A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein - Surviving AIDS in the 80s

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

Peter Staley was a 24-year-old, closeted finance guy when he was diagnosed with HIV. Having been handed a death sentence, he quit his job and devoted what life he had left to fighting the homophobic governments that were letting him and his friends die. Peter tells us about living through the darkest years of gay history, the pivotal role of lesbians in the AIDS movement, and the silent mental health and drug battles he grappled with after realizing he was going to survive. Support me on Patreon! Find more of A Bit Fruity. Find more of Matt. Try Rocket Money and start cutting your unwanted expenses! Try HelloFresh for a timesaving, budget-friendly approach to home cooking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruitie. I am so happy that you're here. Before we get started this week, if you like the show and want to support it, we are on Patreon. We are doing, I say we, it's just me. It's really just me, but I'm doing monthly bonus episodes over there, and we have a private chat group, and it's really nice time. And so I'd love if you could support. And if not, then that is perfectly fine, too. Just take back and hang out. Today is a really, really special day for the show and for me personally. I want to give a little bit of background as to why I'm here today and why we're joined by this incredibly important guest to me.

When I was growing up, I didn't know anything about HIV AIDS. I mean, we were introduced to the topic in school very briefly, and the only thing that they taught us was that HIV-V. stood for human immunodeficiency virus and don't get it and good luck. And I didn't even know that it had a relationship to the queer community or gay history or anything. I mean, the AIDS crisis, the political, like none of that was talked about in health class and history class. And so I just didn't know. I came out in 2013 when I was in high school and my mom at the time, God bless her, but she was like, don't get AIDS. And I was, I didn't even have a, a framework to understand what that meant. And when I was a senior in high school, I came across a

picture on Instagram of an act up protest. And I didn't know what I was looking at. I did a little digging and I ended up coming across a documentary which had come out not long before called How to Survive a Plague. And I watched it and it was like a portal into this part of history that I felt like I had been denied was just open and it like sucked me in. And for like the second half of my senior year of high school, I did nothing but research about the AIDS crisis and teach myself everything that I, that there was to know. All of I, you know, consuming every documentary, every book, every TV show, everything that was publicly available. One of the main subjects of that documentary I watched How to Survive a Plague was Peter Staley. In the late 1980s, because of circumstances of his life, which he will tell you about, Peter went from a Wall Street bond trader, which I don't even really know what that means, but he went from doing something on Wall Street to becoming a full-time AIDS activist, and he is here to tell the tale.

In a not so abstract way, I credit Peter and his colleagues with my life, really, which I know is probably a weird thing to say to you, Peter. But it's true. And I'm so honored to be here talking with you all of these years after you ignited something in me that I hope sharing your story with people listening today will also ignite in them. Peter, welcome to A BitFruity. It's a great honor, Matt, to be on your podcast. I've been following you for years. And I just love that you got bit by the curiosity bug to learn what had come before you and your generation. I mean, the thing that was crazy to me was the story of the AIDS crisis and of Actup was, it is just so unbelievable.

What I remember the initial feeling that I was struck with was, how was I not taught this ever, in school or outside of school? Like, how isn't this widely taught? So let's start from the beginning. Where were you born? When were you born? I'm old. You're dating me now.

I was born in the last days of the Eisenhower presidency. Okay. In 1961, in Sacramento, California. I'm a California boy. Okay. And my dad worked for Procter & Gamble as a plant manager, and they would move him from plant to plant around the country. I had two older brothers at the time who had already gone through a series of moves.

I went through a series of moves. until I was eight when we finally settled outside of Philadelphia. And so I grew up on the main line, as it's called, in a town called Berwyn, Pennsylvania. I started realizing right around puberty that I was attracted to men as it happens. And I also realized right away, it was kind of in the zeitgeist, I guess,

was that these thoughts I was having, were, to say the very least, frowned upon. They were wrong. I realized in order to survive, I'd have to keep it quiet. And then I got really unlucky from that point on in my youth. No opportunities came up to confirm the, you know, I didn't have, unlike you and many of your generation, I didn't get to enjoy gay sex in high school or junior high.

I dated women and went to prom. all that stuff. But it wasn't until my college years that I finally did the dirty. Did it. Then it was like, whoa. What have I been missing? Do you remember your first time? Oh, God, yes.

Yeah, I was at, I got to Oberlin College, and they actually was one of the best campuses in the country at the time, known as being gay-friendly. They had a gay and lesbian student union that had been started in the early 70 post-on-wall that was very active. They were known for doing, they had an annual gay and lesbian dance that the entire campus showed up for. So straight people went to this thing. And that was kind of the thing to show allyship. But I was so afraid of anybody finding out still.

I had gone through, you know, by this point it had been a decade of hiding not only to the world, but kind of to myself. But I saw this flyer when I got to campus up all over campus from the gay and lesbian student union for this night of gay and lesbian videos and kind of little documentaries and they were going to have a in one of the theaters on campus. And I thought to myself, well, if I go late, I can sneak in the back and the lights will already be out. And I can find a seat in the back and nobody will know. Plus, the flyer said it had one of the bullets on that flyer. It was like one of these films is, just so you know, it's X-rated. I was like, ooh. Sounds good.

So they were doing a porn showing at your college? Well, it is hysterical. It was technically a kind of a documentary or a how-to. It's 15 minutes long on how gay men have sex, how they meet up, what gay sex is. I feel like that would spark outrage now. I know. The film is kind of like a nature documentary. We're like Attenborough saying, and then the male lion mounts the other lion.

I mean, I get the utility because I remember being in high school and I was seeing a guy for the first time and I was getting ready. Like I needed to figure out like what is bottoming entail? Like what is gay sex entail? And I read an article in Cosmopolitan that was like it was about anal sex but it was targeted for like straight women and their boyfriends who like want to spice it up. Yeah. You know? And I was like, okay, well, this is this is my resource. So maybe, I mean, like you said, kind of ahead of its time.

It was hysterical. It started with how we had our code, this is pre-internet, obviously, how we had a code of hooking up. So it started with a party, a cocktail party, and it's two guys making eye contact across the room. Right. You had to learn these signals because there was no grinder. Right. So it was all about eye contact. The trick back then, and we all know it today too, is straight men will, when they

they have eye contact with another guy, they both turn away before the second hand hits the next second. I mean, it's that fast. Whereas gay men will maintain the, they'll do it for that split second longer. And then they know that is our code. Which indoors today. Which indoors today. For sure. Yeah. For sure. And so it showed them and then they like, they leave the party and then it just shows them going right into a bedroom, undressing each other. And then it showed them sucking. And then it showed them fucking. Wow.

It's totally X-rated. And with the narration, which is hysterical. And now they're going to have anal intercourse. One man, he is called the top. And the other one's it. It was so funny. But anyways, I'm watching this thing in the back of the theater before the blowjob. You know, as soon as they begin to kiss and one guy starts unbuttoning the shirt of the other,

I am having to cross my legs. I'm rock hard. And in my head, I'm saying, okay. He said, from that moment on I was on a mission. I was like, okay, I am going to do this. I have got to do this. This is just, this is what I've been missing my whole life. So I'm known for being a man on mission, man on a mission, and I usually don't give up.

So it was like, where can I do it? And how can I make this happen? And it just so happened the next month. My parents had agreed to let me fly to London by myself to check out the London School of Economics as a possibility for a junior year abroad. And I said, perfect. Nope, I don't know a soul in London. I can be, you know, I can take some risks there. So the mission was one week in London, find a man to have sex with.

And you're going to land in the morning, you know, as you land. That night, I had my first gay of sex. And it was the chapter, quick turnaround. The chapter in my book is called Seven Nights, Eight Men. Good for you. So every night was a different guy, a different lesson, a different position. And the last night was a couple. So I did a three way.

