CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE -- DARKNESS VISIBLE
(Did You Sleep With the Models?)
During my years as editor-in-chief of Mandate, Honcho, and Playguy, the focus of gay life shifted from the bedroom to the hospital bed.
One learned the grim news of death in the form of obituaries of the famous not only from newspaper headlines but also from items further inside the paper: notable persons who might in time have achieved the front page. Besides that, one never became inured to the devastating news from friends reporting on still another loss. Sometimes I felt like the character in Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year who shouts into the street from a high window, "Oh death, death, death."
Yes, the chaos of death stalked the streets. Every day, every hour, more somber news, and our enemies gloated over what they laughed at and called "the gay plague."
An especially shocking way to learn of death was to dial a telephone number and hear this recording: "The number you have called has been disconnected." When no forwarding number was given, it meant one thing: AIDS had struck again. Even now, I recall that dire message when I dialed the number of Mario Z. In disbelief, I tried again several times…until the chill reality sank in.
In the summer of 1984 Mario, a promising young photographer, brought his portfolio into the Modernismo offices. Impressed with his work, the art directors and I immediately selected several of his black and white photographs of Al Parker, along with an interview Mario had conducted with him (see Bonus Number 1, posted on January 11). That layout appeared in the October 1984 issue of Mandate.
Sadly, Mario died before seeing any of his photos published in our magazines. Four months after the Al Parker interview, in February 1985, we ran several additional photographs under the title "Mario Z: Last Exposures." The following text accompanied his final layout in Mandate: "Mario Z, whose work appears in these pages, died last summer at the age of 30. We didn't know him well, because he had only begun submitting his work to us a few months before his death. But we liked his work, and we liked him. And so did Mandate readers. After Mario's interview with Al Parker appeared in October 1984, several readers told us that it was the best Al Parker interview they had read. Some of Mario's remaining work will appear in Mandate and Honcho in the future. We are sad that he is not here to do much, much more."
I'm not sure he ever told me his real name. I do recall, however, his details of a wrangle with New York Telephone, as the company then was. For a long time they refused to list him in the phone book under his professional name.
Television newscasts distinguished between "innocent victims" of AIDS -- children, heterosexuals who contracted the disease through blood transfusions -- and those others, the presumed guilty -- i.e., gay men. I cringe even now recalling pious newsreaders like Diane Sawyer and Tom Brokaw who made that egregious contrast. They mouthed the word "homosexual" as if in need of mouthwash. Such newscasters often linked "homosexuals" with "I.V. drug users," as though the two groups were symbiotically joined. (Plentiful cocaine at celebrity gatherings, including those attended by TV journalists, somehow didn't count as "drug use.")
Magazine coverage was just as deplorable. To cite but one example: in October 1982 the Saturday Evening Post ran an article titled "Being Gay is a Health Hazard." The writer, Barry Vinocur, repeatedly referred to AIDS as "the gay plague." That title also appeared as a cover line (lower left below) beside that month's cover subject, presidential daughter Patti Reagan Davis.
Soon after becoming editor-in-chief of the magazines, I recognized the need for medical reporting. This was especially crucial for readers in remote places who lacked access to metropolitan newspapers, to the Advocate, or to regional gay publications such as Bay Area Reporter, Dallas Voice, or Philadelphia Gay News. Somehow, those readers found copies of our magazines. They often wrote appreciative letters for an article or a layout. As Gorbachev loosened the grip of communism in Eastern Europe, letters also arrived from Poland, Hungary, and other Iron Curtain countries. Before the full horror of AIDS, gay papers and magazines occasionally ran service articles on such topics as venereal disease, hepatitis, and amoebiasis. In Mandate of June 1982 -- one of those early issues with my name on the masthead but edited by my predecessor -- was a feature titled "A Visit to a V.D. Clinic." The writer, unfortunately, treated his visit as a lark, almost like an outing to the county fair with antibiotics in place of cotton candy.
In the October 1982 issue of Mandate I ran "A Man's Skin," an informative feature that did not discuss AIDS, one reason being that when the issue was put to bed in mid-summer little was known about the disease apart from early medical research. The article began, "What is the largest sensory organ in a man's body? Wrong! It's his skin. Not only does this approximately 18 square feet of external covering contain more sensitivity to all sorts of stimuli, but it is also the largest organ of personal identification and of sexual attraction."
I didn't know that; did you? Readers probably gained more dermatological insight from this article than from a physiology textbook.
The same author, Roger Tuveson, also contributed "Starting at the Crotch: A Tour of the Male Body," which ran in February 1983. The pull quote suggests why this article, like the previous one, perhaps verbalized what boys knew by instinct from phys. ed. or locker rooms: "A subtle way of sending visual genital signals is to use another part of the body as a 'genital echo.' That's why pulses quicken when biceps flex."
