt their sex lives altogether.
Speaker 12 (24:58):
I'm a gay man. Took me years to bring myself
to say that openly and with pride.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
One columnist for The Native published a rebuttal to Callan
and Berkowitz, called in defense of promiscuity. He went on
local television to make his point.
Speaker 12 (25:12):
Certainly, my sexuality is only a part of my gayness,
but it is the central part. If I can't join
another man's body to mind, then how am I gay?
Liking Bet Midler isn't enough.
Speaker 4 (25:22):
Make no mistake.
Speaker 12 (25:24):
I know about this disease, and I know it may
strike me tomorrow. I'm scared. The crucial question is how
will I let my fear affect me? I know what
I won't do. I won't give up the physical expression
of intimacy and in my sexual encounters, we won't start
out with a health quiz, Nor will we limit our
love making to certain acts I refused.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
Sean Strew remembers the prevailing feeling among his friends during
this time as being as much about indifference and avoidance
as it was about fear and anger.
Speaker 6 (25:53):
Wats of my friends didn't want to hear about it,
you know? I mean I can remember being at events
for or a host would say, Okay, let's let's not
talk about AIDS tonight. You know, let's not talk about
the gay cancer tonight, where they kind of like put
that out as something that couldn't be discussed.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Strube told me that at this point he didn't have
a clear sense that some people had aids and others didn't.
He experienced it more like a growing ominous presence, one
that called the future of everyone around him into question.
Do you remember when that turned into a feeling that
there was a death sentence hanging over you?
Speaker 6 (26:27):
Yes, in those first years I knew it had something
to do with me, but huge numbers of people had
stolen influence. You know, it was a massive community. I
wasn't singular, This wasn't any sort of secret. It wasn't
you know whatever. You know, you would be in bed
with somebody and.
Speaker 11 (26:44):
You know, and do you have someone?
Speaker 6 (26:45):
Look, yeah, I do, feeling each other and you know,
talking about it, comparing it all the time.
Speaker 4 (26:49):
Is that right?
Speaker 1 (26:49):
You remember you remember being in bed with someone and
like feeling each other's.
Speaker 6 (26:53):
Absolutely multiple people. I remember the night I met Michael
Misso was my part who died in nineteen eighty eight.
The night we met, we were both talking about having,
you know, lymph clients that swelled at times, and we
talked about the epidemic and and I guess by then
the idea that this was something, you know, potentially contagious
(27:15):
had emerged.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
As more and more people got sick, news about who
had the disease and who was dying of it would spread,
almost like gossip. Strube and one of his friends started
keeping a written tally.
Speaker 6 (27:33):
We talk on the phone every day, and we just
started comparing notes, and you know, I heard, did you hear?
Speaker 4 (27:42):
You know?
Speaker 13 (27:42):
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (27:42):
Bobby went back to Minneapolis to you know, see his family.
But it's been like a month.
Speaker 11 (27:46):
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (27:46):
Do you think something's going on? And we put Bobby
down question mark, And we started keeping a list of
everybody we heard who was sick or who had you know,
had lost weight. We were, you know, wondering about and
when people die, you know, we'd cross them off.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Larry Mass, the physician who wrote the first article about
AIDS for the New York Native, looks back on this
time with some regret. He was too worried about stoking panic,
he says, and too hesitant to make recommendations to his
readers while the science of the disease was still so uncertain.
Speaker 11 (28:25):
I was someone who, you know, had all these misgivings,
what about our civil rights? What about you know, what
exactly we're going to tell people? I wanted clarity I
felt that go tell everybody just to stop havingly. That
wasn't going to work. You know, I look back on
it now, I mean we were too cautious. I was
too cautious.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Not everyone in massive circle was so cautious. Mass had
one friend in particular who was more than willing to
sound an early alarm. That friend was a writer named
Larry Kramer, who would become probably the most famous name
in the history of AIDS activism.
Speaker 4 (29:01):
Plague. We are in the middle of a fucking plague.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
We are in the worst shape we have ever, ever
ever been in.
Speaker 11 (29:12):
I have a fifty year friendship with Larry, going way back.
Larry was one of the people I knew in New York,
one of the people I first came to see. Larry
was my first inspiration as a writer. Had a lot
of feeling in regard for Larry, but even I really
didn't know where Larry was coming from. He was extremely angry,
(29:34):
volcanically incessantly angry.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
It was a disposition well suited to the moment. From
the very beginning, Kramer saw the new disease as an
existential threat to gay life, and he took some decisive
early steps to bring attention to it.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
We have found a complete and utter lack of interest
in it on part the gay and the medical and
straight communities altogether.
Speaker 10 (30:01):
Or do you think that is I think it's scary.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
I think in terms of the straight community, it's because
basically it's homophobia, or not even homophobia. I do not
think that heterosexuals are interested in homosexuals. I don't think
it's homophobia. I just think it's a complete and utter
lack of interest. And that's okay. I mean, what can
you do.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Kramer is usually described as the co founder of act UP,
the transformative protest group he helped start in nineteen eighty seven,
but all that came much later. In the early eighties,
Kramer was just a screenwriter and author. One of his
screenplays have been nominated for an Oscar, but he was
perhaps best known for a polarizing novel published in nineteen
(30:39):
seventy eight, in which he satirized the sexual politics of
post liberation New York. We have here this morning Larry Kramer,
the author of the controversial novel Fagots.
Speaker 4 (30:49):
Good morning Larry, Good morning Randy.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
I would just like somebody to say introduce me as
being other than controversial.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
If Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen put themselves forward as
young libertines, Larry Kramer had earned a reputation in gay
circles as someone who was hopelessly old fashioned, even squeamish,
about certain aspects of the gay liberation movement.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
Well, I do think that one of the problems that
we're going through now is that we treat ourselves almost
exclusively as sexual beings. And while I think sex is fine,
and I'm not promulgating that we don't do what we
want to do, I think we've come to look upon
ourselves strictly in sexual terms, treating each other as only
(31:31):
a sexual objects.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
Larry Mass regarded his friend's novel as a judgmental text,
a condemnation of a lifestyle that Kramer disapproved of.
Speaker 11 (31:41):
Faggots is basically a great warning to the gay community
that you're on the precipice, and you know, the character's
name in Faggots is fred Lemish, and basically the images
of a lemming going with all these all these other lemmings,
you know, off the cliff, because you know, it was
(32:01):
like a suicidal lives that we were living.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
I can't decide if Kramer's posture towards the gay liberation
movement made him an awkward fit for AIDS activism, or
if it made him the perfect man for the job. Regardless,
he was motivated and connected enough to get people's attention.
In nineteen eighty two, Kramer and five other men, including
(32:26):
Larry Mass, co founded an organization called Gay Men's Health
Crisis or GMHC for short. At first, they mostly raised
money for doctors studying the new disease, but as the
outbreak got worse, some GMHC members became more focused on
providing care to people who were sick and had nowhere
else to turn.
Speaker 11 (32:47):
We had no other resources but ourselves, you know, the hospitals,
but especially the government, the city, the City Department of Health.
Nobody was, you know, really there for us.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
As they brought on more volunteers, GMHC filled the vacuum
in the city. All over New York, there were men
who were suffering and dying alone. In many cases, they
had been rejected even by their families.
Speaker 11 (33:16):
They had nobody to help them at home, they had
nobody to talk to, nobody to help them at multiple levels,
and most of them were dying.
Speaker 8 (33:27):
Hello Hi, Bill, Hi, Hi. This is Roger McFarland from
the Gay Men's Health Crisis. Oh hi, Hi, what can
I do for?
Speaker 1 (33:33):
One of GMHC's earliest volunteers, Roger McFarlane, turned his home
phone number into a hotline for people who thought they
might be sick. On the first night the hotline was up,
McFarlane sat in his living room closet and took more
than one hundred calls.
Speaker 8 (33:48):
Hi Bill, Hi, I'm sorry I just connected this.
Speaker 12 (33:50):
Yeah, that's okay.
Speaker 8 (33:51):
So you talked to the social worker and you're still
able to work, and they're going to start treating you
at Saint Vincent's in a protocol there with doctor Combe.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
Yeah, I know if they're going to treat me as
such or.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Over the coming months. People called in with questions about
which doctors to see, which hospitals to go to, and
how to pay for medical care.