That's why it's not seven nights, seven minutes. It's seven nights eight minutes. And so I returned to Oberlin a fully educated slut. Okay, slot. Good. You know, good for you. So this was in 1980, right? 81, right.

January 81 was London. So that was literally, I mean, it was a little later in 1981 that people across the U.S. started really finding out about AIDS. June. June. And so you literally had this six-month window where, I mean, what was it like? I mean, because as a 25-year-old, like, obviously, I only know gay sex in a post-HIV world.

Right. You had that six months. Well, I had the six months. It was great. But it was also longer than that because I was not a gay New Yorker yet. And as we now know, the sad story, the country. largely ignored this new epidemic. So if you were at a rural college like I was, you did not go through with a lot of gay men did in New York City of seeing it in the New York Times and you and all your

friends discussing it right away. I didn't hear about it in June of 81. I heard about it much later only when the mainstream press started occasionally doing a story. And even then, it was so easily ignored because not a single politician was talking about it. As we know, Reagan didn't mention the word AIDS for years. I did graduate in 83. I had heard of it by then. The first national news story was, I believe, the summer of 82, a year later. That's just how slow and little media attention it was getting. Yeah. So I get to New York in the spring of 83. You're 22. Straight out of undergrad, I got a job on Wall Street.

I'm working at the most homophobic industry within New York. And within short notice, I've become a U.S. government bond trader, which is that each firm has its own bond trading floor. And those trading floors were the most homophobic rooms on Wall Street. It's like a locker room environment. I mean, the F word was constant. and sexism and racism and it was just everywhere, really toxic and toxic masculinity, basically. And you're closeted at this point?

Of course. I went back in the closet. I had kind of come out my last year at Oberlin and I just went right back in for work in New York. But on the weekends, I would explore the gay bars and that's where I started having my first conversations about AIDS with other gay men was, at a bar. What was the feeling among people at that point? Were people scared? Were they confused? They were scared, but also this might surprise people to hear younger gay men who were kind of

clueless like I was, and most of us were clueless, who weren't connected to the Larry Kramer's of the world or weren't politically involved. We were just interested in the bars and cock. we were very our default posture was being dismissive of the risk my first conversation about AIDS with another gay man was at a bar and the guy said to me well I'm hearing it's only in older gay men who have slept with hundreds of guys so we don't we don't have to worry about it remember the numbers were still in the hundreds if by that summer it might have been between 1,000 and 2,000 nationally. Deaths or diagnoses?

Diagnoses, and almost half had died. So it already got been labeled as a major killer, you know, with a very high death rate. We didn't know then how it was transmitted. If it was a virus, we didn't know that yet. The virus had not been found yet. And there were all sorts of, the theory was that it was sexually transmitted. That's what the epidemiologists were. kind of making very strong guesses at.

And it wasn't clear cut yet. And so there was no message, not even from the new AIDS groups like GMHC, there was no strong messaging around condoms in 83. People just didn't even know that they were effective against this. Right. We didn't know exactly how it was transmitted. My understanding of the cultural history here is that during the 70s with the gay liberation movement, there was such a push to make gay sex an acceptable, perhaps.

you know, non-criminal thing to do consensually. And this idea that you should stop having gay sex to save yourselves was like felt like it was going against the grain of, of the movement for sexual liberation and gay liberation. I think the majority of gay men back then, you know, had gone through hell as in their youth. And now they had moved to these gay ghettos in American cities where they got some semblance of freedom and self-awareness. And they were, they were finally free and living it up. And all of a sudden you have on, you know, bare minimum of evidence that they should shut it all down. I thought that that was a pretty natural response. I don't chastise the gay community for being slow on the uptake, especially when the government was ignoring it.

If science had been as fast as it usually is with a new epidemic and politicians had reacted like they usually do during epidemics, we would have been given stronger, more informed warnings earlier on. And our behavior would have changed earlier. But don't blame us. Yeah. Because the government wasn't doing anything. The government wasn't telling you what was going on. No. There was no warnings at all.

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slash fruity. Now back to the show. So I was like plotting through life as a Wall Street bond trader by workday and a slightly little gay boy by weekend, but so, so closeted that I avoided relationships because I wouldn't know how to hide one. You needed a one-night stand. And I had plenty of those. Including a two-week fling every night with this gorgeous bartender at the duplex, which was a piano bar on Grove Street, which was a dive, a basement-level dive that was just fabulous.

So I met the bartender there, and he was so adorable. And we had this fling for two weeks. But he was a struggling actor, waiter, bartender, who was very, he was a socialist, basically, and just couldn't wrap his head around my career. We started, like, thinking, are we falling in love? Should we have a relationship? And he could not imagine entering into a relationship

with a seriously closeted Wall Street bond trader because he was very anti-capitalist. And so he pushed me away, which was fine. It was two weeks. no harm done. And it was too fabulous weeks of sex. But I think that's when it happened. And that was late summer of 83. So it was soon after I came to New York. I got some STDs from it and HIV often piggybacked on STDs. And those STDs kind of shut me down sexually for a while. It was two years later in the fall of 85 when AIDS finally became a national.

story four years into the crisis and it all happened because of Rock Hudson. Do you want to explain who Rock Hudson is because I feel like some people listening to this? I mean, I was going to say some people are listening to this are going to be too young to know, which sounds patronizing because I am also theoretically too young to know who Rock Hudson is. And the only reason I do is because of AIDS. Well, who's the actor today who is the heterosexual heartthrob doing movie after movie after movie? Jacob Allorty.

People love Jacob Alluredty. Okay. So he was the Jacob Allurty of his day. But even bigger because Hollywood stars back then were like huge. He was closeted gay man that was kind of out in Hollywood. I mean, he didn't hide it. It wasn't ruthlessly closeted. One of those like open secret.

Yeah, open secret things back when you could keep those open secrets in Hollywood. But he got AIDS and Public found out about it, I think in August or September of 85. A couple months later, he was dead. And the news just totally shook the country because they all thought he was straight. He was this famous, famous star. It was a double whammy story. And then it was on the cover of every magazine.

So we finally started paying attention, but not in a good way. It sent the country into a panic. It's like, can we get it at a restaurant? They're gay waiters. I know gay waiters. And then there were reports that by then it was known that it spread through hemophilia treatments.

and that kids with hemophilia were getting infected and some were dying. So are there kids in our schools that have AIDS and parent? And then there would be a rumor and straight parents would pull their kids out of school because they were scared that their kids would get it from another child. And then this TV movie comes out called an early frost. It was the first kind of Hollywood attempt to tackle AIDS for the, the mainstream public. And it became this huge national story before it even premiered because all the advertisers pulled out. Every advertiser pulled out. And that became this huge story.

It turned out that the whole country decided to watch. It had huge ratings. It's the Barbara Streisand effect. Yeah, exactly. And it was up against a major NFL game, from what I remember, and it still beat the other networks. I was actually, dating a guy at the time, trying to figure out how to hide our relationship. So he was living with me and we sit down to watch this together. Not so much because we're fascinated by HIV AIDS, to be honest, we thought the lead actor was hot as hell. His name is Aiden Quinn. So we sat down with the rest of the country to watch this thing. And he's a closeted gay man who's got a boyfriend, a hidden boyfriend.

It's like my life is like showing up on this screen. And he gets PCP pneumonia and he's coughing away from the early signs of getting sick. And he ends up having to tell his conservative parents that he has AIDS. And oh, yes, by the way, I'm gay. Halfway through, you know, a third of the way through, he's coughing badly. They cut to commercial. And I'm coughing badly. You are.

