Preface
SOME PEOPLE ARE GOOD IN EMERGENCIES, others less so. My friends and I were Crazy Club Kids, Punk Rock Nutters, Goofy Goofballs, Fashion Victims, Disco Dollies, Happy Hustlers, and Dizzy Twinks. You couldn’t count on us to pick up the right carton of milk at the store, let alone file our taxes or remember to take out the trash on Wednesday. We danced with the manic grace of plastic bags caught in the wind, but our bank accounts were empty. We wore clothes that stopped traffic, but few of us knew how to drive. We lived, laughed, and loved like there was no tomorrow, never guessing that for many of us there wasn’t. As denizens of what used to be called “The Underground” we were prepared for lives full of social exclusion and unrelenting bohemian squalor. We were not prepared for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.
It began with newspaper articles full of rare, spooky diseases with unpronounceable names or mysterious acronyms. GRID. Pneumocystis. KS. My friends and I didn’t pay attention because, well . . . papers were always full of bad news, right? Then, the rumors started. A friend of a friend of a friend went into the hospital with a cough and never came out. A co-worker’s neighbor dropped in his tracks. That guy who was always sitting outside that café? Gone. Still we didn’t panic. We were barely into our twenties, so healthy and robust we felt immortal. Our delusions of immunity didn’t last long, though. First one friend took ill, then another, then another, then another and another and another. Before long we found ourselves in the midst of a pitiless and unstoppable viral scourge.
As if we didn’t have enough problems already, my friends and I!
In those benighted days of yore, wide swaths of the populace believed all homosexuals were degenerates. In our case they were basically right, but—oh!—they were so mean and judge-y about it. Everyone I knew was scarred, or at least neuroticized, from family rejection, queer-bashing, or just hearing the bigoted blathering of right-wing politicians and televangelists. Unwelcome in respectable society, we descended into the subterranean lavender twilit shadow world of the gay ghetto. There, in dark clubs and dive bars, we frolicked and reveled, utterly determined to wring every last ounce of pleasure and fun from our wretched lives in what little time we had left.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned politicians and televangelists took an unspeakably irritating “told you so” attitude, loudly proclaiming we gays were getting our just rewards. “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals,” elucidated President Reagan’s good friend, Reverend Jerry Falwell. “It is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.” The resulting climate of paranoid intolerance, along with fear of a rapid and painful death, led many gays to abandon the hallowed traditions of camp humor, arched aestheticism, and sexual anarchy—as if a heapin’ helpin’ of normalcy might spur the virus and the bigots to leave us all alone. Not so, my friends and I. We doubled down on the queer and assaulted the public with agitprop street theater, drag cabaret, spoken word poetry, performance art, and worse. Our lives became one giant cri de coeur: We want to live! And yet, even during this riot of rococo rebellion, we kept dying.
Then, after a decade and a half of terror and trauma, it ended, or slowed down anyway, when the development of protease inhibitor “cocktails” sent the death toll plummeting. The general public (at least outside the Bible Belt) decided it didn’t hate gays after all and history marched on to meet its next appointment. The band of merry misfits who’d assembled for mutual support and collective hijinks during the crisis scattered to the winds. People wanted to get on with their lives, not sit around feeling shattered and tragic. A feigned amnesia prevailed across queerdom, albeit one interrupted by brief, sanctioned occasions for dignified mourning.
My dead friends, however, were anything but dignified or mournful. The ghosts of sleazy boys in black leather jackets and cackling queens in tacky frocks nagged me in my dreams. “Hey, Miss Girl! Get off your ass and write something fun about us. Nobody else is doing it.” Strangely, this appeared to be true. Sure, the heroic crusades of ACT UP and Queer Nation were well and justly remembered, but the swirling, whirling, daffy, and demented fringes of queer social life during the high AIDS era were all but forgotten.
When it comes to publicity, my dearly departed friends are not to be denied. So, to avoid their posthumous pestering, I wrote this book: the true story of how a bunch of pathologically flippant kids floundered through a deadly serious disaster. You can read it as an elegy, apologia, cautionary tale, or social history, but it’s also my memoir, and as such it will have to begin with me.
—Alvin Orloff
FEBRUARY 2019
Chapter 1: Polk Street, 1977
A CLOUDLESS EVENING SKY WAS SHADING from deep blue to decadent purple as I stepped off San Francisco’s 38 Geary bus and started walking up Polk Street. On the next block I passed a small gaggle of boys—teenagers, like me—loitering outside a head shop with an air of mild insolence. The cutest, a pale, slender kid with a solemn face, took an oversized comb from the back pocket of tight, white jeans and began slowly running it through his shoulder-length dirty-blond hair. He did this with just enough swagger to suggest he might be preening for an audience. Sure enough, I soon spotted a nearby older man staring his way with needy eyes. A frisson of excitement ran up my spine. Once again I’d escaped the drearily heterosexual suburbs for a night in the glamorous gay ghetto, a place where it seemed possible, if only just, that someone would want me for . . . something.
On reaching the popular section of Polk Street, scores of guys were peacocking up and down the sidewalks, perching on cars, and spilling out of bars, all in a state of advanced merriment. A mini-skirted man wearing a ratty orange ladies’ wig jumped off the back of an idling motorcycle and ran into a liquor store. A balding, middle-aged Bible-thumper wearing a cheap, brown suit tried to give out tracts but was refused by everyone. A pair of guys in tight, shiny, up-to-the-second disco fashions strolled down the street holding hands—right there in public for all-the-world to see.
Spotting a few feet of open space in front of Neato Burrito, I leaned against the wall, shoved my hands in my pockets, and tried to look casual. All around, guys were eying each other with a ravenous hunger, flirting, and walking off together. This, I knew (from library research), was the fabled practice of “cruising,” a prelude to instant sex. Through careful observation, I discerned three styles: Some guys stared fixedly at their quarry, as if commanding him to come their way by telekinesis. Others tried to make eye contact with every passerby, their head zipping back and forth like spectators at a tennis match. Still others slyly glanced at their prey then quickly looked away, feigning indifference. Too shy for any of these, I stared heavenward with what I hoped was a winsome look on my face and waited.
After what seemed like forever, one of the many cars slowly circling the block pulled to the curb so its driver could ogle me. I was being cruised! Nerves aflutter, I sauntered up to the car just as its passenger door swung open and the man patted the seat next to him invitingly. Like every child in America, I’d been severely warned against getting into cars with strangers. I got in. The man, middle-aged and thus of no interest to me, drove around the block while asking polite questions. How old was I? (Sixteen.) Was I in high school? (Yup, and the kids all wanted to kill me for being a fag.) Did my parents know I was gay? (Yes, and they’d sent me to a shrink.) When we reached the spot where he’d picked me up, the man let me out with a “Nice to meet you.” Had he noticed my acne-ravaged face was covered in a virtual mask of Clearasil—a shade of tawny pink that does not, I believe, occur in nature—and been turned off? We’ll never know.
My spot in front of Neato Burrito had been taken, so I started walking. The gay part of Polk was six blocks long and after I’d traversed it three times, I decided to try sneaking in somewhere and randomly chose a place called Buzzby’s. The club was humid, dark, and tiny—though it looked larger than it was thanks to mirrorized walls. And it was packed with men. On the miniscule dance floor a throng of sweaty bodies writhed under a set of disco lights elaborate enough to put me in mind of an alien spacecraft while Donna Summer boomed from giant speakers, “I feel love, I feel love, I feel looove!” I