Speaker 8 (34:09):
Then there's a couple of things I can suggest. First
of all, we do need to see where they're going
to refer you. If she doesn't know where to refer
you to, I can certainly give her a call.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
And sometimes the calls were less about what to do
and more about how to cope with what was happening.
Speaker 13 (34:27):
I am so scared and.
Speaker 7 (34:30):
Be so scared.
Speaker 11 (34:31):
I'm only twenty four years old.
Speaker 15 (34:33):
If I have this, I'm going to die and I'm
going to freak out.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
It was in part to help people with the emotional
toll of the disease that GMHC created a buddy system
that paired the healthy with the sick. Mass himself was
never officially part of the buddy system, but he did
his fair share of visiting friends in the hospital, and
when he did, he tried to do for them the
kinds of things that buddies tended to do. One friend
(35:07):
wanted to spend his last days in drag, so Mass
brought him jewelry to wear in his hospital bed. Another friend,
Vito Russo, a gay activist and writer for the New
York Native, wanted Mass to rub his feet.
Speaker 11 (35:21):
I had a kind of gmac buddy moment with him.
I said, Veto, I said, you know, you've you've been this,
you know, fierce great activist, and you know there's so
much that isn't being done, and there's so much that
so many of us could have done. And and I
broke down. I started crying. I said, you know, I'm
(35:44):
so sorry. That I wasn't the activist that you all needed.
They needed people like Larry and Veto. Not everybody was
a Larry or Veto. I mean I wasn't. I'm just
not in that league. Larry never accepted that. He said,
why aren't you angrier? You know you have to. You know,
Larry wouldn't accept that. You know, he was this special,
(36:05):
great leader person. He felt that everybody could do lots
and lots more and you know, should have been doing that.
So I broke down with Veto and I cried, I
was I said, I'm so sorry that I wasn't more
and better. And he looked at me with that sparkle
as I says, I love you, Larry. A lot of memories,
(36:33):
a lot of stuff.
Speaker 15 (36:46):
With me in New York is Larry Kramer. He's co
founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis task for how
many friends have you lost to this disease? Twenty twenty?
Speaker 3 (36:55):
Yes, those are.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
By the fall of nineteen eighty two, nearly six hundred
people in the United States have been diagnosed with AIDS,
and two hundred and forty three had died. Larry Kramer
was only getting angrier.
Speaker 15 (37:09):
And you have still more friends who are sick, very ill.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
Jane, can you imagine what it must be like if
you had lost twenty of your friends in the last eighteen.
Speaker 15 (37:17):
Months and you don't know why.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
No cause, no cure, people in hospitals, we can't. It's
a very angry community. We feel like a disenfranchised for community.
We can't seem to get the government, the National Institutes
of Health to accelerate the research.
Speaker 15 (37:35):
That's going on.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
We can't even get the mayor of New York City
to acknowledge publicly that there's a health emergency crisis going on.
We feel very isolated down in Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
New York City was the epicenter of the growing crisis,
but local government was doing almost nothing about AIDS. Activists
pleaded with the city for funding to pay for things
like housing for people with AIDS and a health clinic
in the village and a hospice center for all the
people who were dying. Mayor at Koch rejected each of
these requests, and the longer the mayor dragged his feet,
(38:07):
the more confrontational. Larry Kramer became.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
I'm a member of an organization of two hundred volunteers
doing things that the city should be doing that. The
Red Cross should be during the Cancer Society will not
give us twenty nine cents. Mayor Koch has not yet
given us twenty nine cents. We have to do it ourselves.
We're fighting to get funding.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
On March fourteenth, nineteen eighty three, Kramer published an article
that ran on the cover of the New York Native
under the headline one thousand, one hundred and twelve and
counting it was a true creedcur in which Kramer declared
that homosexuals had never been closer to extinction. Here is
Kramer reading from the piece.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
Unless we can generate visibly numbers masses, we are going
to die. I am sick of everyone in this community
who tells me to stop creating a panic. How many
of us have to die before you get off your ass,
get scared off your ass and into action.
Speaker 11 (39:03):
Every straight person who is.
Speaker 3 (39:05):
Knowledgeable about the AIDS epidemic can't understand why gay men
aren't marching on the White House.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
For Kramer, the situation was so dire that even the
volunteer care work that GMHC was doing struck him as
beside the point. Eventually he left the organization.
Speaker 11 (39:22):
He said, it's good that GMAC is providing these services.
It's good that GMAC is helping these people. There's no
question that these are good people doing good work. But
what GMHC is doing is helping them die rather than live.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
Kramer thought he needed to scare his fellow gay men
into awareness and action. Meanwhile, Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen
were trying in their way to reassure them. Two months
after Kramer's essay came out in the Native Berkowitz and
Kalen put out a scorcher of their own, a pamphlet
called how to Have Set in an Epidemic. Once again,
(40:02):
it was based on the ideas of doctor Joseph sonoband.
Speaker 4 (40:06):
We had sonoband walking us through the microbiological consequences of
every type of sex act. It was my experience as
a sex worker that turned into a forty page pamphlet
because I had seen everything gay men would even consider
calling sexual expression.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
How to Have Sex in an Epidemic picked up where
Berkowitz and Callen had left off with we Know who
we Are, but this time they wanted to emphasize that
they weren't calling for an end to gay sex altogether.
The pamphlet was full of frank, practical advice about how
to have sex without incurring unnecessary risk.
Speaker 4 (40:42):
We gave people every possible shred of information we could
think of so that they can make their own journey,
make their own decisions, and not have people telling them
what to do. And we did it in a language
that sexually after gay men spoke. We did it with humor,
and we did it clearly.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
How to have sex in an epidemic was a hit.
Burkowitz and Kallen delivered copies to doctor's offices in the
West Village and handed them out at events and local fundraisers.
They found it hard to keep up with demand. At
one point, Burkowitz attended a forum on AIDS and ran
out of copies before all the attendees who wanted the
pamphlet grab one. Afterwards, Burkwood's told Callen about it over
(41:23):
the phone.
Speaker 9 (41:24):
I'm telling you people, just the title people were laughing in.
When you sit there and you listen to all these things,
it hits you in the gut. You're in this auditorium
with two thousand gay men and all they're talking about
is death and you, no matter what they say, what
really hits home is the parties over.
Speaker 13 (41:39):
What are we going to do then?
Speaker 9 (41:41):
And the reaction you tend to see is that, well,
if I can't be promiscous and don't want to be gay,
who needs all this?
Speaker 13 (41:45):
Who wants these people? Who cares about this?
Speaker 9 (41:47):
I mean, I want my party? How many I had?
Speaker 13 (41:50):
Nine hundred may As.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
The pamphlet raised their profile, Burkowitz and Kallen heard about
an upcoming gathering of AIDS activists in Denver, Colorado. It
would turn out to be a foundational event in the
epidemics history. The idea was for a delegation of people
with AIDS from around the country to show up at
a medical conference focused on gay health and address the
doctors and scientists in attendance. One of the organizers of
(42:15):
the gathering was Bobby Campbell, the nurse from San Francisco
who had emerged as one of the first people ever
to speak publicly about having AIDS.
Speaker 5 (42:22):
I encourage you to contact through the doctors to find
other brothers who have this illness, so that we can
talk to each other and support each other through this.
Speaker 4 (42:31):
So you are forming support networks. That's right. It's easier
to be positive together.
Speaker 5 (42:36):
That's certainly true.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
Basically, Campbell put out a call on the gay press
saying that anyone who had AIDS should consider flying out
to Denver for the conference. After raising some money for airfare,
Berkowitz and Callen made the trip.
Speaker 4 (42:49):
You know, we knew when we got there that this
is going to be a momentous coming together of gay
men at the forefront in the first wave of battling AIDS.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
Callen immediately hit it off with Campbell and they started
collaborating on a written statement to present at the conference.