I am. Yeah. And boyfriend says, you say, unlike him and he points to Aiden Quinn on the screen. I said, okay, okay, I'll go to my doctor. And I thought it was a cold. And you know what, Matt? It was a cold. It was only a cold, but false start. False start. But it got me to my doctor. Yeah. Who was a gay doctor. The doctor I found after that relationship two years earlier with the bartender where I got these STDs, I wanted to see a gay doctor because I didn't want to any stigma unbeknownst to me he was on the front line of the crisis

you know he was losing patients every week had you lost any friends at that point no I was too young it was happening initially the guys in their 30s and up so I go in and by that point my doctor was so shell-shocked that he had this he learned these new techniques of when any of his gay patient showed up for any reason, he would run a CBC, a complete bug count because he knew that if it came back with a low white blood cell count, that that meant he probably had a new HIV infection. So I show up with my cold, fucking cold, that an AIDS film on TV got me to come into his office for. And he runs a CBC in 48 hours later.

I'm at my trading desk on Wall Street and the nurse in the office calls and says, we need you back here for more blood work. I'm at the trading desk at this point. I'm very aggressive. I'm like, well, what's wrong? You said, you have a low white blood cell account. And I said, well, what could that mean? He said, well, why don't you come in and the doctor will talk to you? And I said, no, no. I said, I'm an adult. Tell me what this might mean. And this was a gay male nurse that runs the office. And he said, well, frankly, when we see this, it's mostly in men who have HIV AIDS. In a split second, this ignorance I'd been living in, this dismissiveness, this youthful arrogance of not assessing risk well, which is a known problem with being young. it all vanished in a split second. And then the pieces came together.

It's like, oh, yeah, you're a gay guy, sexually active at ground zero for AIDS. You've been living in New York for two years. And you've been thinking you're not at risk for HIV? What a fucking idiot. And for some reason, I just knew right there that that's what it was. And of course, the further testing showed that it was that. And I had already, my immune system was half, of the minimum that a healthy person tests for.

I was handed a death sentence that month. Is that how it felt? Yes. It was a death sentence. Yeah. And did they give you a prognosis? No, but I quickly found one. I scoured the newsstands that day for anything that was written about HIV AIDS.

And of course, this was after Rock Hudson. The newsstand actually had stuff on AIDS at that time. And there was this cover story. and Scientific American that was about AIDS, everything that they knew about the science around it. It was incredibly thorough. And I sat down and I read every paragraph three times before moving on to the next paragraph. So it took like an hour to read this one article. And by the end of that hour, I knew what HIV stood for when it was discovered, that it was a retrovirus.

What is a retrovirus? It means it's based on RNA, not DNA, and the RNA. This particular RNA virus targets immune cells, a very specific immune cell called a T4 cell, CD4 cell, which is the conductor of the immune system. It's one of the most important immune cells. It's a white blood cell. You know, it binds to it, goes inside the CD4 cell. The RNA integrates itself into the DNA of the DNA of the cell.

CD4 cell and turns that CD4 cell into a factory for more HIV, which bursts out of the CD4 cell, killing the CD4 cell in the process, creating thousands of more HIV viruses that battle your immune system. And over time, you lose all your CD4 cells. Your immune system crashes. HIV doesn't kill you, but you die from other things because you don't have an immune system to fight them off. And these are called opportunistic infections, and there are various cancers as well. AIDS was considered by that point almost universally fatal. And at the end of that hour, I knew that I was going to die from this and that I probably would not live to see a cure. How old are you at this point? I'm 24.

Wow. Reading this article, I realized that this virus was now part of me. It was in me. It was in me. in my DNA, it was integrated. There was no way to untangle that. There was no technology. There was no science to untangle that. So I was fucked. I hung my hat on a little bit of hope.

There was some discussion about therapies that could slow down the replication cycle. And that's the hat I hung a little hope on. I said, okay, how do I get my hands on those therapies? When you initially learned about your diagnosis, did you tell people? I mean, what was your idea about, I mean, and with work? Well, I knew, yeah, I told the guy I was dating. I went home to him that day. He went through this process with me that day.

Yeah. And I knew I needed a support network. I knew it was going to come out. I was going to get sick. So better tell some people now to help me emotionally. And I was going to be heading home less than two weeks later for Thanksgiving vacation. And I made the very mature choice. frankly i mean a brave choice to go home and tell everyone one at a time i made this list in my head

of my parents were divorced at the time and and uh but we did you know like separate thanksgivings i would see them both and i had two older brothers and younger sister so i had five people to tell and i listed them i ranked them who would be the easiest and who i thought would be the hardest so on like a homophobia scale because i had to tell them i had to do what what i called then to myself, an early frost double whammy. I had to give them that. I had to do them, you were gay and that you had to. Yeah, I had to do what Aiden Quidd did. The early frost double whammy. And early, yeah, the early frost double whammy. So I started with my oldest brother who was the artist, told him on Wednesday night before Thanksgiving. Wednesday morning, I went to my sister,

younger sister, then my other brother, Jess. And then I went over to where my dad was living and told him, these are very hard conversations. And I just kind of came out with it. Yeah. And I was very lucky because most of my peers, those conversations could lead to being thrown out of the house. I think one of the things I credit for them embracing me and being my first support group was that we were not raised by any of the mainstream religions. Religion was the enemy back then. It was one of the main reasons Reagan never mentioned AIDS because he was elected. His base was what was called the moral majority. Yeah.

Which is the same base that Donald gets Donald Trump elected today. Immediately at the beginning was there that rhetoric and that cultural understanding of like, you know, like the moralism with HIV and AIDS. Like, oh, look, this is God's punishment for sin. Like, was that a prevailing thought from the beginning? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, right away.

I may not love the centers. Don't say that I can go that far, but I sympathize with anybody who has a terminal disease, however he or she gets it. But there is not one case of AIDS on record in this country, or as far as I know anywhere else, that did not have its origin in sodomy. The backlash against gays was going through the roof. Like they were doing gay liberation throughout the 70s, and this is the punishment. It's all gone too far. Right. So you had the whole moral majority,

and the religious leaders were saying, this is God's punishment. And you had an entire political party laughing about it and saying, let them die. It was just horrific. But my family rallied behind me and I had that support. And then I put myself on a learning curve trying to find out what was going on politically, what was going on scientifically, what was going on in the gay world,

which I was the gay political world, which I was completely clueless about. You went from total kind of living in the blissfulness of total ignorance to let me learn everything about every facet of this possible because I have no other choice. Right. I need to buy myself time. Did you feel like knowledge was the only thing that could have saved your life? Yes. Well, I had to start with that.

And then the more I learned, it got actually scarier because then I learned how much it was being ignored. I learned how really fucked we all were. And how the homophobia was just getting worse and worse and worse. Things were getting worse, not better. And not much science was happening because Congress, the president and Congress weren't putting much towards it at all. And that just made me angrier. And I tried to figure out, okay, how are we going to change this? How are we going to change the trajectory so that things start becoming more promising,

not worse and worse and worse? Right. Because something, I mean, flashed forward of sorts, but drugs that were really life-saving didn't end up becoming available until 1996. And when you look at the death rate every year between 1981 and 1996, it got worse every single year until drugs became more available, like exponentially worse. Right. When did you first hear about ACTAP?

It's first demonstration, which was outside my front door at work. Actually, I should say, what is ACT UP? ActUp is the AIDS Coalition to Unleashed Power. It's an acronym. It's one of the most significant movements in American history and considered one of the most successful. You have to remember that it happened really late in the crisis. Right. So cases start really showing up and being reported on in 1981. Actup is formed in 87. Exactly. Six years. Peter, I did my history. I did my research before you showed up. I couldn't be an idiot in front of Peter Staley.

