Living and Dying in A.I.D.S. Time
Midnight Music Confessions
I was reading student essays yesterday from my Fear and American Culture film class. One astute young woman wrote about The Dallas Buyers’ Club, specifically, how then-President Reagan couldn’t even say the term A.I.D.S. until 1985, a full five years after the disease had begun spreading through America.
Reagan’s contemporary Rock Hudson is referenced in the film, too, by protagonist Ron Woodruff who, like the rest of us, was unaware of how sex of any sort back then could infect a person. I thought again of how, before Hudson was outed, so many men wanted to be like him, be HIM. I wondered if Reagan knew about Hudson’s desires way before when Hollywood kept secrets about a person’s orientation/identity.
Did Reagan want to be Hudson, ever? Did he envy Hudson’s career, his sexual prowess?
According to jazz proto-rapper Gil Scott-Heron, Reagan wanted to be John Wayne, or maybe it’s that when we elected him in 1980, we wanted him to be John Wayne (I didn’t, but then I mistakenly voted for the-one-who-was-not-the-country-star John Anderson instead of Carter). Heron’s signature tunes “B Movie” and “Re-Ron” covered the Age of Reagan well if anyone was listening.
1980 was a transitional year in more ways than one. For me, it was my first full year in graduate school in Tennessee where I was trying to make sense of Middle English and visiting Shakespeare professors who would rather drink than switch, or teach us anything about those comedies.
Musically speaking, I was discovering that one could love The Wall as well as Sandinista! And in the withering darkness of some Friday nights, one could also spin around tiny Disco floors in clubs usually hiding down some side street or masquerading as a lobby entrance to an old downtown hotel.
I’d come home to Alabama for holidays and summers still, and go out with old friends to such clubs. By then, Donna Summer had gone past techno, and Dick Clark on American Bandstand was already pronouncing Disco as dead. Who knows why or what he meant? What I knew was that clubs like Belle’s were throbbing on weekend nights and many Wednesdays, too.
Unfortunately, something was dying, though we didn’t really know it then.
How should I say this? I hate labels, so let me dance around a few.
I am male. I am semi-Jewish, though also christened. I am married and have been since 1984. To the same person, a woman.
Before I got married, I kissed many women, and a few men.
In my childhood, a boy/friend of mine and I touched each other. We were six years old. It was his idea.
I was more or less touched/molested by a family physician when I was an adolescent.
I don’t trust many men, and I have a hard time trusting anyone touching me.
So the dance floor in those Disco years could be dangerous territory for someone like me. Still, I had so much fun out there, and sure, I got and gave a few looks, but so what? It was all a game and nothing too bad ever happened…to me, and back then, I never thought it would.
My friends, though, had their own stories, but the saddest part is that two who had such stories didn’t make it out of the 80's.
One friend, Steve, was a college mate of my best friend, and how two guys from the Birmingham area both made it to Sewanee as undergrads, both hiding their queerness at the time, and then kept their friendship alive after graduating isn’t so strange really. Sometimes just one look tells us everything.
My best friend introduced me to Steve who was working with another good friend of mine for Birmingham’s mayor. My friend in the mayor’s office wasn’t gay, so we’ll leave him here.
Steve loved to dance and whenever I think of him in this period, the song that most haunts my memory is The Pointer Sisters’ “He’s So Shy.” Steve loved a boy who fit that bill. I don’t know how long he loved this guy, but he’d confess to me all that they’d done. I kept wondering why he told me.
Steve also tried to introduce me to another friend of his, but I wasn’t interested. I thought about such things deeply, but what I thought most about was that I wasn’t mainly attracted to men — not that I didn’t find some men attractive.
Steve’s shy boy, it turned out, wasn’t, and Steve moved on, too. I can’t tell you the last time I saw him, for I just don’t know. And then, one year the friend who introduced us told me that Steve was dying. And a few weeks later, he was gone.
I knew Billy even better. We didn’t go to the same high school because Billy lived just beyond the city limits. We traveled in similar circles, though, during those rambling weekend nights in our school days. I never wondered about Billy’s personal life then. No one was out so much, and even when we all started hitting the discos, Billy seemed as taken with the music as with anything or anyone else.
All of our crowd — boys, girls — would dance together, and Billy, who seemed so shy when I first knew him, came alive on the disco floor. He’d “get so fired up,” he’d say, especially when Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” began its insistent beat.
I have no idea how many people Billy slept with. The one person I do know he had more than occasional sex with was a girl I wanted to have sex with. She and I also were a couple for a few long-distance months, but she couldn’t take that last step with me.
For she was in love with Billy, who once tried to get me to do more with him. I wasn’t offended, just scared, and I couldn’t have said then what I was so scared of, really. Billy was a kind guy, and I enjoyed his company. Some details are best left private, but I will say that Billy was never a guy to force himself on anyone.
By the late 80’s, he had become well-known in his neighborhood — an old Birmingham enclave. Once he found a partner, things started going really bad for Billy. Not with the partner, but with his health. I remember seeing pictures of Billy with an eye patch — he was open about what he was experiencing, so much so, that the main Birmingham newspaper did a story on him while he was fighting the disease and trying to spread awareness as far as he could.
When Billy died, I was living several states away. I didn’t get to tell him goodbye, but when I hear anything from that Disco period, it takes only a few seconds for me to picture him on the dance floor, arms waving above his head, getting himself and the rest of us fired up.
How can, how do, we understand these times of our lives?
Watching a film like Dallas Buyers’ Club and discussing it with college students today, I’m glad to hear of their outrage at a government that not only didn’t care that people all around us were dying of a sudden wave of virus, but that couldn’t even say the common name given to that virus. It’s like when Ron Woodruff sees a former co-worker who is afraid to even touch Ron now, once it’s known that Ron has A.I.D.S. We knew so little then, but what do we know, remember, now?
Students wonder what was wrong with us, and yes, I know there is still too much judgment out there: Our need to make everything black and white, straight and gay (or not straight); our need to try to reduce everything to some little container, some little square, so that when the song comes on, we’ll know which step to make.
I’m so glad my students are asking questions today as they wonder about these older days, as they wonder about “us” and themselves. I want to tell them so much, too, though sometimes what I want to say most is that if people like Reagan could have known Billy and Steve, or maybe Rock Hudson, then maybe we could have sought a better solution, a better medicine, to help those of us who loved to dance continue to do so, letting the music play freely and without the condemnation of a culture that just couldn’t bring itself to believe that as complex as love is, sometimes it really can be that simple, and that’s fine.
I love the idea of disco bridging a divide, and I can see Billy jumping and singing "We Are Family" at the top of his lungs. Wonder if Reagan liked Sister Sledge...