Speaker 4 (43:05):
Michael and Bobby Campbell were like the two top dogs
of the group, the two control queens, so they took
control of writing this document, and they would write together,
and then all of us would get back into this
hospitality suite and listen to what they read and give
our feedback. And after a couple of days it turned
to the Denver Principles, and when it was done, it
was just breathtakingly brilliant.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
The Denver Principles opened with a declaration, we condemn attempts
to label us as victims, a term which implies defeat,
and we are only occasionally patients, a term which implies passivity, helplessness,
and dependence upon the care of others. The activists said
they wanted to be referred to as people with AIDS.
(43:52):
Standing on the conference's main stage next to a banner
that read fighting for Our Lives, each of the eleven
men took reading the Denver Principles out loud, line by line.
It amounted to a kind of bill of rights.
Speaker 4 (44:08):
The rights of people with AIDS to as full and
satisfying sexual and emotional lives as anyone else. To quality
medical treatment and quality social service provision without discrimination of
any form. To full explanations of all medical procedures and risk,
to choose or refuse their treatment modalities, to refuse to
(44:28):
participate in research without jeopardizing their treatment, and to make
informed decisions about their lives, to human respect, and to
choose who their significant others are, to die and to
live in dignity, Denver, nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Before Denver AIDS, activism had been happening in separate silo
around the country in cities like New York, San Francisco,
and Los Angeles. Now those early activists had come together
and staked out a position on how they planned to
fit in to whatever was coming next. Afterwards, Berkelwitz continued
doing media appearances to publicize the message.
Speaker 11 (45:18):
You don't like the term, Richard, victim of AIDS.
Speaker 7 (45:22):
I guess it's also a response to the media coverage
which keeps saying that all victims of AIDS are dying.
That has a mortality rate of eighty two hundred percent,
and that's pretty demoralizing when you're trying to fight a
life threatening illness for which there is no proven treatment
or cure.
Speaker 8 (45:37):
What's the prognosis for you, Richard, Well, I'm still immune deficient,
but my blood tests are all getting better.
Speaker 7 (45:42):
My fatigue and my fevers are gone. I don't believe
any more than I'm going to die. I've stopped checking
for lesions.
Speaker 1 (45:51):
The meeting in Denver led to the founding of the
National Association of People with AIDS, and to this day,
the Denver Principles remain embedded in the mission states of
many AIDS organizations around the world. Perhaps most importantly, the
Denver Principles gave people who got diagnosed with AIDS or
reason to not give up. Sean Strub, for example, was
(46:12):
inspired to go into AIDS fundraising and to start a
magazine called Pause for and By People with HIV and AIDS.
Speaker 6 (46:20):
Every time you'd hear about the epidemic, it was inevitably fatal,
dread disease, no survivors, no cure, terminal illness, one hundred
percent fatal. You were bombarded with death sentence messages, It's
all anybody heard, death sentence, death sentence, death sentence, including
within the gay community. And yet those of us kind
(46:41):
of in the middle of the activism saw something different.
You know, we saw unspeakable levels of pain and loss,
but we also saw a vitality and purpose. You know,
some of the happiest times in my life were also
times when I had the the least confidence I was
going to be able to survive.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
So much of early AIDS activism was directed inwards at
the people who were at risk and the people who
were already sick, but that was only part of the picture.
Slowing the spread of AIDS would require measures that went
far beyond any one individual's personal behavior or decision making.
AIDS activists would have to reach beyond their own communities
(47:26):
and contend with government officials who could not be trusted
to have their best interests at heart. On the next
(47:56):
episode of Fiasco, we leave New York for San Francisco,
were a push to shut down the city's gay bathhouses
in order to slow the spread of AIDS ignited a
battle over public health and civil liberties.
Speaker 10 (48:08):
This whole debate was occurring in this context of many
people from the radical right expressing really extreme measures. It
was unreasonable for people to fear how slippery that slope
might be.
Speaker 4 (48:26):
Say what is not?
Speaker 3 (48:31):
Change?
Speaker 1 (48:34):
Fiasco was presented by Audible Originals and Prologue Projects. The
show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Sam Graham, Felsen, Battlin,
kaplan Ula Culpa, and me Leon Napok. Editorial support by
Nour Waswas and Jessica Miller. Our researcher is Francis Carr.
Archival research by Michelle Sullivan. This season's score is composed
(48:56):
by Edith Mudge. Additional music by Nick Silvester of Godman,
as well as Billy libby Joel Saint, Julian and Dan English,
Noah Hecht and Joe Valley. Our theme song is by
Spatial Relations Music Licensing courtesy of Anthony Roman. Our credit
song this week is How to Have Sex by Michael Callen,
courtesy of Richard Dwarkin. You also heard Can He Find
(49:18):
Another One? By Double Discovery courtesy of Eugenia Publishing Company,
an Era Recording Studio. Audio mixed by Erica Wong with
additional support from Selina Urabe. Our artwork is designed by
Teddy Blanks at Chips and Y. David Blum is the
editor in chief of Audible Originals, Mike Charzik is the
vice president of Audible Studios. Zach Ross is the head
(49:41):
of acquisition and Development for Audible. Thanks to the LGBT
Community Center National History Archive for giving us access to
the Michael Callen collection. Thanks also to Archive dot Org,
Ginny Apuzzo, Henry Waxman, Michael Bronski, Victor Bumblow, and Brian Erstadt.
Special thanks to Peter Yasse. See you next week for
(50:01):
episode three.
Speaker 10 (50:03):
Work Back It's Healthy s
Hey, this is Leon Napok. I'm the host of Fiasco,
but you may also know me from the podcasts Slowburn,
Think Twice, Michael Jackson, and Backfired the Vaping Wars. I'm
excited to be sharing with you the next season of Backfired,
titled Attention Deficit, which is now available exclusively on Audible.
Backfired is a podcast about the business of unintended consequences.
(00:20):
In the first season, my co host Ril Pardess and
I dove deep into the world of vaping and how
the well intentioned quest for a safer cigarette went awry.
Now we're tackling ADHD and how the push to destigmatize
this hard to define childhood diagnosis has led to an
explosion of stimulant use in kids as well as adults.
It's a story about the promise of psychiatry to fix
(00:41):
our brains and the power of the pharmaceutical industry to
shape how we and our doctors think about what's wrong
with us. To hear both seasons of Backfired, go to
audible dot com slash Backfired and start a free trial
that's audible dot com slash backfired. Fiasco is tended for
mature audiences. For a list of books, articles and documentaries
(01:04):
we used in our research. Follow the link in the
show notes Previously on Fiasco.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
It's mysterious, it's deadly, and it's baffling medical science.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
A new deadly disease that no one understands, a great
medical puzzle.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
There was virtually no coverage in the mainstream media.
Speaker 5 (01:27):
I just thought that the more I talked about it,
the better it would be for other people in my community.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
When Sean Strube arrived in New York in nineteen seventy nine,
what he found was a city full of gay men
having the time of their lives. It was exactly what
Strube had been looking for when he decided to transfer
from Georgetown to Columbia.
Speaker 6 (01:54):
I really moved to New York to be free and
to be gay. I didn't know anybody there. I literally
been there a few weekends and met one person, spent
a weekend with him, and fell in love with the city.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Strube had only recently come out to his parents. His
mom had cried and his dad awkwardly asked him if
he was the man or the woman in his relationships,
but Strube still felt a lot better afterwards. He was
a twenty one year old fresh out of the closet
with an apartment in Hell's kitchen. Nothing his parents could
say was going to put a damper on that. A
(02:31):
few weeks after he arrived in New York, Strube attended
the Gay Pride Parade for the first time in his life.
Speaker 6 (02:39):
I couldn't believe all these people were gay. I'm like
walking through and looking that one and that one and
that one, and I was astonished in Central Park. I
had no idea there were that many homosexuals in the world.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
The first Gay Pride Parade had taken place about a
decade earlier. It celebrated the Stonewall Uprising of nineteen sixty nine,
a series of demonstrations that erupted after police rated a
popular gay bar in Greenwich Village. Stonewall was a major
turning point in gay life, not just in New York City,
but across the country.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
A gay liberation movement is challenging a society that abhors homosexuality.
Speaker 7 (03:16):
Tell me, what do you feel about the Harliflow movement.