March of 87. How'd you hear about it? So it was a year and a half after my diagnosis. I had already met some AIDS activists in New York. I had finally met other people with HIV. I went to a support group in the summer of 86. Finally, I was getting some luck. A guy named Griffin Gold was in the room, who was one of the founders of the people with AIDS self-empowerment movement and the people with AIDS coalition in New York. He introduced me to Michael Callum. So I was meeting some of the greats of the early AIDS activism, but I was also learning that they were not having a lot of success.

They were screaming into the wind, as it were. And then March of 87 comes around. I'm heading to my job on Wall Street and I get handed a flyer at 7.30 in the morning. By some gay guy. By some gay, random gay guy. It's really hot. And I read this thing and it's like AIDS. It's an AIDS flyer. And they're having a demonstration that morning. And I go up to the trading floor.

Everybody else has been handed a flyer too. And there's a conversation about AIDS happening at my work. And my mentor, the lead bond trader, he shuts down. the god i still remember there's he shuts down the conversation he's like he's sick of it and he says well if you ask me they all deserve to die because they took it up the butt and even the other straight people on the trading floor were like whoa okay even they were like a little shocked by the cruelty of this display of homophobia that we pretty much i mean we heard the F word every day. Yeah. And nobody knows about your status or even that you're gay. No. So, you know, I'm like

stew about it for the rest of the day. Don't see the demonstration because I'm working, but then I get home, turn on the national news and there's the demo. And it looks powerful and exciting. And they actually combine it with some footage of the commissioner of the FDA. There's a press conference in response saying, you know, we're going to tweak some regs, regulations, and try to speed up stuff. AZT had just come out. AZT had just come out. Can you explain what AZT was and notably what it wasn't? AZT was the first drug to be approved to fight HIV AIDS. It came out the same month, Act Up was born. It blocked one of the processes, one of the many processes that HIV goes through the HIV life cycle.

And it does that effectively. The problem is that, as we've seen with COVID and most viruses, if you target something that it does, it tries to keep mutating, and one of those mutations is able to get around that little action that the drug is doing to block it. Viral mutation creates what's called resistance to the drug. Initially, the drug will dramatically lower your viral load, and then the versions that can get around it take over and burst and your viral loads sores again.

So it wasn't all that effective? It was effective for on average, about six months. So you would have some people who are like hospitalized who all of a sudden within a week were looking alive again and they could actually end up going home for a time. but then three months later, six months later, they were back in the hospital and then they'd die. It ended up feeling like a major disappointment, plus the fact that they kind of, the initial dose that they selected for people with HIV, they wanted to really hit it hard as hard as they could, but it ended up being more than was needed, and it turned in, and it was pretty toxic at the levels that they initially gave it to us. It created anemia.

There was nausea and stuff like that. It was some major GI effects. You combine that with the fact that people would end up dying anyway six months later and then feel shitty during those months from the drug. It got a bad reputation pretty quickly. So, okay, you see the first act up demonstration on TV. I knew the equation, as we described before, things were getting worse and worse and worse.

Something desperate had to be done to shake up that trajectory. And this seemed like a possibility. To be clear, the goal of ACT UP was to put pressure on these institutions that purported to serve and protect the health of the American people that weren't if you were the wrong type of American person. It was to grab the country by the throat, both the population and the politicians, all the way up to the president and say, do something about this. You were letting thousands of Americans die because of your hatred. And in very short order, we started accomplishing that. You decided to join. You saw it on TV.

I went to the very next meeting. And the meetings were Monday nights at the Lesbian Gay Community Center. In West Village. In the West Village, West 13th Street. Uh-huh. I know the one. Yeah, the one you see now is like remodeled. Yeah.

It's nice. It was a dump back then. Uh-huh. But it was our dump. Yeah, it was. We loved it. And there was no air conditioning. God.

But I, you know, that first meeting I went into, Matt, was already over 100 people there. It was multi-generational. I had lots of gay men all ages. Were they also getting sick? Some were sick. A lot weren't. A lot were they had lost friends or lovers. And a lot of, a lot of lesbians.

I was really surprised. I mean, you know, I was a closet of gay guy. I had very little contact with lesbians up until that point. There were lots of them. And they were, they seemed like they were in charge. They knew, they knew what they were talking about. As it turns out, they had a lot more movement experience than a lot of the gay guys. They had been fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 70s.

Right, within the feminist movement. Exactly. And they brought all those skills. and experience so that we didn't have to relearn that we could hit the ground running with their knowledge and their, you know, cahunas. I mean, I thought the lesbians had the biggest balls in the room at that point. I love that historical detail because it's interesting. I mean, you think about how the history of misogyny within gay male spaces and the fact that AIDS was largely affecting gay men and much fewer lesbians, I don't know. You think.

about the cultural history and if like this was tit for tat then they didn't really have to help I know they didn't I was always kind of amazing to me and I find it still to this day it gives me goosebumps they didn't have to show up it would and that's what was so I that first meeting just just floored me it was so beautiful there was so many beautiful things happening like that but there also was this sense right away that this was really real, there was a huge confidence that we were going to make history of some kind. We may fall flat in our face, but we had already made national news with our first demonstration, and we weren't going to let that go.

And we had the driving experience to keep that going and to do something with it. And you could see it in the older people's eyes. I remember there were some Stonewall veterans there, and they hadn't seen anything like this. since the early 70s, which had a burst of activism after Stonewall. But those movements, CAA, et cetera, they fizzled out within a few years from infighting. And there hadn't been a lot of, you know, in-your-face politics, especially on a national level, all through the late 70s or early 80s. This was something new and real.

And they were ready. They've been waiting. And it gave me so much hope. And so you just hit the ground running. Yeah. And you quit your job. Not right away. I did this crazy year where I was a closeted bond trader by day and a radical AIDS activist by night.

And I, yeah, it was a crazy, stupid, stupid, stupid. I should have quit my job right away. I made this decision early on that I was going to try to hold on to things in my life that I had until I had to give them up. It was a way of not letting the virus knock me off course. So I was like, what can I do with Act Up that won't out me at work? I became head of fundraising. I could raise money for the group and do that very, you know, behind the scene. Discreetly.

Discretely. I even went to a couple demonstrations, but I would be very aware of where all the cameras were. And I would care, I would get like the biggest placard. Uh-huh. And I would just make sure the placard was between my face and the camera. It was like a big like, fuck you, Ronald Reagan. But you couldn't see me. So I went to a couple demos and I met Larry Kramer that summer.

Who found it, Act Up. Who found it, Act Up. And he was so sweet to me. I started dating this guy. One of the wonderful things that happened to me is I had been totally shut down sexually. You know, I didn't touch. I thought my sex life was over because of HIV. And I joined this movement.

where one of the beautiful things we did was the country thought gay men should, they were okay with us dying from this, but they were scared to death of it. And they definitely thought that any gay men who had this should not be a waiter at a restaurant and should definitely not have sex with anybody. They had to like disappear somehow. And there was talk of quarantine, active talk of quarantine. Act up decided to do a full frontal against that. and say, well, actually, the science says, and even the CDC says, condoms work.

And we have, our community has developed these, this new way of having sex, safe sex, we call it. And it works. It's completely protective. And a lot of gay men weren't sure of that. But the movement, we embraced that science and embraced it in our lives. It became politically incorrect for a gay man enact up to refuse, to push away an HIV-positive gay man and say, I'm not going to have sex with you. I can't. I'm too scared of you.

