Gays and AIDS: An Identity Forged in Flames

Michael McDade, who earned a Bronze Star fighting in Vietnam, came to believe the war was an unwinnable folly. But opposition to the conflict never got him marching in protest. Nor did Watergate prompt him to activism, even though he grew so disgusted he "no longer felt allegiance to the government." What did radicalize him, he says, was "having to bundle up and transport my increasingly ill lover to a welfare office every few months so bureaucrats could go through the pointless charade of recertifying a dying man's disability to work." So he began to join group after group and march in every demonstration he could find. This month the poet and floral decorator took on a new career, completing a certificate course at Boston University to become an AIDS educator. He plans to focus on racial minorities. "I had a lot of anger that I had to turn into something productive," he says. "We live in a society so numbed by statistics that we have begun to normalize something that should never be considered normal. It's the Vietnam body count all over. And gay white men are already better organized than other communities. I wanted to be sure others didn't have to reinvent the wheel on this epidemic."

In his anger, his politicization and his activism, McDade embodies the experience of many of the country's 10 million adult gay men. They feel they have been living through a war, watching comrades fall by the battalion. During the dozen years of the AIDS epidemic, they have witnessed the premature death of virtually a generation of leaders, role models, neighbors and friends. While some gay men have been touched by unexpected compassion from heterosexual acquaintances, a majority have been embittered by what they see as widespread hostility or neglect. They overwhelmingly believe that government at all levels has scorned and abandoned them, that the nation's leaders either actively welcome their suffering or, at best, do not much care whether they live or die. They are infuriated by talk of "innocent" victims of the disease, with its implication that gay victims are all guilty and deserve their fate. They are enraged that ostensibly sympathetic heterosexuals, including their own families, may voice concern but fail to grasp the depth of the emotional exhaustion, isolation and sense of loss. And many gay men, even when they test negative for the disease and meticulously avoid behavior thought likely to transmit it, live with a constant sense of doom, an anguishing irrational certainty that this virus will someday, somehow, come to get them too. "It's always in the back of my mind, except when it's in the front of my mind," says Mark Mobley, an arts critic at the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. "Whenever you are in a room with someone, the question is always there: Is AIDS in the room with you too?"