Speaker 8 (03:18):
I think it's really dynamite, and I think the only
way to achieve it is from force and march is
like this.
Speaker 9 (03:23):
You know, other groups have their own holidays, you know,
their own marshes and things like that.
Speaker 10 (03:28):
This is our day.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
The gay liberation movement was about civil rights and being
able to live openly. It was also about sex and
having as much of it as you wanted.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Freedom of sexual expression is as much an issue of
the gay movement as civil and legal rights are.
Speaker 6 (03:45):
This was sort of the peak of the explosion in
gay male sexuality in the years after Stonewall, right after
this sort of intense repression and this new era of
liberation in the seventies, and everybody was getting it's axually
transmitted infections.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
In my life, there were lots of different diseases circulating
around New York. With treatment, they were rarely fatal. That
they were everywhere.
Speaker 6 (04:10):
Whether it was you know, goanrhea or crabs or herpes.
You know, at the time, herpes was the biggest concern.
You know, people say, oh, if I ever got herpes,
I'd kill myself. And then everybody got herpes and they
didn't kill themselves, so it was commonplace.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Not long after he started at Columbia in the fall,
Strube noticed the lymph nodes on one side of his
neck were badly swollen. He went to University Health Services,
where they told him he might have a contusion or
maybe even leukemia. It was concerning, but the swelling eventually
went down and Strube stopped worrying about it. Then he
started experiencing other symptoms.
Speaker 6 (04:47):
I was having night sweats, and I'd lost weight in
the year after I moved to New York as well.
But I was a tall, skinny kid. My weight fluctuated.
I didn't pay any attention to that, and then I
got hepatitis and I ended up, you know, in bed
for about six weeks and had to drop out of Columbia.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
After he recovered from his bout with hepatitis, Strube started
volunteering at a gay newspaper that had recently opened an
office on fifty seventh Street.
Speaker 6 (05:15):
I was a volunteer copy editor at the New York Native.
Speaker 11 (05:19):
Okay.
Speaker 6 (05:19):
I was dating somebody who worked there, and I would
go in and read the you know, the galleys for
typos and things like that.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
For years, gay New Yorkers had been without a major
news outlet of their own. San Francisco had The Bay
Area Reporter, DC had The Blade, Boston had Gay Community News.
The Native had sprouted up to fill the gap in
New York, and it became a hub of news criticism, advertising,
and local gossip. Did you get on newstands or were
(05:49):
there boxes or how did it get distributed.
Speaker 6 (05:51):
I'd either get it free from the office, or I'd
get it at the newsstands. It was distributed everywhere. I
mean it was in Lower Manhattan anyway, it was everywhere.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Read the paper every two weeks. As soon as it
came out. In the spring of nineteen eighty one, he
came across an article headlined Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded. It
accompanied the first news story ever to be published about
what would turn out to be AIDS.
Speaker 6 (06:15):
And I read it and had, you know, kind of
the gamut of reactions people had, you know, oh my god,
this is scary too, Oh my god, this is fear mongering.
You know, this can't be true.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
The central takeaway from the article was that an exotic
new disease was said to have struck the gay community
in New York, but that, according to health officials, there
was for now no reason to panic. Soon there would be,
and as the disease spread, people like Sean Strub decided
they couldn't wait for scientists, doctors, and government officials to
(06:52):
help them. They were going to have to help themselves.
I'm Leon Napok from Audible Originals and Prologue Projects. This
is fiasco.
Speaker 12 (07:04):
I know about this disease, and I know it may
strike me tomorrow.
Speaker 7 (07:08):
I am there.
Speaker 4 (07:10):
I have swollen glands, I had night sweats, I have fevers.
Am I dying?
Speaker 11 (07:13):
We had no other resources but ourselves.
Speaker 6 (07:16):
We started keeping up a list of who was sick,
and then when people die, you know, we'd cross him off.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
Every gay man who was unable to come forward now
and fight to save his own life is truly helping
to kill the rest of us.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
In this episode, how a handful of gay men in
New York improvised their own response to the outbreak. The
article in the New York Native Disease Rumors, Largely Unfounded,
was written by a physician named Larry Mass. Mass had
(07:54):
a medical degree, but he'd realized that he wasn't all
that interested in being a doctor, so he became a
writer instead, and he started using his expertise to cover
medicine and sex for the Native. In nineteen eighty one,
Mass heard from a source that a few gay men
in New York had come down to the rare lung
infection numisistus pneumonia.
Speaker 11 (08:15):
I got a call from a colonae in what I
call community medicine, trying to help these underserved communities, gay
men and rejects from mainstream medicine and health, and she
said there's something going on.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Mass's source sounded nervous and uncertain. She had been cautioned
not to discuss the issue, but according to Mass, she
thought that someone in the gay community should know.
Speaker 11 (08:43):
She said, there's some cases in New York City intensive
care units and emergency rooms. There's been a couple of deaths.
That's it. I can't talk about it. They told me,
I can't talk about it. I could basically after talking
for a minute and a half like that, it was
basic hung up.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Mass followed up on the tip by calling a doctor
the New York City Department of Health. The doctor reassured
him that unless someone was severely immunocompromised, they didn't need
to worry.
Speaker 11 (09:12):
They said, there are these cases, and there's a few
of them. We don't know if they're related to one another.
We don't know if it's just a coincidence that we're
seeing a few cases and if they are in any
way connected, And that was what became the first piece
disease rumors largely unfounded.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
When Seaun Strew read the article, it didn't even occur
to him that it might have anything to do with him.
But then a few months later, a follow up story
and the native got his attention. This one was about
a group of gay men in Los Angeles, all suffering
from the same three symptoms, swollen lymph clans, weight loss,
and night sweats.
Speaker 6 (09:59):
I remember reading that article and getting the feeling in
the pit of my stomach that that's me. I have
all those things.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Strube went to see a doctor who specialized in treating
gay men. Strube called him a classic clap doctor, someone
who prescribed antibiotics for things like gonn rhea and syphilis
and treated patients who, for various reasons, couldn't turn to
their regular physicians.
Speaker 6 (10:23):
He had an office in the same building this apartment
was in. I think he had had difficulty holding on
to his license, and you know, he kind of showed
up at his apartment and his specimen jar for urine
specimens was a skipy peanut butter jar.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
The doctor told Strube that he was probably fine, he.
Speaker 6 (10:41):
Said, Oh, don't worry about it, that's nothing. He says,
just wash up after you. I think he used some
vulgar colloquialism for having sex, you know, wash up, be
a boy scout, you'll be fine. That didn't comfort me.
I didn't have that much of faith in what he
was telling me.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Anyway, Strube's experience wasn't unusual. All Over New York, gay
men were dealing with doctors who didn't have the slightest
idea what they were up against. Unlike the specialists you
heard about in our first episode, most clap doctors weren't
paying attention to the latest alerts from the CDC or
engaging in any organized effort to figure out how to
(11:21):
treat their patients. Mainly, these doctors were helping people maintain
their sex lives. At a moment when it seemed like
everyone was walking around with some variety of std there
were all.
Speaker 4 (11:33):
These articles in the gay press saying, look, if you're
sexually active gay man, you need every three months to
go and get checked up to make sure you don't
have siphlist and connorrhea.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
This is Richard Burkowitz. He was twenty three when he
moved to New York to study film at NYU.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
The responsible gay man who cares about his community. Every
three months get to a clinic get tested because the
rates were skyrocketing.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Berkowitz was young, handsome, and and he quickly figured out
that he could make a lot of money as an escort.
It wasn't long before he had occasion to visit a
community clinic for gay men in Greenwich Village.
Speaker 4 (12:11):
And I was really fortunate because my chart just happened
to be handed to whatever doctor was available at the moment.
And in that moment, it was doctor Joseph Sonoband who
became my personal e Moses.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Joseph Sonoband was a virologist originally from South Africa. He
was gay, and he had dedicated his practice in New
York to helping men like Richard Berkowitz stay healthy. Berkowitz
became close with Sonoband after getting infected with hepatitis A.
Sonoband told him that he needed to contact all of
his sexual partners and tell them to come see him.