You wouldn't last enact up if you got a reputation doing that. So the reverse became true. All of a sudden, I became a hot-eyed. You could be a slut again. I could be a slut again. It was so great. And I mean, we've seen those pictures of you. If you, the listener, are watching the video version of this on YouTube,

we'll obviously have some of your studly 1980s Peter Saley pinups on screen. I can imagine you were a hot ticket. And it was the most sex-positive movement in history. We had lots of sex within the movement. We not only preached it, we practiced it. And even, you know, God, it got so crazy that gay men were sleeping with lesbians. Oh, why not? Why not?

It's amazing. Just one more checkmark on your belt, right? A unique one. Eventually you quit your job. Yeah, a year later, I kind of, the decision was made for me by my CD4 count. I had been seeing a shrink, a lesbian. she was doing some gentle nudging. After a few months of seeing me, she said,

you know, Peter, when we talk, the only time I see you light up is when you talk about act up. And I was still holding on, you know, to these old parts of my life. But I said, well, if I get into the danger zone on my CD4 count, there was an actual number on that.

200 CD4s or less. Meaning your immune system is so low. So low. Once you go below 2. 200, that's when most of the opportunistic infections start showing up. 200 is, for me, when a clock would start. Because when you hit 200 CD4 cells untreated, you generally were dead within two years. And I told my shrink, I said, I will leave my job if that happens.

And it happened a year into act up, March of 88. Day after I got CD4 count of 178 or whatever it was, I walked. into my boss's office before trading started and told him everything and said, I'm going on disability. This is my last day here. I'm going to walk out right now and just tell everybody I've got a family emergency or something. And you can tell them at the full staff meeting before the market opens tomorrow. You can tell them everything. That you had AIDS. Yeah. And that I'm gay or whatever. And they did. He did. I have some photos here of various act up. actions that I was hoping I could show you and you could put them into context.

Sounds fun. Show and tell. Show and tell, except I'm showing you things about your life and you're telling. Okay. So if you're listening to the audio-only version of this, I'll describe the photo. So in this photo, we are inside a church. There are some concerned-looking churchgoers. Someone's holding an act-up pamphlet.

people are sitting at the pews looking pretty, pretty dismayed and uneasy. So what's going on here? Act up in another group called Wham, W-H-A-M, announced a gigantic confrontation against the Catholic Church in general. We use St. Patrick's Cathedral as our target. Which is a big, famous church in Midtown, Manhattan. Yeah, it's the center of Catholicism here in New York, and Cardinal O'Connor was the guy in charge at that point. He was going to be preaching that that morning. And he, along with the

Pope, had made it very clear that condoms shouldn't be used. They were anti-condem. Why? Because it blocks God's seed. That's hot. It was nonsensical. And it was leading, especially in other countries, a highly count. Catholic countries in South America and Africa, et cetera, it was causing mass death because it was leading to far more HIV infections than otherwise would occur. So we decided to attack the church for that position and we did it inside. I was one of the 110 people that got arrested for inside the church for laying down. You guys did this a lot where you would go to places and lay on the ground as if to be dead.

Right. Dianns, they're called. Yeah. And what was the purpose of that? To really be in your face visually with a picture showing that we were a movement that was meant to confront Americans with the fact that their views and their policies were causing deaths, mass death. What were the people, what were the churchgoers reactions like when you were there staging your die-in? Well, it was very pre-announced. They all knew that something was going to happen inside. They didn't know exactly what. And even we didn't know exactly what was going to happen inside.

We had a lot of ex-Catholics, you know, people who were raised Catholic who were traumatized by that church as young queer people. Some of them had to work out that trauma that day. And they didn't stick to the agreed upon game plan of doing a silent die-in. Oh, it was meant to be silent. It was meant to be silent. I've seen videos from that day and it's not silent. It's not silent.

There are people screaming. A couple people decided to change, change the game plan. And it created a real debate in the movement because the press we got was just absolutely. We normally got very sympathetic press for the first few years of our movement. This was different. We got raked over the coals for days in the national press. Every politician, Democrat or Republican, condemned us because of our tactic. inside the cathedral.

Sorry, all the Catholics out there. I personally felt we screwed up that day. I consider myself my forte is movement strategy and tactician. And my view is that when the tactic becomes the story rather than the issue, then you've shot yourself in the foot. It brings to mind the conversation around

the climate activists throwing soup at the paintings and museums. And that brought up a lot of the same discourse about like, is the story, what we're protesting, for is the story how we did it. I mean, I don't know that there's a right answer to that. Yeah, it's a hard one.

It split us right away the week after half the group thought we had gone too far and half thought it was it was our best day. I want to give a quick shout out to Hello Fresh for being kind enough to sponsor the show. I have to be honest. At this point in my life, I have very few hours in the day that I am not spending on my laptop. And during those hours, I am asleep. So I need resources and tools and services that make meal prep as simple and stress-free and, frankly, quick as possible. With HelloFresh, you get farm-fresh and pre-portioned ingredients for seasonal recipes delivered right to your door.

HelloFresh has a huge online menu where you could just pick what you're interested in and your delivery dates, and HelloFresh will do all of the meal planning and the shopping for you. So all you have to do is open up your weekly box of pre-portion ingredients and step-by-step recipes and get cooking. If you're like me, I really encourage you to take a look at what they have to offer and see if it might be for you too. Right now, HelloFresh is offering listeners of a bit fruity a free breakfast item in every single box you order forever, literally forever.

So if that sounds good to you, all you have to do is go to hellofresh.com slash fruityfree and use code fruity free for free breakfast for life. That's one free breakfast item per box for as long as you have a subscription at hellofresh.com slash fruity free with code fruity free. Now back to the show. Speaking of going to extremes, our next image. So this, wow, what are we looking at? It's a house and covering the house is a giant yellow inflatable condom.

I want you to tell me about this because I know that you were there. I was there. I designed this action. On the condom, it says, A condom to stop unsafe politics. Helms is deadlier than a virus. Who is Jesse Helms, first of all? Jesse Helms was, he is like today's Ted Cruz or

DeSantis. Okay. He's like DeSantis. Far right. Homophobic. Far right. The worst of homophobes. And he was a powerful U.S. senator from North Carolina.

He actually harmed us badly. He would, at the last minute, pull out an amendment to some bill that was about to get passed in the Senate that would be an attack against gay people and people with HIV AIDS. The reason that the U.S. started banning people with HIV from traveling to the U.S. or immigrating to the U.S. was because of a Helms amendment. And that banning of people with HIV from traveling here got replicated. around the world after Helms did that here. Every other country did it too. So we couldn't trap. You know, it was just horrible.

He banned the CDC from spent giving any grants to any aid service organization that mentioned homosexuality, which gutted our ability to get out safe sex messaging, at least with government funding. So we had to do it all with private funding. Did he want you all to die? Of course. On the question of morality and personal conduct. People don't have to risk getting AIDS if they don't engage in sodomy or if they don't have

activities with people who are infected with AIDS already. He was the worst of the worst. And here it was 1991, four years into the movement. He was enemy number one. And I'm, you know, doing my second summer on Fire Island. I'm sitting there by the pool and I'm thinking about this. And I see him in the news doing something. And I'm like, you know, we all hate him.

He's like enemy number one. But we've never like targeted him person. We've never gotten in his face, taking it right to his doorstep, you know, made him pay some kind of price for his hatred. So what can we do to do that? I would fall asleep thinking about it. it. And it's like, I realized it wouldn't be enough just to scream at him and make him squirm. I wanted to reduce his power in a way. And the only way I could think of to do that would be to

kind of isolate his efforts on HIV AIDS amongst his peers. In other words, get the other senators left or right in Washington to say, you know, Helms really is over the top on HAAs. Maybe we shouldn't be voting for these amendments. How do you get a senator, a fellow senator, to start viewing Helms skeptically on HAB AIDS? The only way I thought that might work is something that really highlighted his hatred, but did it in a humorous way so that the joke would be on him. I now call this, even though John Stewart didn't exist back then, I call it John Stewart-style activism. Because John Stewart became gigantic during the Obama administration ripping into Republicans with humor.