Roger Tuveson was slightly mysterious. He seemed eager to write for the magazines -- he also submitted fiction -- but apart from his southern accent I knew nothing of his past or his present. Looking back, I wonder whether he was a medical journalist or otherwise connected to the field of medicine. In any event, his knowledge of the body far exceeded the bland health nostrums of TV and print journalism. Older than our typical contributors -- fiftyish -- he wore jacket and tie when he came to my office.
In that same February issue, an elegiac article by Leigh W. Rutledge titled "Gilded Wings Across the Final Frontier," accompanied by a photograph of a stone angel with great wings spread across two pages. The subject: how famous gays and bisexuals of the past faced death. The author concluded that they did so "no better and no worse than anyone else, but many of them met the inevitable end with style. English novelist W. Somerset Maugham said on his deathbed, 'Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing to do with it.' " Included in the long cortege to eternity were Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Marcel Proust, Luchino Visconti, Susan B. Anthony, Hart Crane, Virginia Woolf, Yukio Mishima. Neither Leigh nor I, nor anyone else, could have guessed how many contemporaries would soon join that long, silent cavalcade that moves forever in one direction.
(I will post “Gilded Wings Across the Final Frontier” tomorrow — Saturday — as Bonus Number 25.)
More pointedly mournful -- and alarming -- was George De Stefano's well-researched article three months later, in May 1983. The title, "Courage to Endure," comes from a poem by Emily Brontë. That phrase is incised on the memorial stone tablet to the Brontë sisters in the Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. The article's subtitle, "How Gay Men Are Coping with the Health Menace," was relevant at the time. Soon the word "coping" would seem passé; can one cope with a cataclysm? Each week the catastrophe lashed New York like heaves of a great storm whose deadly waves soon pounded this country and the world. Some of those who laughed at "the gay plague" later died of it.
De Stefano interviewed several AIDS patients and also two New York doctors in the forefront of treatment of the disease. Rereading the article recently, I was stunned by this paragraph: "As of late 1982, more than six hundred cases of AIDS have been reported nationally, and according to the Center for Disease Control, there has been a mortality rate of 68 percent for those cases that have been followed for at least two years. AIDS has been reported in 27 states."
"Only" six hundred cases; "only" twenty-seven states. The article was frightening in 1983 because of what was unknown. It is equally so today because of what we know. George ended the article with a quote from Manhattan immunologist Dr. Roger Enlow: "The forces set in motion by the AIDS epidemic will forever change gay life." I don't recall what George De Stefano made of Dr. Enlow's prophesy at the time, nor do I recall my own thoughts. Perhaps we imagined that a cure would soon be found. After all, this was twentieth-century America and science had defeated many dread diseases. With medical specialists joining the battle each week victory was surely not far off, even with a B-movie buffoon in the White House and his administration of vicious court jesters.
In retrospect, Dr. Enlow's prophesy resounds with foreboding like the beating of a leaden gong. No one then could have imagined how tragically apt the prediction was, a profound modern memento mori…remember death.
"Fear of violent attacks by bigots and hoodlums is part of the gay heritage in this country [and] the recent right-wing political and religious backlash against gay rights has intensified the problem dramatically." So began the article by Gary Bass titled "Violence Against Gays: Are We Meeting the Challenge?" By October 1983 the number of attacks had increased, fueled by negative reporting on AIDS by mainstream media, including those shallow, "objective" newscasts by the overpaid likes of Diane Sawyer and Tom Brokaw. Such yellow-journalism tabloids as the New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch, functioned as the Fox News of the eighties. A list of indictments for heinous coverage would fill many pages.
It was round about this time that George Mavety's most grotesque insertion of himself into editorial matters took place. Once I had become established as editor, and sales figures continued to climb, he paid scant attention to the gay side of the eleventh floor. One day, however, he summoned me to his office with a call over the intercom: "Mr. Staggs, could you come in, please." This one, like many of George's pagings, was mellifluous in spite of electronic crackle and loud thumps, for George never quite mastered the summoning device that he used so proudly and so inexpertly.
"Why haven't you run pictures of lesions in the magazines?" he inquired. "This AIDS epidemic is veddy dangerous, and we must scare our readers." Did my mouth sag to the floor like the jaws of a cartoon beast? What possible response could one make to such a question? At times, I and others among my colleagues suspected that George passed through periods of mental disorder. These we attributed to diet pills or a drop in the stock market. But this suggestion of lesions in the pages of Mandate -- or Honcho or Playguy -- was unprecedented. Had I been less astounded I might have asked, pokerfaced, "Do you prefer ulcers or absess? And would you like that with or without Kaposi's sarcoma?"
