Hold Tight Gently by Martin Duberman Page B

time they’d been at work. They entitled the piece “We Know Who We Are,” and it appeared in the November 8–21, 1982, issue of New York Native with a byline that added “with Richard Dworkin” to Callen and Berkowitz. It minced no words: “Few have beenwilling to say it so clearly, but the single greatest risk factor for contracting AIDS is a history of multiple sexual contacts with partners who are having multiple sexual contacts.”
    “Other factors may contribute,” they acknowledged later in the piece, but went on to insist that to date “no evidence supports” speculation about a new or mutant virus. It was true that the CDC had found a cluster of nine gay men who’d had sexual contact only with one another over a five-year period, and yet each man had developed Kaposi’s—thus suggesting that a virus, not promiscuity, was centrally involved. Yet in a footnote, the CDC had acknowledged that the nine “tended to report having more sexual partners in the year before onset of symptoms (median: 50).” As for hemophiliacs, the U.S. blood supply comes of course from many different donors with many different viruses, and “continual re-exposure and re-infection” over the years may have weakened the recipients’ immune systems. In regard to the infected Haitians, CDC scientists reasoned that in the course of frequent visits to and from the island, with its poor sanitary conditions, they may have picked up “a variety of tropical viruses.”
    Mike and Rich argued in their article that “whichever theory you accept, promiscuity is the way AIDS is being spread among gay men”; they specifically cited, as did a number of specialists in the early years, the known fact that repeated re-infection with a common herpes virus—cytomegalovirus (CMV)—“produced a mild sperm-induced immunosuppression.” Both were forthright about acknowledging in the piece their own sexually active histories and went to great lengths to avoid being misunderstood as saying that there was something inherently wrong with having a large number of sexual contacts. Not only did they still believe in sexual liberation, they argued, but they were not suggesting legislating an end to promiscuity—like passing laws to close the baths or back-room bars. The underlying cause of AIDS, they insisted, was homophobia: “Hatred has forced too many of us into the ghetto of the bathhouse circuit . . . disease settings equivalent to those of poor Third World nations, and junkies.”
    Instead, Rich and Mike called for “sexual alternatives”—like “ ‘fuck buddies’ . . . circles of healthy individuals who can be trusted to limit their sexual contacts to members of that closed group”—until greater understanding of AIDS and treatments for it had developed: “The epidemic of AIDS need not result in abstinence or even monogamyfor everyone. Not everyone who wishes to discuss alternatives to promiscuity,” they insisted, “is sex-negative or a sexual fascist.”
    Their article caused an immediate uproar. It should be remembered that in November 1982—just one year into the U.S. epidemic—a significant number of gay men were still in denial about both how extensive and how lethal the plague could become. Thanks to assorted CDC reports, there was also a fairly widespread conviction, bordering in some quarters on hope, that heterosexuals would become infected in mounting numbers. It was a message that the new organization the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) eagerly promoted in the expectation that it would prompt the federal government and the medical establishment to respond with a massive research effort and a quick cure—since heterosexual lives mattered .
    At the time, GMHC, under the conservative leadership of Paul Popham, a Republican gay man and ex-marine, had in an “educational” brochure only gone so far as to say that the disease might be sexually transmitted. David Goodstein, the even more conservative owner of the national