Speaker 4 (12:46):
Most guys when he said that would just like roll
their eyes. It's like, how do you contact a guy
from the bath? How do you contact a guy from
the Saint Balcony. You couldn't do partner tracing when you're
going to the baths and having affected five different people.
But I had a sex worklog of every client I'd seen,
and I had a lot of phone calls to make
(13:07):
that day.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
When Sonoban looked at Berkowitz's blood work, he noticed that
his patient was showing signs of immune deficiency. He called
Burkewitz back to his office, at which point he also
noticed a number of swollen glands.
Speaker 4 (13:20):
He started putting his two sets of fingers under my neck,
under my arm pit. He said, Oh my god, there's
another swollen glen here. There's another swollen glen here. There's
another swollen glan here. And I'm like freaking out, getting
like gnauseris.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Sonobin suggested Berkowitz get a biopsy, and at first Berkowitz refused.
He was scared, and he avoided going back to Sonoban's
office for several months.
Speaker 9 (13:46):
Hello hello, Hi, are you huh?
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
In the meantime, Berkowitz and his friends would talk on
the phone about the gay cancer And I.
Speaker 13 (13:54):
Had this big article in the paper about this this
gay cancer con man. Yeah, will you say this for.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
The Burkowitz recorded many of his calls and collected them
in a personal archive. He and his friends would talk
about people they knew who were getting sick and what
they were going through.
Speaker 7 (14:10):
He's got it, but he's not saying he's got it.
He's keeping it a secret from everybody.
Speaker 13 (14:15):
And you do something you don't want to tell people
when you have cancer. They don't want you in your house,
they don't want you know what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 7 (14:19):
If you have cant catchy want they can't belive in catsne.
Speaker 13 (14:21):
Yeah, but still there's a stigma that goes along with
having cancer. It's like, you know, stay away.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Burkowitz heard about other people who seem to be developing
symptoms of the new disease. The stories hit close to home.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
I had a lot of the escorts who were friends
of mine, and one of them was Hibiscus, and I
heard that he was sick from other escorts.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Berkowitz was told that Hibiscus had gone to a hospital
in the village. Then the news spread that Hibiscus was dead.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
And that freaked me out because we shared a client.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
After that, burke Whitz finally got his biopsy. When he
got home, he decided that his days as an escort
were over. He and Hibiscus had advertised in the same magazine.
Their ads were right next to each others.
Speaker 4 (15:11):
I walked over to the phone. I called near a telephone.
I said, disconnect both my phone numbers. I'm done. I mean,
I thought that said I'm going to die twenty six.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Berkelwitz asked Sonoban to level with him.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
I said everything I'm reading everyone with AIDS dies. You know,
I have swollen glands, I have night sweats, I have fevers.
I had epichatius. Say it eppatatus, b am I dying?
And he looked at me and said, well, actually no.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Sonoban then shared his theory of the new disease. Unlike
some doctors and scientists who were convinced from very early
on that AIDS was caused by a virus, Sonoban believed
that gay men living in cities like New York and
San Francisco had simply burned out their immune systems. They
had had too much sex with too many partners, done
(16:01):
too many drugs, and gotten too many sexually transmitted diseases. AIDS,
Sonobin told Berkowitz was the cumulative result of too many
bad decisions, and he.
Speaker 4 (16:11):
Said, Richard, you need everything possible to protect your immune
system and stay as healthy as you can to fight
off whatever's causing this. You know, this notion that you
know it's just a virus, it's just stupid. You're getting
repeatedly infected with hepatatus say hepatatus be, syphilist gunner rhea,
stomach parasites. I mean, do I have to go down
(16:32):
the list? Herpes a, herpes be? I mean it was
like exploding, he said. Anybody who thinks that there's not
a cumulative consequence to constantly be infected with this, he said,
they're you know, they're in denial.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Whatever this new thing was. Sonoban said it was not
just one virus that you could catch from a single
sexual encounter. Rather, it was an avoidable outcome of certain behaviors,
one that might even be reversible.
Speaker 4 (16:58):
He said, you need to understand that it's not a
hopeful situation. And if you stop exposing yourself to all
these things, you know, I think you're going to be
all right.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Sonobin wanted to get the word out about his theory.
Here he is talking about it on a local news broadcast.
Speaker 14 (17:16):
I suppose the most simplistic and easiest way to view
this is that there was a new biological agent that
was being transmitted from group to group.
Speaker 4 (17:24):
You believe that, of.
Speaker 14 (17:25):
Course, not on this absurd It's just totally absurd, and
it's based on the whole superstructure of conjecture.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
Berkowitz embraced Sonoban's theory wholeheartedly. He excitedly told his friends
about what he'd learned.
Speaker 13 (17:37):
Well, I spoke to my doctor with this week. I
just wanted to talk to him. Yeah, for he said,
first of all, the only people who get this are
that hardcore, heavy duty you know, Friday Sunday, every weekend
drugs and fucking baths and orgies back rooms. And you're
trying to say this cancer comes from a good ten
to fifteen years of every weekend drugs, multiple sex, and
(18:00):
kinky sex. That's what this comes from, every weekend.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Sonobin's theory of AIDS came to be known as the
multi factorial theory. It was wrong, and though Sonoban eventually
did soften his views and allow that AIDS was caused
by a virus, his longtime skepticism earned him a somewhat
uneasy place in the history of the disease. It's important
to realize, though, that back in nineteen eighty two, Sonoban's
(18:27):
ideas weren't competing with some widely accepted scientific consensus. As
you'll hear later in the series, the theory that AIDS
was caused by a virus took years to confirm. In
the meantime, Sonobin distinguished himself by being one of the
first doctors anywhere to start researching AIDS and treating people
who had it, and his faith in the multifactorial theory
(18:51):
led him to advocate for an idea that even his
critics acknowledge was right on the money. Gay men needed
to start having safer sex. In Richard Burkowitz, Sonoban found
an enthusiastic messenger.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
When Sonoman told me that I was going to live,
that there was a good chance I could live, I
said to him, I just quit my job. I never
told my escort it. I said, I just quit my job.
A good all this time? What had you to help?
And he said, well, I have another patient I wants
to help. I know it was rough for you and
your brother.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Sonoban's other patient was a twenty seven year old named
Michael Callen. He was a singer who performed at piano
bars around New York.
Speaker 12 (19:36):
If you could see through my eyes.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Like Berkowitz, Callen had recently been diagnosed with AIDS. Berkowitz
actually recorded the first few seconds of his first ever
phone call with Callen from nineteen eighty two. Sadly he
taped over the rest, but it's still kind of magical
to hear it.
Speaker 7 (19:56):
Oh yeah, Michael Callen, Callen, Hi, my name is Rich Burkowitz, right, yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
We had both been woken up to Sonobin's ideas that
it was actually possible to survive this thing that everyone
was calling the end of the world. Once you get it,
you're dead. It was the first way of hope, and
so in that moment we connected.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Berkowitz and Kllen bonded over the energetic sex lives they
had led prior to their diagnoses. After Berkowitz told Callen
he'd been an escort, Kllen confessed he had been with
approximately three thousand men. He had done the math because
the CDC had just recently interviewed him for a study.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
He said, well, I've had three thousand minute my butt,
You're a whore. What are the perfect ones? Start writing?
About Sonomin's ideas.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Berkowitz and Callen got to work right away. At the time,
Callen was a full time paralegal, and when he left
the office at five o'clock every day, Berkowitz would meet
him at his Greenwich Village apartment. Together, they started writing
an essay, a kind of open letter in which they
would address their fellow gay men.
Speaker 4 (20:59):
In between the writing, he would sometimes bake the most
delicious cookies. He had a beat up piano in his apartment.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
I know, I said, it would be a kid.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
He would like play some music and I would sit
on the fire scape and I'd look at it at
the city Scotland and think, oh my god, just like
a storm coming. It's gonna kill so many people. And
it's up to us to try to weak people up,
to get, you know, to duck for cover. Honey, I
know you must go.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
As they worked on their essay, Berkowitz and Callen attended
an early support group for gay men with AIDS. There
they found like minded people who also didn't want to
resign themselves to an inevitable death. The experience informed Burkowitz
and Kwen's writing, and after a few months they came
up with a piece that was straightforward, a little funny
in places, and full of knowing references to the lifestyle
(21:52):
the authors have been enjoying until recently.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
Michael said to me, we're gonna call this we Know
Who we Are. We live this lifestyle, we loved this lifestyle,
and we're going to talk to you like sluts, like
gay men of our generation, and we're going to tell
you like it is, and we're going to talk to
it in a language that you'll recognize and understand as
part of your community. Not the whole community, but the
sexual active community.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
When Berkowitz and Kallen were done with We Know Who
We Are, there was really only one publication they could
imagine submitting it to.