I thought of "The Triumph of Death" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which I had seen in the Prado a few years earlier. Or the bizarre, disturbing paintings of James Ensor and Francis Bacon. Too stunned to speak, I refrained from macabre irony, which literal-minded George might actually have tried to answer. Instead I explained that our publications, with a lead time of three or four months, could not possibly update developments in the rapidly changing medical landscape. Besides, I added, daily reporting in the Times, the Washington Post, and in newspapers and weekly magazines across the country kept the public informed. He seemed not to have considered this.
"Veddy well, then, keep up the good work. It is a fine job you're doing, veddy fine. You have a considerate soul." Then he added, in an avuncular tone, "I trust you are using protection."
Had he picked that up, I wondered, from Dr. Ruth, media maven and unlikely sex therapist, who asked every caller to her local radio broadcast, "Are you using contraceptives?" This in her unmistakeable high-pitched voice and easily parodied Mitteleuropa accent. So hilarious was her interrogative logo that it became a New York camp line. I couldn't resist asking certain friends, each time they found a new squeeze, "Are you using contraceptives?"
Following my surreal meeting with George Mavety, which left associate editors Freeman Gunter and George De Stefano aghast when they heard it, we had new comic material. I would say to them, or they to me, such things as "Where's the model copy for our lesion layout?" Of course it was in hideous taste, but sometimes it's cathartic to mock a situation that exceeds the limits of absurdity. Then, too, one laughs so as not to weep.
Connecting the dots, I arrived at this hypothesis: George, with not much work to do and excess time on his hands, often entertained lumpen acquaintances and hangers-on. I suspect that one of these, surely an ignoramus, stated that the gay magazines should show graphic images of men in the throes of AIDS. This notion then fed into some deranged pocket of George's mind and produced visual images inappropriate for our magazines but at home in medical textbooks.
Our first safer sex article, "Staying Alive in the Year of the Plague," was written by AIDS activist Richard Berkowitz and appeared in Mandate in November 1983. The article was excerpted from a pamphlet by Berkowitz and Michael Callen titled "How to Have Sex in an Epidemic," which was available by mail from the address given. I'm happy to report that Richard, who was diagnosed with AIDS some forty years ago, is still an activist. His blog gives details of his life and work. He was also the subject, in 2008, of the documentary film Sex Positive. His article was perhaps our most important one up to then regarding safe-sex practices. That phrase, new at the time, had won too few converts. Soon, fortunately, the recommendations were familiar, e.g., condom use, avoidance of bodily fluids, degrees of risk connected to certain practices: kissing with lips closed considered low-risk, unprotected anal sex extremely dangerous.
For the next issue, George De Stefano wrote a moving tribute to Bill Bader, one of our models who also photographed other models. His work appeared on Mandate and Honcho covers and in nine photo spreads. The model pictured in Chapter Sixteen (posted earlier this year) with a parrot perched on his penis was Bill's discovery. He guffawed when I told him my campy title for the layout: “Pecker.”
From the outset, I tried to match every article in the magazines with an appropriate title. Certain features required camp, others a staightforward title, still others an enigmatic one that would lure readers to the article. As the AIDS epidemic spread, melancholy titles became commonplace. At Bill Bader's request, George De Stefano and I interviewed him by phone a week before his death on July 18, 1983. George's article is based on that interview, which chronicles Bill's diagnosis and his brave fight against the disease until, when it became obvious that he would not win the battle, he accepted the inevitable.
I titled this memorial tribute "Called to Rise," a phrase from a poem by Emily Dickinson:
We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise
And then, if we are true to plan,
Our statures touch the skies.
De Stefano opened the article with these elegant words: "When the cause of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome is finally discovered and an effective treatment becomes available, some enterprising journalist will no doubt write a book telling how gay men afflicted with AIDS coped with their ordeal. If the writer is sufficiently empathic and something of a poet, he or she will capture the terror and the pathos of the young men whose bodily defenses deserted them, leaving them vulnerable to invasion by an army of bizarre, devastating infections.
"Such a book would not be, one hopes, simply a compendium of suffering. Some of these men refused to be AIDS victims. Instead, they fought back with all their strength against not only the physical ravages of the disease but also society's homophobia and their own feelings of guilt and unworthinsess. Such a man was Bill Bader, and when the gay Profiles in Courage is written, his story should be one of the book's most moving chapters."
After chemotherapy for Kaposi's sarcoma, and other treatments, Bill consulted a doctor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. "His philosophy," Bill said, "is that health is the result of the balancing of the spiritual, the mental, and the physical, and you can't really treat one of those three aspects without treating all three." The doctor gave Bill a nutritional regimen which for a time produced favorable results. For about two months, he said he felt "super-good...my physical condition reversed dramatically. Some of the lesions started going away. I had lots of energy." He went on several meditation retreats in northern California which, he said, "proved incredibly helpful in my achieving peace within myself."
