Half an hour later, we were ready to roll. There must have been about fifteen people in the room by then. Olivia asked if we should start or wait a little longer.
“Might as well start,” said Trevor, a short black man with a baby face. Trevor was effeminate and everything he said seemed to be an attempt to be flippant. His humor was of a self-mocking variety. “Oh, let’s start. These Tennessee queens don’t even wake up till midnight. And it takes them another hour to get dressed. We’d be waiting all night if we waited for them.”
And so, at Trevor’s prompting, we started.
People stuck their head into the room during the showing, and by the end of the tape, which was almost an hour long, the audience had grown to twenty or more. I sensed that there were others outside, listening in.
When the lights went up, an awkward silence prevailed. Trevor, was nudging his companion, a white boy of similar build and youthful appearance. It would be difficult not to have noticed him—he must have slipped in when the lights went down. Trevor loudly introduced him to me as “the one and only Raleigh,” and Raleigh inclined his head in acknowledgment. Raleigh was a mere wisp of a boy, looking no older than thirteen. I could see vivid, purple scar tissue above his right wrist—it was not a matter of clinical astuteness; Raleigh seemed to be flashing the scar. In the lighting of the Connection I could not tell if his hair was blond or red. The hair was gelled up into a cross between a mohawk and a pompadour. He was extremely thin and wore tight-fitting jeans with black boots and a silky chemise. Thick foundation cream had formed ridges over a cluster of pimples on his cheek and chin.
Trevor and Raleigh now whispered to each other and giggled as if they were in homeroom and sharing a desk, as if I was the substitute teacher whose attention they were trying to attract, but the only way they knew to do it was to act silly. Indeed, I found it difficult to take my eyes off this black and white pair. I didn’t get the impression they were a couple; they were more like coconspirators.
At long last, a question was asked. The questioner was tall, with dark hair and an athletic build. Unlike Trevor or Raleigh, there was nothing about him that might have led me to think he was gay. He had a serious, intellectual air. Later, when Olivia and I discussed him, not knowing his name, we referred to him as “the D.A.” He had watched the video quietly, bringing his own chair in from the bar to be in front of the television.
The D.A. was articulate and well informed. His speaking seemed to make Trevor temporarily give up his comic routine. I sensed that the other men in the room were pleased that the D.A. was willing to ask questions. They were anxious to hear my responses but unwilling to speak up.
From a general commiseration about the inadequate Reagan response, the prospects for a vaccine, the D.A. became more specific. Did I know the risks (“percentage-wise”) for specific acts such as deep kissing or fellatio? When I extended my answer to cover “rimming,” “fisting,” “water sports,” Trevor rolled his eyes and squirmed in the chair and acted sheepish. As if I had singled him out with these words.
The D.A. asked more questions: What about poppers? And could you get AIDS from mosquitoes?
A thin young man with blond hair, a low brow and green eyes, cleared his throat and then spoke softly: “What are our chances for getting AIDS here in Johnson City?” I had noticed him when he came into the room because he made his way directly to the corner and crouched down there, distancing himself from everyone else in the room. He wore a batik T-shirt and jeans. He was speaking from his crouched position, his arms hugging his knees. He was nervous, not accustomed to debate in the manner of the D.A.
“If you practice safe sex, it should be extremely low.”
“Well, what if you don’t—or you haven’t.”
Trevor giggled and nudged Raleigh, who gave a little yelp. This was good for a few laughs.
The questioner flashed Raleigh and Trevor a look of exasperation. He resented having to ask this question in front of everyone else.
“If you don’t practice safe sex, then it depends on how many of your partners happen to be carrying the virus. It’s a bit like Russian roulette. In a place like New York or San Francisco, most of the chambers will have bullets in them. In Johnson City . . . I don’t know.”
“I mean,” the young man continued, “. . . let’s say that you have been careful. You trusted someone. But come to find out he was carrying on with everyone. . . . And the only person you were with was him.”
