Washington Blade - June 12, 2009
Amy Cavanaugh

Karen: Let's talk a little about Stonewall. This is the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and I am in a city where Stonewall does not exist and there are folks in this room who were not born when the Stonewall riots took place, but it is one of those mythic touch points in the timeline of our movement. But I want to ask, how many people have a sense of what happened at Stonewall? Tell me what little you know.

Pari: It was a hotel or something like that, I think. There were riots, the police raided, which started a lot of gay and lesbian riots, and they were fighting against the police ... It's like gay liberation. That's what I know, that little bit.

Terra: My first time hearing about Stonewall was at SMYAL, we watched the Stonewall movie. It was like, "Wow," just thinking about how that all went down ... the coming to arms and being able to stand together and say you know what, "I'm tired. I'm physically tired and emotionally tired and I'm not going to deal with this anymore."

Karen: How about folks who were alive and out or thinking about coming out around the time riots were taking place - how did you find out about them if you weren't in New York and what did that mean? How did that feel?

Alan: One of the things we take for granted right now is the GLBT press. It didn't really exist then. Whatever reporting there was came from the national press. If you read the New York Times you probably saw something that was fairly prominently portrayed. If you were living in a lot of other places in the country, it did not get reported at all. It was not until the first Gay Pride in New York in 1970, which was a year after, that people were talking about this. It was how this Pride movement came into being, so for a lot of us, even though we may have been out to ourselves and maybe a few friends, if you were not reading the national press, it didn't exist. It hadn't happened.

Karen: The only paper that initially covered it was the New York [Daily News], and the headline, which was considered perfectly appropriate at the time, was "Queen Bees All Abuzz as Nest is Raided by Police." You wouldn't hear things like "Laurie said," or "Alan stated"... all the descriptions in the paper are "she lisped," "he fanned himself." All the men were described as "she," and always very, very effeminate. That was considered standard, completely appropriate reporting. This is a major daily newspaper, and that was how the Stonewall riot was initially covered.

Nick: I think Stonewall from the West Coast perspective was picked up more as a symbol of gay liberation than for the significance of the three days of rioting. By its first anniversary it became the thing which was the uniting symbol for the entire movement, but it wasn't so much so at the very time that it happened.

Laurie: What it did was scare people. What it did was probably keep me from coming out for four or five years. Because in a very public way, what I saw was how we were treated and that it wasn't OK to be who we were.

John: When you think about D.C., the Post carried it somewhat, because I remember looking at it in the monastery, it was my hometown, New York, thinking "I wish I was there, I missed a party." The only thing you read about in D.C. for the gay community back then was when President Johnson's assistant was arrested at the restroom at the Y. And that's how closeted this town was, and then Frank Kameny, when we got our first delegate to Congress, Frank ran for Congress as an openly gay man and he got 6,000 votes, I said "Where do all these people come from?"

HIV / AIDS

Karen: When the New York Times reported on a mysterious cancer that seemed to be affecting primarily gay men [in the 1980s] it was known as GRID, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. And it's now known as HIV. How has it had an impact on those of you who remember a time before HIV/AIDS, and how has that shifted in your lives today? And there's a whole bunch of you at this table

who have grown up with HIV not only always present in your lives, but particularly in D.C. with an incredibly high rate of HIV infection here. What do you remember? What are some of those pieces that are painful, I know, for a lot of us, but what can you say about it?

John: Before GRID, it was called gay cancer, and people were taught that cancer is not contagious, so for a lack of a good medical definition, how many people became positive without realizing it? Just for the lack of terminology.

Nick: I'll never forget the day, I was living in Houston at the time, in the summer of '81, and a woman who worked at the office started talking about the fact that 14 men in New York City, who were all gay, had this Kaposi's sarcoma, blotches on them, and you know, it just hit me like an electric shock to hear that. I followed the story all the time, and they would try to explain what it was. At first they were convinced the fatality rate was maybe 20 percent, then 35 percent, then - boom - it went to 100 percent. It was a terror, it was a true dark age not knowing whether you were infected or not.

Alan: You had the situation, too, of friends who died within six months. One of the things that is a real hole in our system right now, is that if you're trying to collect histories, particularly in places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C., about what was going on in '70s up to the early '80s period, there's a lot of people you can't talk to. There are only a few people around who have any memories. That's an entire part of the history that's gone.

Laurie: I was a psychotherapist in D.C. and my practice was almost exclusively LGBT. And I remember going through hospital sessions as my clients lay dying. I remember attending funerals on a regular basis and I also remember working with people who were dealing with survival guilt, who were dealing with anger at whoever infected them, dealing with incredible loss.