At this time, candlelight marches were held in cities across the country to focus attention on AIDS and the paltry response of the federal government. At one such march, Bill addressed a crowd of several thousand. "I told them," he recalled, "that the worst part of this disease wasn't the physical part, although that's pretty bad, but it was the sense of isolation, of loneliness, that was so awful." He ended his speech with hope for himself and others battling the disease.
But remission ended, and once more he became seriously ill. "I'm in a position now," he told George De Stefano and me, "where I don't feel I'm going to physically heal myself. To continue to be optimistic would be sheer denial. The cancer is progressing rapidly and my health is deteriorating.
"I've finished all my business. I prepared a will. I've called all my best friends from back home [in Pennsylvania] and explained to them that I'm going to die soon, and I talked at great length with all my friends here. My parents and my sister are coming to visit, and they know the seriousness of the situation. There's nothing I regret in my life, nothing I feel has been left undone. I'm proud of how I've lived."
And his poignant final paragraph: "The reason I wanted to do this interview is that I feel there are some people who gained a lot of hope from my being so positive in my attitude and saying I could heal myself. Hopefully there will be people who will heal themselves, and I encourage those who feel they can do so to give it every shot they can. I feel that I did that. I also think it's important to realize that healing comes in many forms, and for me it has come in the form of my being able to pass on to whatever is next with peace in my heart and with people around me who love me. That's my healing, that's my winning over this disease."
These features were among our most important responses to the health crisis during my editorship. To complete our coverage of related issues, social as well as medical, I include a bibliographical collage of titles, authors, and issue dates. That's because I am sometimes asked the role of these gay monthlies during those years of relentless battle and loss. An added reason is to facilitate research for that hypothetical writer in George De Stefano's article, viz., the future author of a definitive gay Profiles in Courage.
Articles appeared in Mandate except as otherwise noted.
"Gonorrhea: A New Look at an Old Problem" by Gary Bassett (2/84)
"Gays Try Courtship" by Richard Stanton, with this pull-quote: "The
cock-chasing of the Seventies has become passé. Gay men in
the Eighties are choosing quality over quantity -- or size." (4/84)
"Gays and Monogamy" by Donald Vining. "Is one man enough? Before
you settle down with your one and only, you'd better realize that gay
monogamy is more a matter of the spirit than of the body." (5/84)
"Well Hung, Fatally Hanged: The Deadly Thrill of Autoerotic Hanging"
by Robert Bahr (11/84)
"The Truth About A.I.D.S: Evolution of an Epidemic." George De Stefano, reviewing the book of this title by Ann Giudici Fettner and William A. Check, Ph.D., found nothing good to say about it. "No gay man -- or anyone else -- should waste $15.95 on this shoddy piece of work," he concluded. (11/84)
"Love Handles: Heft Means Health, So the Big Look Is In" by George Heymont (2/85)
"Facing It: A Novel of AIDS." Freeman Gunter, reviewing this novel by
Paul Reed, confessed that despite its clichés and lack of artistry, it
possessed "a curious power." (3/85)
"Hemorrhoids Are a Pain in the Ass" by Robert Stenge. (4/85)
"Escape From Fantasy: Even If It's Unhealthy, You Can Still Dream About It" by Brett Averill. Brett was editor of New York Native, which was the city's main gay paper from 1980 to 1997. His article discussed "new forms of fantasy conforming to the dictates of sexual reality" in the era of AIDS (5/85)
"Drinking Again: What Disease Creeps Up Disguised as Good Times?" by George Heymont. The article opened with a popular t-shirt slogan: "I don't have a drinking problem. I drink. I get drunk. I fall down. No problem!" (6/85)
"Don't Put It Off, Put It in Writing: What Every Gay Man Should Know About Making His Will" by George Heymont (11/85)
"The University of Homosexuality: Offering a Major in Staying Alive and a Minor in Having Fun and Staying Well" by Mark Chataway, a staff member of Gay Men's Health Crisis, Inc. (12/85)
"Dating: Gay Men Learn New Ways to Socialize" by Bill Baumer. (12/85)
In Honcho: "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome: The Medical Facts About the Health Scare" by Nathan Fain; reprinted from The Advocate Guide to Gay Health, published by Alyson Publications (4/83)
In Playguy: "Armistead Maupin Talks About AIDS" by Lon G. Nungesser (6/85)
A sobering reminder . . . as if we, who lived though it, needed a reminder. Thanks.