“And is he HIV positive?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t know, see. He’s left to Atlanta and all I know . . . I heard he was sick. In fact, I think he’s dead.”
All of a sudden, from an abstract discussion, the virus was right in our midst. The effect on Trevor and Raleigh was as if someone had poured a bucket of cold water on their heads. For a fleeting moment I glimpsed the faces behind the masks; I saw two terrified boys.
Clearly, the young man who asked me the question had not been tested; otherwise he would not have to ask.
“It depends on your partner and whether he had the virus. And how long you were together, what you did together, and so on. . . . The blood test is the only way to tell,” I said.
I looked around. There was an eerie silence in the room. Outside we could hear the clink of bottles and furniture being dragged about. I suddenly realized that none of the men in the room had been tested! I had no way to be sure of this, but I was sure. Incredibly, at a time when gay men in Boston and New York and other big cities had gone to be tested in droves, these gay men in Johnson City had not. Perhaps testing was perceived as cumbersome, involving red tape. Perhaps they felt that there was no place they could be tested and be assured of confidentiality.
I now saw the room in a different light. There were higher stakes involved with this screening of the video than in any other place it had been shown. Everyone here was at risk for HIV infection, if he didn’t have it already. Every life here hung on the result of a blood test, a test they had not as yet taken. Trevor manifested his anxiety with his running commentary and persistent attempts at humor. Raleigh shook his bangles and feigned indifference. The D.A. was intellectually trying to determine his odds, “percentage-wise.” And the young man with the batik shirt was angry, hoping that despite the odds, despite his sick friend, he had not been infected.
When Olivia and I emerged from the back room, all the bar stools were occupied as were most of the tables; people were pouring into the bar from outside. The Connection was hazy with cigarette smoke and the rumble of seventy or so people conversing. I had relaxed during the screening of the video. Now my apprehension about who would see me here started anew. And if I did see someone from the VA or the Miracle Center, would I get a chance to explain what I was doing here? “Relax, Abe,” I said to myself. “Anyone you know will be just as worried about you spotting them here.”
A woman walked out of the rest room and proceeded to greet those at the bar. Trevor, the black youth, kissed her loudly on both cheeks and complimented her on her dress. Raleigh looked at her with what I thought was a touch of jealousy. She wore a shoulderless evening gown and white gloves. The gown glittered with sequins. Her brown hair was down to her shoulders. The hair over her forehead had been sprayed to stand straight up. She was exquisite. Trevor introduced her. “Doc, I want you to meet ________.” The name I cannot recall because I was so blown away by her beauty.
“Pleased I’m sure,” she said and held out her hand. Part of her allure, part of the reason my eye lingered on her, was the hint in her appearance that she was a male: the shoulders were pointed and the collarbones a tad prominent. There was a firmness in the jaw line and cheekbones that came through despite her rouge. Her elaborate eye makeup and her thespian manner gave her a larger than life quality. This was neither a man in drag, nor was it a woman. It was a spectacle, an east Tennessee queen.
Her effect on me was extraordinary: I became speechless. I looked at her with a petrified expression and she in turn cast an experie
nced eye over me, relishing and clearly quite used to this reaction. After she walked away, I wished I had heard her say more. I was curious about the person behind the costume.
But I was too late. The music that had been held down for our meeting, now blasted forth. There was an exodus to the dance floor. The building was rocking to the tune of “Fame: I’m going to live forever.”
Olivia mouthed her goodbyes to the owner of the bar—she had another social function she had to make an appearance at. “Go ahead and stay for a while, Abraham,” she said to me, as if she was reading my mind. “You may only get one chance to see this.” She gave me a hug of encouragement and left.
Walking into the Connection had been the hardest part for me; now that I was here I was determined not to dash right out. I wanted to survey the land.
I found a corner table that had been vacated in the rush to the dance floor and I sat down, sliding the clutter of beer bottles to one side to make room for my elbows. The lighting had changed to black lights; a psychedelic globe reflected squares onto the dance floor. The walls of the place had simply disappeared.