Rainey: When we first heard about GRID, it was first introduced as for gay white men. That it was in California, then it was in New York, and I was kind of like, "Well, those are opposite sides of the country, what happened to the middle?" Many of our friends were getting sick, but it was cancer. They were dying from cancer, they were dying from pneumonia. No one would even say it. In '88, I did 17 funerals in the month of November. And when I talk about that, it got hard because it was having to talk to the same people. It was all of your friends, so it was a very, very difficult time to get through. I'm amazed it still gets to me.

Nick: Sarah Schulman in New York has this whole view that 80,000 New Yorkers, young New Yorkers, died of AIDS in that period of time, and what that's done for American culture to have most of those people being in the creative arts and creative fields die before they were able to fully mature with their talent and ability. And that had not only a personal terrific loss and loss of gay community, but American culture as a whole suffers from the loss of that whole creative element that was centered in New York.

Laurie: I just have this notion that it is harder for younger people to understand or appreciate or even acknowledge aging in our community because there's a whole generation that's missing. There just are not role models out that there that say, "I can be 45, or I can be 50 or 55 and still be vibrant and part of the community," and "This it what it looks to be 58 years old and still be an out lesbian or an out gay man."

Nick: And successful at life.

Laurie: They're just gone. Missing.

Karen: There are a number of people for who it was a one-two punch. It's hard enough to come out, but when it's "Mom, I'm gay and I have AIDS," you're also telling them you're going to die. This was before we had antiretroviral drugs. This was when the life expectancy for men was six months and for women was 30 days from diagnosis. My major coming out time was watching that happen.

It's shifted, and we now have this world ... HIV/AIDS is still here, which none of us was expecting, and we have medication that's shifted AIDS from being a death sentence to what is being considered a chronic condition. We also have the first generation ever in the history of this world that have aged with HIV/AIDS and we don't know what that looks like. For those who have never known a world that did not have HIV/AIDS, how do you think about these pieces?

Antoine: You can live your whole life with ...

it. I dated someone with it, but I'm still free of it. I get tested every three months. For some of our generation it affects them, but for me, it's there, it's something that's manageable. It's not the death sentence it used to be ... I still have sympathy for those who have it, and one of my friends died from it two years ago. That's what gave me my fright to stop doing what I was doing. I was the one being carefree, knowing that this was out there, but at the same time thinking I couldn't be touched.

Pari: While it's not affecting me as far as my health, it's affecting me psychologically and emotionally because someone I love is dying from this disease.

John: Are they teaching it in the schools?

Pari: I'm in high school, and they just say, "Wrap it up, you won't catch it."

Rainey: The term that gets me is "manageable disease." When you see people taking 10 or 15 pills a day, when you see people that cannot get up out of bed still happening today, you don't see the effects today as it was back then. In the early days, you could tell when someone was positive, you could see they were sick, they lost weight. You don't see that much today, but people are still dying today. I'm still in hospitals with people today ... I hear you say "It's not my problem, it doesn't affect me," I'm going "Ahhhh." It is a big deal. Even today you have people who are drug resistant.

Nick: Epidemiologists are going to work every day fearful they're going to see a result that a much more virulent strand is going to mutate and with all the unprotected sex going on, you're going to see a second wave that will be even more devastating than the first round.

Terra: As a sexually active being, it affects me. It also affects my future and the future of those I care about. I saw a poster where there was a cocktail of 15, 30 pills and a condom and it said, "You choose." I don't like taking the pills I take for hormones for a trans person, the hell I'm going to add this cocktail. I'm 22 and I have the heart and mind of a child. You're telling me this is going to take my energy ... It's a reality check that people make light of.

Alan: I wish that we could have you come and make those same statements to older people. The HIV virus is spreading upwards.

Karen: Fifteen percent of new infections of HIV/AIDS are in people over age 50.

Alan: I know people who, because we're older, should know better. The answer is, we don't. Some of the things that are said anecdotally are frightening. "I'm 65 years old, I don't have to worry, it's only young people who get this." Or, "I'm having sex with a 65-year-old man, and nobody over 65 has HIV."

Andrew: For all of its visibility, HIV has almost become invisible. Young people are not seeing the folks who are dying of it, they aren't aware of what goes into making this a manageable disease ... LGBT people are still growing up in a culture that's anti-LGBT. If you're constantly told you're less than heterosexual people, ... at some point that becomes internalized. You can throw them all the condoms in the world, but if they don't believe their lives are worth protecting, they're not going to use them.

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