Speaker 4 (22:24):
We knew we had to go to the Native, you know,
to try to get published, because it was the only
newspaper in town that was the outlet for getting information
about the ads out to gay men.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
We Know Who We Are ran in The Native in
November of nineteen eighty two with a subtitle two Gay
Men declare War on Promiscuity. In it, Berkowitz and Kallen
urged caution the obvious and immediate solution to the present crisis.
They wrote, is the end of urban gay male promiscuity
as we know it today?
Speaker 6 (22:54):
Can I get you to read from We know who we.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
Are as we must care enough about ourselves to begin
this reevaluation. Gay men are dying as a community. We
must initiate and control this process ourselves. Be assured that
if we aren't willing to conduct it, others will do
it for us. The federal government, to the Centers for
(23:18):
Disease Control is already taking a long, hard look at
our behavior.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
The article wasn't all bracing rhetoric. Berkowitz and Kalen also
shared some pragmatic advice about how gay men could have
safer sex. For example, they suggested that the concept of
fuck buddies could be modified to become pods of healthy
people who only had sex with each other. But ultimately,
Berkowitz and Kalen were unequivocal.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
We could continue to deny overwhelming evidence that the prison
health crisis is a direct result of the unprecedented promiscuity
that has occurred since Stonewall, but such denial is killing us.
Denial will continue to kill us until we begin the
difficult task of changing the ways in which we have sex.
Let me tell you that paragraph. It's not me, that's
(24:06):
Michael talking with depressing urgency of disease and death.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Sean Strube, the young Columbia student turned copy editor at
the New York Native, remembers when the article came out, every.
Speaker 6 (24:20):
Gay man who had any consciousness about being gay or
part of the.
Speaker 11 (24:24):
Gay read that article.
Speaker 4 (24:26):
You know, it was absolutely read by everybody.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
The article resonated, even if some people didn't want to
hear what Burkowitz and Callen were saying.
Speaker 6 (24:34):
It was like a splash of cold water in this
community because people couldn't read that article and not see
themselves in it. To one extent or another. There was
a lot of denial. You know, I'm not that promiscuous.
I don't go to that place. I don't do that
particular sexual practice. But underneath it they knew.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Many readers were furious at berkowitzen Callen for what they
saw as a demand to halt their sex lives altogether.
Speaker 12 (24:58):
I'm a gay man. Took me years to bring myself
to say that openly and with pride.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
One columnist for The Native published a rebuttal to Callan
and Berkowitz, called in defense of promiscuity. He went on
local television to make his point.
Speaker 12 (25:12):
Certainly, my sexuality is only a part of my gayness,
but it is the central part. If I can't join
another man's body to mind, then how am I gay?
Liking Bet Midler isn't enough.
Speaker 4 (25:22):
Make no mistake.
Speaker 12 (25:24):
I know about this disease, and I know it may
strike me tomorrow. I'm scared. The crucial question is how
will I let my fear affect me? I know what
I won't do. I won't give up the physical expression
of intimacy and in my sexual encounters, we won't start
out with a health quiz, Nor will we limit our
love making to certain acts I refused.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
Sean Strew remembers the prevailing feeling among his friends during
this time as being as much about indifference and avoidance
as it was about fear and anger.
Speaker 6 (25:53):
Wats of my friends didn't want to hear about it,
you know? I mean I can remember being at events
for or a host would say, Okay, let's let's not
talk about AIDS tonight. You know, let's not talk about
the gay cancer tonight, where they kind of like put
that out as something that couldn't be discussed.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Strube told me that at this point he didn't have
a clear sense that some people had aids and others didn't.
He experienced it more like a growing ominous presence, one
that called the future of everyone around him into question.
Do you remember when that turned into a feeling that
there was a death sentence hanging over you?
Speaker 6 (26:27):
Yes, in those first years I knew it had something
to do with me, but huge numbers of people had
stolen influence. You know, it was a massive community. I
wasn't singular, This wasn't any sort of secret. It wasn't
you know whatever. You know, you would be in bed
with somebody and.
Speaker 11 (26:44):
You know, and do you have someone?
Speaker 6 (26:45):
Look, yeah, I do, feeling each other and you know,
talking about it, comparing it all the time.
Speaker 4 (26:49):
Is that right?
Speaker 1 (26:49):
You remember you remember being in bed with someone and
like feeling each other's.
Speaker 6 (26:53):
Absolutely multiple people. I remember the night I met Michael
Misso was my part who died in nineteen eighty eight.
The night we met, we were both talking about having,
you know, lymph clients that swelled at times, and we
talked about the epidemic and and I guess by then
the idea that this was something, you know, potentially contagious
(27:15):
had emerged.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
As more and more people got sick, news about who
had the disease and who was dying of it would spread,
almost like gossip. Strube and one of his friends started
keeping a written tally.
Speaker 6 (27:33):
We talk on the phone every day, and we just
started comparing notes, and you know, I heard, did you hear?
Speaker 4 (27:42):
You know?
Speaker 13 (27:42):
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (27:42):
Bobby went back to Minneapolis to you know, see his family.
But it's been like a month.
Speaker 11 (27:46):
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (27:46):
Do you think something's going on? And we put Bobby
down question mark, And we started keeping a list of
everybody we heard who was sick or who had you know,
had lost weight. We were, you know, wondering about and
when people die, you know, we'd cross them off.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Larry Mass, the physician who wrote the first article about
AIDS for the New York Native, looks back on this
time with some regret. He was too worried about stoking panic,
he says, and too hesitant to make recommendations to his
readers while the science of the disease was still so uncertain.
Speaker 11 (28:25):
I was someone who, you know, had all these misgivings,
what about our civil rights? What about you know, what
exactly we're going to tell people? I wanted clarity I
felt that go tell everybody just to stop havingly. That
wasn't going to work. You know, I look back on
it now, I mean we were too cautious. I was
too cautious.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Not everyone in massive circle was so cautious. Mass had
one friend in particular who was more than willing to
sound an early alarm. That friend was a writer named
Larry Kramer, who would become probably the most famous name
in the history of AIDS activism.
Speaker 4 (29:01):
Plague. We are in the middle of a fucking plague.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
We are in the worst shape we have ever, ever
ever been in.
Speaker 11 (29:12):
I have a fifty year friendship with Larry, going way back.
Larry was one of the people I knew in New York,
one of the people I first came to see. Larry
was my first inspiration as a writer. Had a lot
of feeling in regard for Larry, but even I really
didn't know where Larry was coming from. He was extremely angry,
(29:34):
volcanically incessantly angry.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
It was a disposition well suited to the moment. From
the very beginning, Kramer saw the new disease as an
existential threat to gay life, and he took some decisive
early steps to bring attention to it.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
We have found a complete and utter lack of interest
in it on part the gay and the medical and
straight communities altogether.
Speaker 10 (30:01):
Or do you think that is I think it's scary.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
I think in terms of the straight community, it's because
basically it's homophobia, or not even homophobia. I do not
think that heterosexuals are interested in homosexuals. I don't think
it's homophobia. I just think it's a complete and utter
lack of interest. And that's okay. I mean, what can
you do.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Kramer is usually described as the co founder of act UP,
the transformative protest group he helped start in nineteen eighty seven,
but all that came much later. In the early eighties,
Kramer was just a screenwriter and author. One of his
screenplays have been nominated for an Oscar, but he was
perhaps best known for a polarizing novel published in nineteen
(30:39):
seventy eight, in which he satirized the sexual politics of
post liberation New York. We have here this morning Larry Kramer,
the author of the controversial novel Fagots.
