Telling a Troubled Story

The New York Historical Society is staging an exhibit titled "Aids in New York: the First Five Years," and gay activist Hugh Ryan doesn't like it:

The exhibition . . . accomplishes a neat trick: it takes a black mark in New York City’s history — its homophobic, apathetic response to the early days of AIDS in the early 1980s — and transforms it into a moment of civic pride, when New Yorkers of all stripes came together to fight the disease. It’s a lovely story, if only it were true.

I was in Connecticut during those years, reading the Times every day, so I remember what Ryan is writing about: the refusal of many hospitals to admit AIDS patients, the refusal of some doctors to touch them, the indifference of Mayor Koch and his administration, the hostility of religious leaders (Cardinal John O’Connor: “The truth is not in condoms or clean needles. These are lies. . . good morality is good medicine.”) Unable to mobilize the establishment to help gay people and addicts, AIDS activists found a handful of sweet white kids who got the disease from blood transfusions to serve as their public face.

In my memory of this time the dominant theme is disgust: disgust at the horrible ways gay people and drug addicts were dying, partly inspired by fear of this mysterious new disease and partly by horror at the lifestyle that spawned the epidemic. I was personally astonished to learn about the orgiastic sex culture of the gay bathhouses, something beyond my youthful imagination.

Ryan:

Here is how the exhibit explains the glacial pace of the government’s response to the crisis: “The number of New York voters committed to fight for gay causes was insufficient to form a political bloc strong enough to successfully demand public funds for research, housing, and social services. This was in part because so many gay citizens feared that embracing advocacy would reveal their sexual identities.” Here, grammar is put through the ringer to avoid blaming homophobic, apathetic New Yorkers for their inaction. But the queer community’s own supposed failings are easy to read.

Thinking back on those years, I understand the frustration of people who lost loved ones to that dreadful disease while some "Christians" cheered that God was claiming vengeance. But in the long view, was the response really "glacial"? By 1992, our response to AIDS had become the best-funded public health crusade in history, and a dozen years is not a long time either to change a whole society's views or to develop effective treatments for a novel disease. It was too long for the many people who died, some of them on the street because because their landlords had evicted them and nobody else would take them in. (By the end of 1984, 7,699 AIDS cases and 3,665 deaths had been reported in the US.) But I am not sure that on the whole this story is a "black mark" on our civilization.

What most interests me about this story, actually, is how hard it is for a museum to take on a topic that spawned competing demonstrations just 25 years ago. About 200,000 school children visit the New York Historical Society every year. If they mounted the sort of finger-pointing exhibit that would please Hugh Ryan, what would happen when those kids went home and asked, "Mom, dad, why did you do nothing while thousands of gay people were dying?"

On the other hand, if you don't cover the anger, disgust, and conflict of those years, what have you covered? This is my fear about the upcoming museum of African American history in Washington, which I think is likely to tell a bland patriotic story of brave black people overcoming nebulous "hardships" to achieve equality, like in some elementary school history text. Racism will no doubt appear, but will racists? Will anything that might be seen by anybody as critical of African Americans be admitted? Will segregation appear as anything but a nefarious evil, and will it be mentioned that many blacks supported it? Will it be able to convey the full spectrum of slavery, from its worst horrors to the masters who freed their slave mistresses and tried to marry them?

For public institutions, these are just hard problems to deal with, because nobody seems to enjoy real honesty about the recent past.