And he really nicked and dinged and sliced away little by little at their power and effectiveness by portraying them as clowns. And that was the goal of putting a condom on Jesse Helms' house. I mean, how did it? So, yeah, you, all of this is to say you literally got an enormous, I mean, how tall was that? How did, so you got an enormous inflatable condom? Yeah. What were even the logistics? How did you get, how did that happen?

The first thing I did is I reached out to a friend who worked at Greenpeace, one of Greenpeace's brilliant strategists, Twilly Cannon, who's sadly no longer with us, but Twilly had done lots of civil disobedience strategizing for Greenpeace for years. And after I had led an action that shut down the New York Stock Exchange in 1989, he reached out to me and he said, if you ever need any help on tactics and pulling off really hard-to-do concepts, give me a call. So I call them up and I said, Twilly, I got the address. I found Helms' home address outside D.C. I want to put a condom over his house while he's away on August recess while the house is empty. And, you know, Twilly was probably the only person I could call in the whole country who would answer me, when can you get down here

so we can scope out the house? You know, he was like, yeah, I'm game. So, like, within a week, I drove down there, We drove past the house slowly and then we parked and we walked up and down the street very casually. It was a very sleepy suburban street. And I managed to snap a picture of the house when we were on the other side of the street on the way back to the car. And I said, don't we have to like measure a few things? And Twilly said, no, no, no, no, the picture is all I need. So we can take the picture and take a ruler and do a little math and get all the measurements of the rest of the the house based on the height of the door in the picture. Right, because I mean, I'm assuming the

condom over the house was custom made. I don't think it was custom made. Condoms typically don't. I mean, God bless the person, you know, who buys that size condom for regular use. See, you know the blow-up things like the blow-up gorilla in front of the use car lot. Yeah. Yeah. There are companies that make the, those are custom. There are companies that make these custom inflatables. It turns out almost all of them, at least back then, we're in and around San Diego, California. I don't, I have, no idea why. So I start contacting them and I lie to them and I say, I'm on the board of an AIDS organization on Long Island and we're having a big benefit at our board president's house. We want to, you know, make news. And so we're going to put, we're going to cover the house

with a condom for the benefit. And they're like, oh, that's, that's, that's hysterical. That's great. And I said, but the benefits like, next month. I need this fast. So they said, well, fax us the measurements. Twilly and I designed the sketch of the whole thing. And we got wildly different bids. And it ranged from 15,000 was the first one that came in. And we didn't have that kind of money. And then the lowest bid came in with $3,500. And I didn't even have that kind of money. And so I start scrambling to try to find out where I can get the $3,500. And little-known secret after having a fight with my boyfriend at the time. He thought I was going to end up in jail forever for targeting the U.S. Senator. We had this big argument in a fire alley. Storms off.

God love the man. He was a celebrity journalist for vanity fair. And he was friends with David Geffen, who had a new house on the beach. David Geffen, the record. The record guy. The record label guy. He's now out. We have this big argument and Kevin Storms off. It goes to David Gaffin's house to cry on Giffin's shoulder and thinking that Giffin's going to take his side and like, oh, that crazy Peter. But Giffin doesn't. Giffin says, Kevin, you got to support him. He knows what he's doing.

This is what Peter does. And he said, let's go, let's go find him. They walked back down the beach. And by that time, I'm laying on the beach by myself. David Gaffin walks up and he says, here, he puts out his hand. He says, here is a big lot of cash. He just hands you to cash and he's like, go buy your big condo. And he said, make me one promise.

Nobody ever knows where you got this money. Oh, while you're breaking his promise. No. I think he said as long as Helms was alive. Oh, well, he's dead. He's dead now. Spoiler, Jesse Helms is dead. So I included it in the book.

But yeah, David Geffen paid for the condom. Good for David Geffam. You know, we have to have billionaires do some good things for society. And within a few months, there are senators criticizing Helms as he bitches about us putting a condom on his own. So it was effective in more ways than just it being tiny. It did exactly what I hoped it would. And there were no further Helms amendments. Which just goes to show, like sometimes if you really don't like someone and they're really politically powerful and, you know, hurting you, you have to put a condom on their house. You might have to. So in this photo,

there are there's a crowd of people kind of pushed up against the fence in front of the front lawn of the white house and you see a couple of men throwing ashes over the fence onto the lawn and this was a big act up protest it was it was a few years into act up it was i believe 91 or 92 it is one of the most powerful demonstrations in the history of demos people were throwing ashes of their loved ones onto the White House lawn. Right. And the police were trying to stop it. It was very dangerous. There were police horses. It was kind of chaotic. As the ashes started flying, those who were throwing the ashes, you know, were having some serious, cathartic, emotional experiences. And there was tears and

screams. And it was, it's a very emotional wallop. That demo was, was, was, largely ignored at the time. And that's because five years in, we'd been doing demonstrations almost every month that made national news. And we had become yesterday's news. We couldn't keep the nation's attention and the press's attention year after year after year. Even as we got more extreme and more creative with our actions, the country began to move on. It was very difficult period in AIDS activism. All right. Next one. So this photo, you are being bent over, but not in the way that, you know, I imagine you

would have preferred. You're being bent over what looks like the back of a cop car being handcuffed by... Well, none. All of those things are ways I would prefer. Fair enough. You're being bent. But it's being done by. older straight guys. Right, right. It's no fun. You're being bent over the back of a cop car

handcuffed by these, by these two cops. One of them is kind of cute. It's hard to tell. You're screaming, you're wearing your, it looks like your silence equals death. Yeah. Shirt. Do you remember when this was? Yeah, I think it was my, I got arrested 10 times in Act Up. Wow. I think it was like arrest number six or something like that. And what would happen when you got arrested at these protests. Well, I, you know, I argue that Actup got off easy as a civil disobedience movement, mostly because the outside world, including the cops and the legal system, thought that we were all HIV positive and were all dying of AIDS.

And therefore, our anger made sense to them. It's like, these people are desperate. So I get, I get why they're angry. They still are disgusting to me, but I understand their anger. And they were also afraid of getting HIV from us. So they didn't, you know, there was no five-minute beatdowns. They didn't want you to bleed. They didn't want us to bleed.

And the judges in the legal system, putting somebody is about to die in prison, was a step too far even for them. I mean, there were some rough moments. We had some members who were hurt during demonstrations, including one or two that have long-term harm. But if you compare it to like Black Lives Matter, it's no comparison. We got handed pretty easily. So this was outside of yet another pharmaceutical company that we were doing a demonstration from and I got arrested that day. We all were generally released within hours.

And then you'd have to come back. We had pro bono lawyers. They maneuvered with the judges for some sort of slap on the wrist. It generally meant you couldn't get arrested again for six months, and then you wouldn't have a record. Did you, though, because at this point, you still are anticipating death, right? Right. Was being arrested something that mattered to people at that point?

Not to me. That's one of the things that really made it easy for our movement. Because people felt like they had so little to lose. Exactly. I had no problem recruiting for some extreme actions. One of the first actions I recruited for was invading the headquarters of Burroughs Welcome in North Carolina, very scary location, scary cops, et cetera, scary legal system. And we were going to go in and cause property damage.