Under the spotlights that illuminated the bar, there were a few scrubbed faces that I could see clearly, their expressions magnified. Their eyes roved around, looking at the dancers, swiveling to look every time the front door opened, glancing at the men who, drink in hand, circled the perimeter of the club, peering into the darkness to where I sat.
I had thought of the Connection as a sanctuary for the gay men of east Tennessee, a haven where they could come and let their hair down, put their arms around each other and enjoy complete acceptance and camaraderie. But the atmosphere of the club had none of this. Yes, this was a place where a gay person could give up the pretense of being straight, but it was hardly a natural setting. The garish lighting, the loud music, the people coursing around the room as if at the county fair, the peering over each other’s heads, the scanning, the searching as if looking for someone you knew—it all seemed a bit desperate, anything but relaxed.
I watched the face of the 7-Eleven clerk as he downed a shot glass—he was now piss-drunk, as Allen would say. It struck me that he had escaped a certain kind of scrutiny by coming into the Connection; but now that he was here, was he really himself? Was this—the short-shorts, the eye shadow, the lipstick—who he really was? Was he not exposed to a different and perhaps more intense and competitive kind of scrutiny in here? I felt I could read his uncertainty and the thoughts that crossed his mind: Am I dressed right? Does my face look all right? Will someone want to meet me? How do I get the approval of that good-looking gang who were carrying on in loud voices and laughing near the other end of the bar before the music began? Do I have the courage to talk to someone? I had yet to see anyone converse with him. Meanwhile he kept downing shots, as if he had not yet found the threshold dose of alcohol to produce the disinhibition he needed.
A strobe light came on. All I could see were the truncated movements of limbs cogwheeling to the music, seventy-odd incandescent faces in ecstasy. The dancers were not dancing as couples as much as they were dancing en masse. Raleigh stood out. He was somehow the center of attention: It was his mascara that seemed to fluoresce, it was his hair that appeared on fire, and it was the bangles on his wrists held high over his head that flashed over the dancers. I looked to see if I could spot the scars running across his wrists again.
When I turned back to the bar, the 7-Eleven clerk was missing! Had he left? No, I spotted him making his way to the dance floor. He was unsteady and not well coordinated, but the group made room for him, let him in the circle and he began to shake and twist his body. For the first time that evening I saw his face wear a smile, saw it devoid of tension. Every face on the dance floor was relaxed, happy, devoid of artifice, the primitive beat of the music uniting them, making them as one. Dance was the great healer here; it was only on the dance floor that the utopian vision I had of the Connection as sanctuary came close to being true.
I left as soon as the first song-set wound down and people began to return to their tables. The night air felt cool, and only after coming out did I realize how thick the tobacco smoke had been within. Despite the mass of dancers in the bar, my car was one of just a few in the parking lot. I got in quickly and drove away.
Back home, the household was fast asleep. When I removed my jacket and brought it to my nose, it reeked of tobacco. I poured myself a stiff Scotch and stepped out onto the porch. I felt as if I had returned from a dangerous mission and had miraculously emerged unscathed.
OUR VISIT TO THE BAR resulted in a flurry of testing by the men I spoke to as well as others—partners perhaps. The young man with the batik T-shirt who had been concerned about a sick lover did not show up. Neither did Raleigh.
To my utter amazement, not one of the patrons of the Connection who obtained the test was infected with the virus!
Yet, I was certain that if this had been a random sample of gay men from a gay bar in Boston’s Fenway district, or San Francisco’s Castro district in the same year, 1986, a significant percentage of them—20 to 80 percent?—would be infected with the virus.
This was the tragic lesson learned when the blood test for HIV became widely available: many urban gay men and urban intravenous drug users, though quite asymptomatic, were already infected with HIV.
But not so in rural Tennessee.
