LGBTQ History Month: Surviving a Plague
Updated: Oct 5
It must be hard for young queer people today to imagine what it was like to be LGBTQ+ in America from 1981 to 2000—the maelstrom of denial, terror, love, loss, grief, guilt, rage, despair, and hope. It’s hard enough for me to recall how I survived the daily assaults on our community without falling apart.
I moved to New York in the early 1980s, just as the storm was gathering. Stonewall was already more than a decade behind us, and the country had lurched from the social justice movements of the 60s and 70s to conservative Christian politics that demonized gay people and blamed them for HIV/AIDS. At a time when we had few legal protections or political allies, our community was left to fight for our lives while battling for the most basic human rights.
I had reached a turning point of my own. After 16 years of shame and celibacy, the pain of self-denial had finally overwhelmed my fear of coming out. In June 1984, I went to a Pride picnic in Central Park, where I met Steve, who became my first lover.
A generation older, Steve had lived openly in the gay world for years. We were monogamous but not always safe. Two and a half years on, he was diagnosed with AIDS. I assumed he had infected me. At the time, the common wisdom was that everyone who got it died—it was only a question of when.
As Steve’s immune system collapsed and his opportunistic infections multiplied, I saw my own grim future reflected back at me. I was committed to being by his side each step of the way, but who would be there for me when I reached my own inescapable end?
Steve lasted less than two years after diagnosis. Through the gay grapevine, we found an undertaker who would take AIDS corpses without extortion. In death as in life back then, gay men with AIDS were pariahs, with no right to their dignity.
My grief arrived alongside night terrors. Any spot on my skin or film on my tongue seemed like proof of AIDS. Would I die like Steve, blinded in one eye, covered in purple lesions inside and out, gasping for air? Would cytomegalovirus devour my brain? Would I be reduced to a skeleton, shaking and speechless, like my lifelong friend Jeffrey?
I tried to distract myself with healthy food, acupuncture, Chinese herbs, exercise, and a support group—anything to forget the ticking clock. But dread seeped into the corners of my life. Were organic greens, pigeon droppings, or cat boxes potentially lethal for my immune-compromised body? Could I safely kiss anyone? Had I already infected others? The specter of death tainted my most casual human encounters.
Should I take the HIV test? If I were positive, would I take AZT, the only drug available, knowing it had inflicted terrible side effects without saving Steve’s life? What was the point of medical proof of my HIV status if there was no cure?
By 1989, new experimental drugs pushed me to take the HIV test. I waited three agonizing days for the results. It was one thing to assume I was positive, another to receive the clinic’s cold, hard verdict. I already knew the math: average life expectancy after infection was eleven years. I would be dead by 1995. Yet I was advised to “resume normal life,” as if I weren’t a dead man walking.
Instead, I directed my efforts to dying well. I got all the insurance I could, and made end-of-life medical and financial decisions. I stopped saving money. I vowed to live without regrets. I abandoned my career, and planned to start my own music store-café. I sang in a queer chorale, wrote and performed AIDS theater, joined an ACT UP direct action at City Hall, and counseled the worried well.
For the first time since my diagnosis, I fell for a guy. Joe, a tenor in my chorus, was HIV-positive and single, like me. When we finally took our clothes off, I was turned on and terrified. It seemed I could boldly shout, “Silence Equals Death!” in the streets, but up close, skin to skin, my fear won out.
The HIV three-drug cocktail arrived in 1996, too late for Steve and Jeffrey and Joe and too many other men ravaged beyond saving. But it transformed my life. My immune system rebounded, for as long as insurance covered the astronomical cost of five pills per day. Survival brought a new kind of turmoil: after six years preparing for my end, I suddenly had decades ahead of me. The cognitive whiplash was dizzying.
There are times when the plague years come back to me with such immediacy and force that my heart races, tightens, breaks and mends again: that first sunrise on Fire Island, sobbing in Steve’s arms in grief and joy for my journey from the closet; struggling for four hours in a snowstorm to his bedside on the day of his diagnosis; the decade of hugs and prayers and kisses and love exchanged at hospitals, funerals, and protests.
I have now lived more than forty years with a virus I once believed would kill me. I may yet die of old age—a fate inconceivable before the mid-nineties, when we lit candles and stitched quilt panels for the brief, brilliant lives of the brave men we lost far too soon.
Why revisit the AIDS holocaust now, forty years on? Because learning the lessons of our past is key to making wiser choices for future generations. My story is one among many that are a testament to queer resilience, persistence, and commitment to justice—for all afflicted by AIDS, and for all struggling Americans.
The LGBTQ+ story is American history. We queer folks have always cared for our own, fought for our lives, and forced change in public policy and opinion. In this fraught moment for our tribe and our nation, remembering our past reminds us of our strength. We have bent the moral arc toward justice before—and we will do it again, so long as we remember where we’ve been, and honor that legacy. This is what we are called to do in October. This is why our nation needs an LGBTQ History Month.
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