We were going to seal ourselves inside an office with drills and metal plates. And we were going to try to break the glass of the office so that we could hand, a banner. So we intended to cause significant property damage. And the lawyers said, if they throw the book at you, it's 10 years maximum. And everyone I asked said, no problem. Because it was like, what the hell? What the hell? In 1988, you went on CNN Crossfire, which was like a debate style show, and you were sat across the table from Pat Buchanan. You've got the pink triangle on your, on your shirt, That's correct. I gather that means you're homosexual.

Yes, it is. Do you know how you, do you know how you caught the disease, but more important than that, if you're 27 years old, you say you've got five years to live. Looking in the camera, what would you tell some kids, say you had a younger brother of 21 years old who also might have homosexual tendencies, or say he's 17 or something like that? What would you tell him if you wanted him to live a long life? I would tell him to use a condom.

Would you tell him not to engage in homosexuals, activity? Absolutely not. Why not? I believe that I believe in safe sex. I'm a sex positive individual. I still have sex myself. Mr. Staley, I saw a study out in California, they tested the condoms, 40% breakage rate in one kind of condom. Isn't that insanity? No, basically that's because of lack of education. There are similar studies that show that if people are properly educated in how to use a condom, and also to use a lubricant, by the way, that has a... What do you mean, this is Russian roulette? It is not Russian roulette.

It is Russian roulette to not give people this information when human nature dictates that they're going to go out there and they're going to have sex anyways. We're sexual beings and it's just going to happen. Either you're going to provide them the information. Why? Let me ask you this. Why? Now, we know a lot of young men your age I grew up with. They went in the seminary and they didn't have sex.

They met sex for whole lives. They have to do the seminar. I think that's probably not true. I would think that there was. Celibacy is impossible? It's just not going to work. People aren't going to do it, and lots of people are going to die. Now, would you rather have a lot of people cheating on their celibacy with thousands of people dying,

or would you rather save those lives and let them have sex? I think that, well, I don't think we've got time to go into that. What was it like, like being invited to these places and these stages and having to argue with these people who had no regard for human life? for your life, for anyone's life, you're watching people die around you and they're just saying, well, you shouldn't have had sex. Like, what, how did you not lose your mind talking to these people? Well, I mean, it was a prevalent view.

So it was job number one to push back against it. We couldn't ignore that elephant in the room because it was, he, he wasn't a sole voice. It was the thing that we had to defeat. And if we didn't have our. our rhetoric down for how to push back against that in a way that at least a plurality of Americans would kind of understand at least, then we were going to lose. I think sometimes when people talk about the AIDS crisis or those early years of the AIDS crisis as this historical event, it's like the timeline gets collapsed in a way.

But, you know, like I said earlier, 1981 is when. the public starts largely becoming aware that something is happening. And it's not until 1996 that the life-saving drugs become available. And so that's 15 years. I mean, it was a long time. I don't have to tell you that. And year over year, the amount of deaths are going up exponentially. For you living through that, and I mean getting increasingly sick yourself,

how did you keep the fight going? What was it like to have to continue fighting to be seen and fighting for? treatment and while so many people are dying around you? Well, it was a roller coaster, emotional roller coaster. And I think for those of us who survived, there are two things we can feel at the same time. It's encompassed this surreal existence that we went through. It was the most painful period of our lives that most of us have some PTSD around. But it was also the most beautiful and alive periods of our life.

Just extraordinary to see the queer movement at its best and strongest. The only way we could get through it was to not be 100% serious, angry activists every hour of the day year after year. As I wrote in my memoir, show me an activist who can no longer feel joy and I will show you a useless activist. We up the volume on that. So up the volume on everything. We were angry and we were doing these incredible actions and winning great victories, but then turning around a month later and the death count would be even higher. So you were losing the war while you were winning these political victories. And every weekend, we would have to Sunday night or Wednesday night,

you'd be going to a memorial. How many funerals do you think you went to? I have a low count because I avoided them. I'm ashamed of it. Because it was too hard. It was a self-protective mechanism. I didn't want to confront what was my very likely future. I avoided hospitals.

I avoided memorials. Shamefully, I did a lot of self-protection by trying to avoid the death and dying. My whole life became act up. It was church. You know, all my boyfriends were active members, my sex life, every moment. So on the weekends, we'd let loose. And the dance clubs in New York were, they were at their peak. Younger boys think you got fun nights in Brooklyn these days.

But it was nothing compared to what we were doing in the late 80s and lower Manhattan. Ecstasy had just come out. It wasn't called Molly back then. The new drug was ecstasy. And Madonna was the new pop star. I've heard of her. I've heard of her. And so all these beautiful things aligned.

And we just had these beautiful communal experiences, extremes. We were burning this candle at both ends in the worst times and the best times of our life at the same time. But that's how, if we didn't have that other end of the candle burning, we would have burned out really fast. Yeah. But there's also this, there's this reality of, you know, as things got really depressing in 92 and 93 and 94, when we had scored so many individual victories, but the top line number was just getting worse and worse and worse. Of deaths. That, what's the alternative? You're going to just close up shop and wait to die?

that it was it was either just keep on keeping doing as if you might win and you might get to a moment where the deaths decline or you close up shop and the alternative is worse so you just kept kept at it and you plow through the pessimism and ultimately activism if done really well is about plowing through pessimism and ultimately you did some of us right in 1996 uh anti-refer retroviral therapy becomes available, which is the drug that we know now to be life-saving and life-preserving your HIV positive. You had been living with HIV for about a decade at that point, right? What was it like taking that drug? And I imagine at this point you had taken so many drugs experimentally on the market, off the market. What was it like among you and your peers realizing that it was working. We had a hard time believing it. I mean, we had had so many letdowns in the 90s, early 90s. You said in interviews from the 90s that you weren't expecting to outlive. I've been saying that for years. And drugs kept coming out and we were combining them and that was buying me a little time.

That kept resetting my two-year clock. I was one of the lucky ones that made it to 96. and then all of us at the same time. I mean, the science was clear, and we had really adopted science as our religion by that point. We knew logically our brains were like we've been saved, but emotionally we just couldn't believe it. It's just been too stung. You'd spent so long preparing for death.

Yeah, and there was, we had had too many, we'd been disappointed too often. We all went on the drugs that were in that study that showed this remarkable success. And within months, all of us went undetectable, one after another. Which means that the viral load of HIV in your body is so low that it doesn't get picked up by tests. Exactly. It doesn't mean you're cured. You still have the virus. But the viral load test, it needs a certain level before it starts to be able to count them. And when you're undetectable, it's impossible to transfer.

transmit via sex. Yeah. Even if you got a very low viral, low detectable viral load, it's actually impossible to transmit. You need a... Which people still need to learn. And which people still need to learn. We all went on to attack and it's like, whoa. And then you go from this surreal existence to something completely different.

You're confronted with the fact that you have a future you didn't think you ever have. your movement begins to collapse because it scored such a huge success. Your community turns its back on HIV AIDS as an issue because it's been 100% focused on it for 15 years and it's exhausted and it's mentally damaged by what it's gone through. That very natural response is, please, can we not think about this for a while? Can we move on to something else? And they moved on very quickly to gay marriage, gays in the military, et cetera, with this new found power that AIDS activism gave it,

this realization that as an organized people, we could win victories on a national stage. They started using that for issues around gay rights. But to us, it felt like not only was that a mental health break that was necessary, It also felt like the community turning its back on us because we had been the center of attention. Now we were the uncomfortable people in the room. A lot of people who survived in the way that you had, who lived through those early years and then made it to 1996, have described a sort of survivor's guilt and a kind of PTSD as if having come home from a war that your peers didn't survive.