Speaker 4 (30:49):
Good morning Larry, Good morning Randy.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
I would just like somebody to say introduce me as
being other than controversial.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
If Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen put themselves forward as
young libertines, Larry Kramer had earned a reputation in gay
circles as someone who was hopelessly old fashioned, even squeamish,
about certain aspects of the gay liberation movement.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
Well, I do think that one of the problems that
we're going through now is that we treat ourselves almost
exclusively as sexual beings. And while I think sex is fine,
and I'm not promulgating that we don't do what we
want to do, I think we've come to look upon
ourselves strictly in sexual terms, treating each other as only
(31:31):
a sexual objects.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
Larry Mass regarded his friend's novel as a judgmental text,
a condemnation of a lifestyle that Kramer disapproved of.
Speaker 11 (31:41):
Faggots is basically a great warning to the gay community
that you're on the precipice, and you know, the character's
name in Faggots is fred Lemish, and basically the images
of a lemming going with all these all these other lemmings,
you know, off the cliff, because you know, it was
(32:01):
like a suicidal lives that we were living.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
I can't decide if Kramer's posture towards the gay liberation
movement made him an awkward fit for AIDS activism, or
if it made him the perfect man for the job. Regardless,
he was motivated and connected enough to get people's attention.
In nineteen eighty two, Kramer and five other men, including
(32:26):
Larry Mass, co founded an organization called Gay Men's Health
Crisis or GMHC for short. At first, they mostly raised
money for doctors studying the new disease, but as the
outbreak got worse, some GMHC members became more focused on
providing care to people who were sick and had nowhere
else to turn.
Speaker 11 (32:47):
We had no other resources but ourselves, you know, the hospitals,
but especially the government, the city, the City Department of Health.
Nobody was, you know, really there for us.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
As they brought on more volunteers, GMHC filled the vacuum
in the city. All over New York, there were men
who were suffering and dying alone. In many cases, they
had been rejected even by their families.
Speaker 11 (33:16):
They had nobody to help them at home, they had
nobody to talk to, nobody to help them at multiple levels,
and most of them were dying.
Speaker 8 (33:27):
Hello Hi, Bill, Hi, Hi. This is Roger McFarland from
the Gay Men's Health Crisis. Oh hi, Hi, what can
I do for?
Speaker 1 (33:33):
One of GMHC's earliest volunteers, Roger McFarlane, turned his home
phone number into a hotline for people who thought they
might be sick. On the first night the hotline was up,
McFarlane sat in his living room closet and took more
than one hundred calls.
Speaker 8 (33:48):
Hi Bill, Hi, I'm sorry I just connected this.
Speaker 12 (33:50):
Yeah, that's okay.
Speaker 8 (33:51):
So you talked to the social worker and you're still
able to work, and they're going to start treating you
at Saint Vincent's in a protocol there with doctor Combe.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
Yeah, I know if they're going to treat me as
such or.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Over the coming months. People called in with questions about
which doctors to see, which hospitals to go to, and
how to pay for medical care.
Speaker 8 (34:09):
Then there's a couple of things I can suggest. First
of all, we do need to see where they're going
to refer you. If she doesn't know where to refer
you to, I can certainly give her a call.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
And sometimes the calls were less about what to do
and more about how to cope with what was happening.
Speaker 13 (34:27):
I am so scared and.
Speaker 7 (34:30):
Be so scared.
Speaker 11 (34:31):
I'm only twenty four years old.
Speaker 15 (34:33):
If I have this, I'm going to die and I'm
going to freak out.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
It was in part to help people with the emotional
toll of the disease that GMHC created a buddy system
that paired the healthy with the sick. Mass himself was
never officially part of the buddy system, but he did
his fair share of visiting friends in the hospital, and
when he did, he tried to do for them the
kinds of things that buddies tended to do. One friend
(35:07):
wanted to spend his last days in drag, so Mass
brought him jewelry to wear in his hospital bed. Another friend,
Vito Russo, a gay activist and writer for the New
York Native, wanted Mass to rub his feet.
Speaker 11 (35:21):
I had a kind of gmac buddy moment with him.
I said, Veto, I said, you know, you've you've been this,
you know, fierce great activist, and you know there's so
much that isn't being done, and there's so much that
so many of us could have done. And and I
broke down. I started crying. I said, you know, I'm
(35:44):
so sorry. That I wasn't the activist that you all needed.
They needed people like Larry and Veto. Not everybody was
a Larry or Veto. I mean I wasn't. I'm just
not in that league. Larry never accepted that. He said,
why aren't you angrier? You know you have to. You know,
Larry wouldn't accept that. You know, he was this special,
(36:05):
great leader person. He felt that everybody could do lots
and lots more and you know, should have been doing that.
So I broke down with Veto and I cried, I
was I said, I'm so sorry that I wasn't more
and better. And he looked at me with that sparkle
as I says, I love you, Larry. A lot of memories,
(36:33):
a lot of stuff.
Speaker 15 (36:46):
With me in New York is Larry Kramer. He's co
founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis task for how
many friends have you lost to this disease? Twenty twenty?
Speaker 3 (36:55):
Yes, those are.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
By the fall of nineteen eighty two, nearly six hundred
people in the United States have been diagnosed with AIDS,
and two hundred and forty three had died. Larry Kramer
was only getting angrier.
Speaker 15 (37:09):
And you have still more friends who are sick, very ill.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
Jane, can you imagine what it must be like if
you had lost twenty of your friends in the last eighteen.
Speaker 15 (37:17):
Months and you don't know why.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
No cause, no cure, people in hospitals, we can't. It's
a very angry community. We feel like a disenfranchised for community.
We can't seem to get the government, the National Institutes
of Health to accelerate the research.
Speaker 15 (37:35):
That's going on.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
We can't even get the mayor of New York City
to acknowledge publicly that there's a health emergency crisis going on.
We feel very isolated down in Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
New York City was the epicenter of the growing crisis,
but local government was doing almost nothing about AIDS. Activists
pleaded with the city for funding to pay for things
like housing for people with AIDS and a health clinic
in the village and a hospice center for all the
people who were dying. Mayor at Koch rejected each of
these requests, and the longer the mayor dragged his feet,
(38:07):
the more confrontational. Larry Kramer became.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
I'm a member of an organization of two hundred volunteers
doing things that the city should be doing that. The
Red Cross should be during the Cancer Society will not
give us twenty nine cents. Mayor Koch has not yet
given us twenty nine cents. We have to do it ourselves.
We're fighting to get funding.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
On March fourteenth, nineteen eighty three, Kramer published an article
that ran on the cover of the New York Native
under the headline one thousand, one hundred and twelve and
counting it was a true creedcur in which Kramer declared
that homosexuals had never been closer to extinction. Here is
Kramer reading from the piece.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
Unless we can generate visibly numbers masses, we are going
to die. I am sick of everyone in this community
who tells me to stop creating a panic. How many
of us have to die before you get off your ass,
get scared off your ass and into action.
Speaker 11 (39:03):
Every straight person who is.
Speaker 3 (39:05):
Knowledgeable about the AIDS epidemic can't understand why gay men
aren't marching on the White House.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
For Kramer, the situation was so dire that even the
volunteer care work that GMHC was doing struck him as
beside the point. Eventually he left the organization.
Speaker 11 (39:22):
He said, it's good that GMAC is providing these services.
It's good that GMAC is helping these people. There's no
question that these are good people doing good work. But
what GMHC is doing is helping them die rather than live.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
Kramer thought he needed to scare his fellow gay men
into awareness and action. Meanwhile, Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen
were trying in their way to reassure them. Two months
after Kramer's essay came out in the Native Berkowitz and
Kalen put out a scorcher of their own, a pamphlet
called how to Have Set in an Epidemic. Once again,
(40:02):
it was based on the ideas of doctor Joseph sonoband.
Speaker 4 (40:06):
We had sonoband walking us through the microbiological consequences of
every type of sex act. It was my experience as
a sex worker that turned into a forty page pamphlet
because I had seen everything gay men would even consider
calling sexual expression.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
How to Have Sex in an Epidemic picked up where
Berkowitz and Callen had left off with we Know who
we Are, but this time they wanted to emphasize that
they weren't calling for an end to gay sex altogether.
