Washington, DC in the 80s: An Eviscerated Queer Populace Confronts AIDS
- Shoga Films
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
In 1983 I was having a drink at the DC Eagle, the city’s most prominent leather bar and was talking to a tall mid-30s man in full motorcycle regalia. When I found out he worked for the President’s communication office, I asked him how his office felt about gays in their midst. “How can you have an opinion about something that doesn’t exist?” he replied.
Three years earlier, 1980, I had moved to Washington, DC to be with the first man I fell in love with, a young Black man by the name of Michael Hamilton. I was also at the beginning of my journey as an out gay man. Even though Michael was only 24, six years younger than I, he was further along the path of gay self-discovery and partially acted as a mentor. In our first year of living together, we were blissfully happy.
The DC to which I moved was about to tip into the darkness of the Reagan revolution. Jimmy Carter, the most moral President of the 20th century, was crushed in the landslide election of 1980, and Reagan, with his Hollywood smile and newly empowered conservative zealots, completely changed the federal government and, by extension, the city itself. I was fortunate enough to land a job with Peace Corps/Washington before the Reagan freeze on all new hiring kicked in, and I watched as the relatively liberal agency fought off ideological and fiscal attacks.
As far as gay life was concerned, Washington was no New York or San Francisco, but the gay community had a vibrant and visible presence. I went to the bars just off Dupont Circle, occasionally sunned on the P Street beach, and looked for social activities in the bi-weekly gay newspaper, the Blade.
I’d never lived in the South before, didn’t realize that DC was the South. One of Washington's nicknames was Chocolate City, but, like all Southern towns, it was severely segregated. I don't know how I missed it. Our first year together, Michael and I moved to a newly renovated apartment building on the H Street corridor. In 1980 it was stone-cold ghetto – Chinese take-out joints serving greasy food behind thick bullet-proof glass. Coming home from work, I was the only paleface on the sidewalk. The guys on the street had clocked us as an interracial gay couple, but they didn’t say anything to me. Michael got all the flak, sometimes bringing him to tears.
None of this was reflected in our gay world, majority white but accommodating to the few Blacks who frequented the bars and dance clubs. In spite of living in a ghetto, I never wondered why there were so few Black men in the gay spaces I frequented. Turned out there was a huge Black gay scene of which I was totally ignorant. If Michael knew about it, he never mentioned it to me.
In July 1981, the Blade ran a front-page story entitled "Rare, Fatal Pneumonia Hits Gay Men." If I took cognizance of the article (and I probably didn’t), it made no impression. Since ours was an open relationship, both of us were susceptible to venereal disease. (Nothing new to me, who had caught the clap numerous times while a Volunteer in Africa.) Under the circumstances, we got off lightly with the exception of a case of hepatitis that laid both of us low for several weeks in 1982.
Later, we noticed that guys were getting hospitalized and dying in a shockingly brief period of time. We saw the occasional Kaposi sarcoma lesion insufficiently hidden beneath make-up. We heard friends and acquaintances fearfully checking for sweats at night and thrush in the morning. Though not much covered in the mainstream media, the gay community became hyper-focused on the deadly entry of AIDS in our midst.
It was terrifying. We didn’t know where it came from, how it was transmitted, or why gay men seemed to be “targeted” as the earliest victims. As the numbers climbed in New York and San Francisco, the gay communities there began to coalesce around providing support for the afflicted and combatting the indifference of the rest of America. In DC it was different. DC queers were not only severely segregated, thus unable to come together as a united front, but even the white gays labored under the crushing burden of self-imposed invisibility.
The Reagan administration was riddled with gays. All of Nancy’s courtiers were gay – and she knew it. As the epidemic spread, as more and more young men were felled decades before their time, as images of emaciated men splayed on life support in specialized hospital wards spread through the media … radio silence from the White House. Reagan had hitched his wagon to a resurgent conservatism, and no matter what his personal views were about the gay men his wife loved so much, he couldn’t be seen offering the slightest mitigation of their plight until he’d won his second term in 1984.
By then, I was leaving Washington, headed for graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin. Michael and I had broken up two years previously. I wasn’t going to a mid-sized midwestern city to escape the plague. That didn’t seem possible. But the prospect of four more years of Reagan indifference and proximity to the lies and vicious legislation of conservative homophobes like Jesse Helms, senator from South Carolina, dampened my enjoyment of DC’s somewhat thin cultural offerings. (It was a factory town after all.)
But though I had physically left DC, I was still connected through friends, subsequent boyfriends, and even my loyalty to Michael Hamilton. In October of 1985, Rock Hudson’s death from AIDS breached the national wall of silence, and the President allowed the word "AIDS" to issue from his lips, but it didn’t seem to make much difference. The numbers kept climbing. Friends in Chicago were swept away. Friends in DC were carried off. In 1986, the Supreme Court handed the community a devastating blow when it upheld the constitutionality of anti-sodomy laws.
So much for working within the system. In a paroxysm of frustration, Larry Kramer co-founded ACT UP in 1987, an organization which used mass demonstrations and civil disobedience to grab the nation's attention and force policy and medical changes. The gay communities of New York and Los Angeles turned rage into action. Only then did things begin to change, but the white gays of Washington were never in the vanguard.
As for my own connection to DC and the ravages of AIDS in the city that had hosted my first love and the development of my gay identity, much worse was to come.
— Robert Philipson
Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay in Those Transgressive Blues.
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