Absolutely. I've often analogized with the Vietnam War where, you know, those who came home in the 70s, the country didn't want to think about it anymore because it had been such a painful experience. So those who did survive and came home had no victory parades. They were the uncomfortable people in the room that would kind of force you to think about it again. So you were almost avoided. combining that with the movement kind of collapsing and like, well, what do you do now that you have a future? You've got to return to the real world.

I had been on disability. A lot of us had. Or we had been doing odd jobs and giving all our free time to a movement. What next? How do we survive? What kind of career do we replace that with? A lot of people like the younger ones like Spencer Cox had gigantic. holes in their resume.

They had a hard time getting a real job. Because at this point, people are in their 30s, 40s, having never really worked because this all started when they were in college. A lot of people that had advanced HIV,

what we called back then, full-blown AIDS, they bought the end was so near that they had blown through credit card limits and they were in a real financial mess. And they had to return to the, they had to try to find a career and it was very difficult adjustments. You'd think,

you know, you'd be like, oh, yay, I'm going to live forever. But this is the other stuff that was coming on our plate and it was not easy. It was a spectrum of a fallout and who landed on their feet and who didn't. And a lot of people didn't land on their feet. And I didn't land on my feet easily. I tried to, I did, you know, I did fulfill a dream of being an entrepreneur and, and launching a business on my own. I stuck with AIDS. I created a website for people with HIV that explained the complexity of HIV treatment and became a community with bulletin boards, etc. for those living with HIV. But at the same time, I was trying to do that. I escaped, you know, the part of the queer community, you know, the only

part where I, this is sad to say, the only part of the community I could find at that point where I felt wanted, frankly, as I was turning 40, was the Crystal Meth Underground. And you tried that? I did, and I got addicted right away. Yeah. Fortunately, I'm such a control freak that I knew I got addicted right away. Yeah. A lot of guys don't admit it to themselves for sometimes years,

and those are the ones that end up with some really serious harm. I realized it right away and started working on it pretty soon after I got addicted. But there was this year where I was loving it and trying to control it at the same time. So I was seeking help from a shrink, and I said, I'm not here for you to help me stop using meth. I'm here for you to help me control my meth use so that I only do it occasionally. And he was like, well, I've been dealing with lots of gay men. He was gay.

I've known lots of gay men in your situation. I have yet to find one who's done that, but I am willing to try with you. So he kept, he didn't push me away. He knew I would probably eventually change. goals. Yeah, I mean, Crystal meth is one of those things that it's hard to have a healthy relationship with. To be with a shrink. Right.

To try to eventually build some sort of working long-term relationship with it. That's a hard trick. If anybody could have done it, I mean, a control freak like me, you think could, but nope. Yeah. Nope. It spirals at some point. But you made it through. I did make it through.

I had to go completely sober for a while. And I did that with the help of a segment of the queer community I didn't know, which was those who were trying to turn their lives around after being brought to their knees by addiction. And that was an incredibly, it was the first time I felt like I met another group of queer people who were saving each other's lives. in community with love since Act Up. And that was through these 12-step meetings. And it changed me in a fundamental way. Almost more than Act Up had changed me, frankly.

I had been pretty much the same stubborn, very arrogant, 13-year-old my whole life, one who didn't listen well to others, who had trouble with empathy. That can give you a certain protectiveness. certainly helped my activism in some ways, but they weren't the essential core of my activism at all. If anything, they probably dinged to me. Through this community of men that were there for each other day after day to lift each other up from the worst moments of their lives, I learned to listen. I learned just true love and empathy for each other. And I've been on a mission ever since to stay tapped into that and add that to my activism.

make it a central focus of how I relate to people in general and conduct my life. And I fundamentally changed by recovering from a crystal meth addiction. I do feel like such a lost part of the story of the AIDS crisis is, I mean, we talk about the lost generation, which I think that rhetoric serves its purpose to convey the magnitude of what happened. But the reality, not everyone in the generation was lost and what about the people who survived? What about people like you and this expectation that people go through the most unimaginably traumatic 15 years and then are expected to reintegrate into society without falter? Right.

I'm grateful that you were able to will it and I grieve those who weren't. Yeah. And we lost some, we lost a lot back then and we lost some after like Spencer Cox. Yeah. who never figured out how to reenter the so-called real world. Over the last couple years, you know as well as anybody in this country that we've dealt with such an extreme uptick in homophobia and transphobia, the resurgence of those forces as a political weapon.

Do you see any parallels or potential parallels between the kind of like anti-gay and anti-trans panic and hysteria that we're dealing with now and that of your young adulthood. And, you know, are there any lessons that you would want to bestow upon the queer youths of today? Sure, with some major caveats. You know, I think one thing we got really right in Act Up is we did borrow a lot from history. We had that historical memory from the lesbians who were in the room from day one. and we borrowed the best of prior movements.

But we also were, there were a lot of young people in the movement, a lot of arrogance that comes with youth, which can be very helpful. There was a lot of, you know, we're going to try new stuff. We're going to try new things. We're going to tweak prior movements. We're going to create new things that will be copied in the future. That is necessary with all activism. I remember there was a couple Stonewall veterans in Actup who were my age now.

I'm an old guy now. A couple of them had a wrong approach of saying, in my day, we did it like this and you should be doing it. You need to listen to me. This is how we do it. You're wrong. And I remember being young and arrogant and saying, yeah. Fuck you. Fuck Stonewall.

Fuck Stonewall. We're doing things differently. dude, get with it. And I think that needs to be encouraged. So I can offer advice, but I want to lead with the fact that young people today shouldn't be listening, shouldn't be looking for some sort of strict playbook from a 63-year-old white guy. With the exception of every moment is going to require you to write a new book, a new playbook, because the time. The time. is different, the tactics are different. If Act Up happened today, we would fail because it's harder now. There was no Fox News back then. We would have been branded terrorists like Black Lives Matter

was branded terrorists by Fox News. We wouldn't have gotten 80% of the country calling for an increase of federal tax dollars spent on AIDS research, which is what happened shortly after our demonstration at the FDA. We convinced 80% of the country to do something right about AIDS. We couldn't do that today. You can't get the country to agree 80% on anything now. It's a scarier time. The activism is harder.

It's going to require some more creativity. If you just borrow our book and only do that kind of activism, you're going to fail. It's going to have to be something more different. personally, I get hope from some of the nerdier stuff I see out there. Like instead of the people who are gluing their hands to paintings for climate activism, I see the activists who are actually working with the scientists and the technology side and leveraging the fact that there is money to be made from reducing carbon emissions, leveraging all that power with science, kind of this geeky stuff, they give me hope.

I know some of those activists, and they realize they're up against it. We all realize it's really, really scary on the climate front, but they get up every day fighting it with that model. So maybe gluing yourself to a really beautiful painting is... You're not a fan. I'm not a fan. You're not a fan. I'm not a fan.

I get it. You know, I was there. I don't think it's a huge harm. I don't think there's a gigantic downside, frankly. It does get some conversation on a certain level and some awareness. But again, the conversation is mostly about the tactic, not the issue. Right. And that's a problem for me.

Because at the end of the day, find the bad guy and put a condom on his house. Only if it moves the ball. Peter, this has been such a tremendous honor for me and so special to just sit down with you and flesh out all the little details. Thank you for sitting with me for two and a half hours to do it. It's been fun. Thank you, the listener, for making it this far. I hope you've gleaned some wisdom from Peter Staley. This has been such a special story to bring to you.

and if you like this show or this episode, feel free to give it a rating or share it with a friend or your mom who remembers the 80s or don't do any of the above. That's really none of my business. I'm just happy you're here. Until next time, I love you. I appreciate you. And stay fruity. We did it. Good job.

Hi. Bye.