The New Issue: Leo Lerman

Leo and Gray’s foyer’s loaded with images of Europe’s Mount Etna and Vesuvius. The latter destroyed Pompeii in 79 AD. The white owl’s just one of the many Gray has collected over the years.

April 13, 1985: Long discussion with Stephen, Puss, Lloyd [Williams] and Joel about AIDS and how this will bring (and is bringing) social changes. In the homosexual world: celibacy, courtship, limited sexual encounters and practices, terror… In the heterosexual world: bewilderment, terror. I said, “When AIDS hits the heterosexual world that will be the time of devastating backlash at the homosexual world.” The signs are already visible: The selfish, I-don’t-care fringe of the homosexual world and the already infected who want to revenge themselves by taking with them ’sacrifices’ are identical with their long-ago forebears in the Black Death.

AB: Do you guys remember this conversation?
SP: Yeah, I remember it. We were in the kitchen. It’s only ’85, so it’s just barely begun. It had broken through in the consciousness within a couple of years and people are beginning to die at a pretty good pace. We still had no idea how it spread, or few ideas of how it spread. It’s now been identified as a gay – an epidemic within the gay community – and nobody knew if it will be contained within that or if it will spread. There were mixed feelings about whether it would be a good thing if it spread. Leo alludes to it in a negative way, but there were feelings that if it spread beyond the gay community, then perhaps there would be some national response.
GF: Fortunately, Leo and I didn’t have many close friends who died.
AB: Do you think that had something to do with the generational gap and the sexual revolution?

GF: Possibly. I was more worried – Leo was always in the hospital and one of the times in the room next to him, there were people in and out with masks.
JK: Whenever you went in, you had to get a mask.
JM: They had signs on the door that said, “Do not enter”.
SP: You know, that was another friend of mine, who was in the room next to Leo. Nicholas. Gray, you did have close friends who died, but they were often not acknowledged as AIDS deaths.
JK: There were lots of people who died and they gave them all kinds of other reasons, because there was terrible shame. Very few of the papers referred to AIDS at all.
SP: One thing I remember early in the epidemic is that The Times wouldn’t use the word – they certainly didn’t refer to gays. There was certainly a silence. There was a code to how you read the obits.

JM: “Tragic illness”. “Pneumonia”.