The pamphlet was full of frank, practical advice about how
to have sex without incurring unnecessary risk.
Speaker 4 (40:42):
We gave people every possible shred of information we could
think of so that they can make their own journey,
make their own decisions, and not have people telling them
what to do. And we did it in a language
that sexually after gay men spoke. We did it with humor,
and we did it clearly.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
How to have sex in an epidemic was a hit.
Burkowitz and Kallen delivered copies to doctor's offices in the
West Village and handed them out at events and local fundraisers.
They found it hard to keep up with demand. At
one point, Burkowitz attended a forum on AIDS and ran
out of copies before all the attendees who wanted the
pamphlet grab one. Afterwards, Burkwood's told Callen about it over
(41:23):
the phone.
Speaker 9 (41:24):
I'm telling you people, just the title people were laughing in.
When you sit there and you listen to all these things,
it hits you in the gut. You're in this auditorium
with two thousand gay men and all they're talking about
is death and you, no matter what they say, what
really hits home is the parties over.
Speaker 13 (41:39):
What are we going to do then?
Speaker 9 (41:41):
And the reaction you tend to see is that, well,
if I can't be promiscous and don't want to be gay,
who needs all this?
Speaker 13 (41:45):
Who wants these people? Who cares about this?
Speaker 9 (41:47):
I mean, I want my party? How many I had?
Speaker 13 (41:50):
Nine hundred may As.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
The pamphlet raised their profile, Burkowitz and Kallen heard about
an upcoming gathering of AIDS activists in Denver, Colorado. It
would turn out to be a foundational event in the
epidemics history. The idea was for a delegation of people
with AIDS from around the country to show up at
a medical conference focused on gay health and address the
doctors and scientists in attendance. One of the organizers of
(42:15):
the gathering was Bobby Campbell, the nurse from San Francisco
who had emerged as one of the first people ever
to speak publicly about having AIDS.
Speaker 5 (42:22):
I encourage you to contact through the doctors to find
other brothers who have this illness, so that we can
talk to each other and support each other through this.
Speaker 4 (42:31):
So you are forming support networks. That's right. It's easier
to be positive together.
Speaker 5 (42:36):
That's certainly true.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
Basically, Campbell put out a call on the gay press
saying that anyone who had AIDS should consider flying out
to Denver for the conference. After raising some money for airfare,
Berkowitz and Callen made the trip.
Speaker 4 (42:49):
You know, we knew when we got there that this
is going to be a momentous coming together of gay
men at the forefront in the first wave of battling AIDS.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
Callen immediately hit it off with Campbell and they started
collaborating on a written statement to present at the conference.
Speaker 4 (43:05):
Michael and Bobby Campbell were like the two top dogs
of the group, the two control queens, so they took
control of writing this document, and they would write together,
and then all of us would get back into this
hospitality suite and listen to what they read and give
our feedback. And after a couple of days it turned
to the Denver Principles, and when it was done, it
was just breathtakingly brilliant.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
The Denver Principles opened with a declaration, we condemn attempts
to label us as victims, a term which implies defeat,
and we are only occasionally patients, a term which implies passivity, helplessness,
and dependence upon the care of others. The activists said
they wanted to be referred to as people with AIDS.
(43:52):
Standing on the conference's main stage next to a banner
that read fighting for Our Lives, each of the eleven
men took reading the Denver Principles out loud, line by line.
It amounted to a kind of bill of rights.
Speaker 4 (44:08):
The rights of people with AIDS to as full and
satisfying sexual and emotional lives as anyone else. To quality
medical treatment and quality social service provision without discrimination of
any form. To full explanations of all medical procedures and risk,
to choose or refuse their treatment modalities, to refuse to
(44:28):
participate in research without jeopardizing their treatment, and to make
informed decisions about their lives, to human respect, and to
choose who their significant others are, to die and to
live in dignity, Denver, nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Before Denver AIDS, activism had been happening in separate silo
around the country in cities like New York, San Francisco,
and Los Angeles. Now those early activists had come together
and staked out a position on how they planned to
fit in to whatever was coming next. Afterwards, Berkelwitz continued
doing media appearances to publicize the message.
Speaker 11 (45:18):
You don't like the term, Richard, victim of AIDS.
Speaker 7 (45:22):
I guess it's also a response to the media coverage
which keeps saying that all victims of AIDS are dying.
That has a mortality rate of eighty two hundred percent,
and that's pretty demoralizing when you're trying to fight a
life threatening illness for which there is no proven treatment
or cure.
Speaker 8 (45:37):
What's the prognosis for you, Richard, Well, I'm still immune deficient,
but my blood tests are all getting better.
Speaker 7 (45:42):
My fatigue and my fevers are gone. I don't believe
any more than I'm going to die. I've stopped checking
for lesions.
Speaker 1 (45:51):
The meeting in Denver led to the founding of the
National Association of People with AIDS, and to this day,
the Denver Principles remain embedded in the mission states of
many AIDS organizations around the world. Perhaps most importantly, the
Denver Principles gave people who got diagnosed with AIDS or
reason to not give up. Sean Strub, for example, was
(46:12):
inspired to go into AIDS fundraising and to start a
magazine called Pause for and By People with HIV and AIDS.
Speaker 6 (46:20):
Every time you'd hear about the epidemic, it was inevitably fatal,
dread disease, no survivors, no cure, terminal illness, one hundred
percent fatal. You were bombarded with death sentence messages, It's
all anybody heard, death sentence, death sentence, death sentence, including
within the gay community. And yet those of us kind
(46:41):
of in the middle of the activism saw something different.
You know, we saw unspeakable levels of pain and loss,
but we also saw a vitality and purpose. You know,
some of the happiest times in my life were also
times when I had the the least confidence I was
going to be able to survive.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
So much of early AIDS activism was directed inwards at
the people who were at risk and the people who
were already sick, but that was only part of the picture.
Slowing the spread of AIDS would require measures that went
far beyond any one individual's personal behavior or decision making.
AIDS activists would have to reach beyond their own communities
(47:26):
and contend with government officials who could not be trusted
to have their best interests at heart. On the next
(47:56):
episode of Fiasco, we leave New York for San Francisco,
were a push to shut down the city's gay bathhouses
in order to slow the spread of AIDS ignited a
battle over public health and civil liberties.
Speaker 10 (48:08):
This whole debate was occurring in this context of many
people from the radical right expressing really extreme measures. It
was unreasonable for people to fear how slippery that slope
might be.
Speaker 4 (48:26):
Say what is not?
Speaker 3 (48:31):
Change?
Speaker 1 (48:34):
Fiasco was presented by Audible Originals and Prologue Projects. The
show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Sam Graham, Felsen, Battlin,
kaplan Ula Culpa, and me Leon Napok. Editorial support by
Nour Waswas and Jessica Miller. Our researcher is Francis Carr.
Archival research by Michelle Sullivan. This season's score is composed
(48:56):
by Edith Mudge. Additional music by Nick Silvester of Godman,
as well as Billy libby Joel Saint, Julian and Dan English,
Noah Hecht and Joe Valley. Our theme song is by
Spatial Relations Music Licensing courtesy of Anthony Roman. Our credit
song this week is How to Have Sex by Michael Callen,
courtesy of Richard Dwarkin. You also heard Can He Find
(49:18):
Another One? By Double Discovery courtesy of Eugenia Publishing Company,
an Era Recording Studio. Audio mixed by Erica Wong with
additional support from Selina Urabe. Our artwork is designed by
Teddy Blanks at Chips and Y. David Blum is the
editor in chief of Audible Originals, Mike Charzik is the
vice president of Audible Studios. Zach Ross is the head
(49:41):
of acquisition and Development for Audible. Thanks to the LGBT
Community Center National History Archive for giving us access to
the Michael Callen collection. Thanks also to Archive dot Org,
Ginny Apuzzo, Henry Waxman, Michael Bronski, Victor Bumblow, and Brian Erstadt.
Special thanks to Peter Yasse. See you next week for
(50:01):
episode three.
Speaker 10 (50:03):
Work Back It's Healthy s
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