I've Seen the Future and I'm Not Going by Peter McGough

Author:Peter McGough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

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When Massimo Audiello was building his gallery on East Eleventh Street in 1984, his contractor’s boyfriend was ill and dying. It was difficult for Massimo, because he needed his gallery to open on time and yet he was aware of the seriousness of the illness. It’s almost impossible to convey to a young person today what it was like then, when so little was known about AIDS.

We went to see our downstairs neighbor and friend the artist Nicolas Moufarrege in the hospital. Chuck was there. All the nurses were in full scrubs with gloves and masks. Chuck, McD, and I were the few not in them. There was a plastic bottle hooked to his bed, so he could urinate. I took the very full bottle after Nicolas asked me to empty it and poured it into the toilet. After I did, the nurse reprimanded me. She was hostile to Nicolas and wasn’t very friendly to his visitors. Nicolas died at age thirty-six in 1985. As so often happened, everything was thrown out of his apartment. David went through the belongings and took all the colored threads that Nicholas used for his art to mend our clothes.

In 1987 Oprah Winfrey had a show about a man who had AIDS and swam in a public pool. She went to Virginia to speak to the town. All hell broke loose in the audience, and the people there were livid about the man and his disease. It pretty much summed up the times. Homophobia reared its ugly head, and people all over were concerned. I remember hearing another AIDS casualty, Gordon Stevenson from the no-wave band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, declare, “Mosquitoes will pass on the disease.” No one knew how it was transmitted till later. Aside from hospital visitors having to wear masks and gloves to visit someone with AIDS, at meals in restaurants and at dinner parties people paused in fear to see which plate or fork or glass was theirs. There was so much shame for the ones who had AIDS, and they were so noticeable in their appearance, with shrunken faces or Kaposi’s sarcoma sores. From the pulpit gays were scorned, too. These were men who were shamed for being gay since childhood and then as adults contracted AIDS. The writer Larry Kramer was warning gay men to stop having sex and to close the bathhouses. Some of them were angry and thought they were being put down. They were part of the sexual revolution and didn’t want to be told what to do. William F. Buckley, the conservative writer, suggested all AIDS patients be tattooed with a marking to warn others. Many conspiracy theories were floating around about germ warfare, as well as direct condemnation: that blacks and gays—or “niggers and faggots,” as they put it—didn’t matter; they deserved what they got. I remember a poster that was plastered all over downtown: a red, black, and white image promoting the germ-warfare theory. I heard the man who designed it disappeared.

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