Based on my small sample, the disease had not reached our gay population. And gay men were the only “high-risk” group in town, since we had almost no intravenous drug use. Clearly, I was in a unique situation. Every effort I made with gay men to disseminate information on safe sex would be worthwhile. I had to make sure that every gay man heard the message about safe sex, that they understood every nuance of it, that they bought into it as a way to keep themselves alive.
Of the half-million people in the country with HIV, the big reservoir of infection was in urban gay men and intravenous drug users. This was the pool from which others, my townsfolk eventually, would get infected. Data from San Francisco, New York and Vancouver suggested that even after the blood test was available, uninfected gay men were contracting the virus at rates of 5 to 20 percent per year!
After my visit to the Connection, I redoubled my health education and public speaking efforts. I felt a sense of urgency that I had lacked before. I covered at some time all the Tri-Cities and ranged up into Virginia and Kentucky. I spoke to Rotary groups, to Lions Clubs, to PTAs, to physicians at their hospital’s weekly “Grand Rounds.” Every opportunity to appear in print, I took.
Olivia and I appeared on a radio show. And then on a TV show—the kind of community-based talk show where the furniture was dusty and of a tasteless mustard color and where the moderator spoke in a monotone and read her questions from a clipboard. The camera often zoomed in on the wrong person—and the moderator, after nodding sagely, often repeated the same question. The tape aired on TV at the most unlikely times, such as 5 A.M. on Sunday. My message everywhere I spoke was about the “window of opportunity”: safe sex education in our towns could keep AIDS out. Everywhere I spoke, I kept the image of the young men I had seen in the Connection in my mind. I hoped that they were listening, that in the course of flipping channels or scanning a newspaper they saw the message. I hoped their parents or siblings who might know they were gay would bring my message to their attention.
MOST STRAIGHT PEOPLE I talked to in town knew nothing about the gay community beyond the fact that they had their own bar. As a community, gays seemed to be invisible. Most gay men were still in the closet, and the community for its part pretended they did not exist. A scandal about sex between men in an ETSU library had occupied the press for a while and then died.
From time to time, scattered other incidents kept bringing awareness of a gay community back to heterosexual consciousness. A young man from a small town in Virginia drove down with a friend to the Connection in Johnson City. There he met a student from ETSU. They had met in the bar once before. They left the Con
nection in one car and drove to an ETSU parking lot near the football field. Later, the beam of a campus policeman’s flashlight surprised them in a sexual act. They were taken to the ETSU security office where they signed a confession, were sternly warned and then released.
A few days later, to their great surprise—and contrary to what they had been led to expect from the campus police—they were served notice of their arrest. This episode is recounted in some detail by Neil Miller in In Search of Gay America. Miller interviewed the two young men and devoted 20 pages of his 300-page book to the happenings in east Tennessee.
Courtesy of Mr. Crockett, the district attorney, the two men were charged under Tennessee’s little-known crimes against nature law: “Crimes against nature, either with mankind or any beast, are punishable by imprisonment in the penitentiary not less than five years, not more than fifteen.” Included were all acts that did not result in procreation: cunnilingus, fellatio, and anal intercourse.
It did not matter at all to David Crockett that cities like Nashville and Memphis routinely dismissed such cases as a misdemeanor; Johnson City was not Sodom or Gomorrah. The D.A. was going to make this abundantly clear by prosecuting this as a felony.
The ACLU and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force rushed to get involved. But the two young men were terrified by the prospect of more publicity; they were unwilling to make theirs a test case by pleading innocent. Instead, they pleaded no-contest and were sentenced to five years imprisonment. The young men’s defense attorney was quoted as saying it was “the most disgusting thing I have ever seen . . . a guy has sex with a fourteen-year-old girl and gets a lesser sentence.” (Mercifully, when the sentence was appealed the two young men were put on probation.)
Sometime later, a dramatic murder-robbery in Rotary Park brought publicity to an area downtown that had evolved into the preferred place to cruise. The “block”—in fact, a two- or three-block area—was centered around what was then called the Mid-Town Inn.