Opinions
Walking among HIV’s dead at Congressional Cemetery
Look closely at the tombstones for a World AIDS Day history lesson
D.C.’s historic Congressional Cemetery is the final resting place for many single men who died between the early-‘80s and mid-’90s, between the ages of 25 and 55. (Washington Blade photo by Damien Salas)
By NATHAN A. PAXTON
I encounter the HIV epidemic in unexpected places, particularly when I take my dachshunds out for a walk.
I live near the Historic Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., and one of the programs of the cemetery allows some of us to walk our dogs among graves of the well known and almost anonymous. The graves of J. Edgar Hoover, Elbridge Gerry (he of the “gerrymander”) and John Philip Sousa get most of the attention.
In quieter ways, I can read the toll of the killing years among gay men in Washington. Most often, the signs are demographic: single men, not buried in a family plot, who died between the early-‘80s and mid-’90s, between the ages of 25 and 55. Sometimes I’ll find these graves in clusters, as if friends and lovers wanted to share proximity in death as in life. Often, though, I will find these graves by themselves, and I wonder what story lies behind the solitariness.
Some graves proclaim their gayness loud and proud, like that of Leonard Matlovich, the first active duty member of the armed forces to challenge the ban on gay and lesbian people serving in the military. Another mentions being a “proud gay educator.” Once you know what to look for, you see these men everywhere. As Walter and Russell sniff and bound jauntily among the headstones, the three of us walk among HIV’s dead, just as we walk among Union and Confederate dead.
I study the politics of epidemics, especially HIV, and it’s often said that one’s research manifests one’s own demons. My own years of research on the development of different countries’ HIV/AIDS policies stemmed, I came to see, from a personal recognition, as much as intellectual motivations.
But for the accident of the year in which I was born, it is quite probable that—as a gay man in America—I would not have been alive to do my work and live my life. HIV, first understood as AIDS, made its first recognized appearance in gay men, and it is often still thought of as a “gay disease,” here in the United States and in the developing countries I study.
Had I been born just a few years earlier, I would be smack in the midst of that generation that first showed the evidence of one of the worst plagues in human history. It is quite probable that I would now be dead.
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late ’90s, it was hard not to notice that gay men between 40 and 60 were sometimes rare, even missing. Friends who had been living there less than 10 years earlier told stories: My friend Billy spoke of attending two memorials a weekend for months on end; Len remembered wearing full sterile garb to visit dying friends in the hospital in 1982; and people at my church, gay and straight, remembered constant care rotas for a changing and diminishing set of friends and lovers. Len, a retired professor, told me that caring for his ailing mother in the late 1970s kept him home and out of the bars: “That’s probably what kept me alive.”
As a social scientist, I think I have a pretty good understanding of the probabilities behind many everyday actions and circumstances. It is sobering to realize that only a matter of years may separate one from the near-certainty of the disease. Even now, I accept as normal that some of my friends have not escaped the laws of probabilities and plagues. Friends of mine speak of a time in their lives when they could count more friends and lovers who were dead than alive.
Each Dec. 1 is World AIDS Day, and we generally don’t much mark the day here in the United States. For many folks, this titanic killer has become a “mere” chronic disease, thanks to the antiretroviral cocktail therapies available to us. As a result, gay men, for example, have been able to turn their social and political efforts toward a variety of other issues: marriage, employment protection, open military service.
We are hardly out of the woods, even in the United States. Recent CDC reports indicate that unprotected anal sex among gay men in America has increased 20 percent since 2005. The same trend has occurred in several other Western countries. While amazing progress has occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, HIV infections and AIDS deaths are on the rise in East Asia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa.
Even while MSM are the most-affected group in the United States and other developed countries, the most common type of HIV-infected person in the world today is a young woman of African descent. The epidemic varies greatly and remains consistent in its pervasive burrowing into those at the margins of our cultures: sexual minorities, drug users, women, sex workers and black people.
UNAIDS will tout good news this Dec. 1. The rate of annual new infections has decreased all over the world, falling by a third over the last decade. New infections and deaths are down in many regions and countries, including many of those most affected, in the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa. Treatment access has increased dramatically in this last decade. ARVs have transformed from global luxury to what scholars Joshua Busby and Ethan Kapstein have called “merit goods” — goods whose consumers assert they have a basic moral right to have, like lifesaving drugs once priced too high to consider providing on a mass basis throughout the developing world.
There will also be bad news. Men who have sex with men are 13 times more likely to be living with the disease. In east Asia and the Middle East, the number of infections is on the rise. Sexual behavior has become more risky in many places, with increasing numbers of partners and less consistent condom use. There are still more than 35 million people — roughly the population of California — infected with the virus.
Most of the people who have died or will die from AIDS have not been and will not be obvious to those of us who walk in cemeteries, with or without canine companions. The statistics of their deaths won’t reveal the manner of that death so easily. We will not be able to tell who the African-American men and women who bear some of the highest burdens in this country were. There will be little evidence in their cemeteries of the widespread injection drug use in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that spreads the disease there. The same will be true of sex workers, transgender people, closeted men who have sex with men and poor women throughout the world. We will forget them more easily, in death as in life.
Just as HIV has proven amazingly adept and complex in the hiding places it finds in our human bodies, it has proven equally adept at hiding in the bodies of our societies. HIV survives and thrives in our biological and social bodies, adapting itself to work quietly and slowly, doing its work at the edges until it is powerful enough to harm those bodies. The complexity of HIV’s biological place pales before the social complexity in which it is enmeshed. If there is an evil in any disease, it lies not in the vector itself but in what we humans do or do not do for the people living with it, that is, by the evil we have done and the evil done on our behalf.
It is easy to miss the first casualties of the HIV epidemic, and most of my human cemetery friends have never noticed the plethora of these dead until I point the matter out. In another world, some of these dead would be alive and walking their dogs among the grass and granite, chapel and colombarium where they are now buried. The HIV-infected and -affected of the future will be much harder to find, more invisible than the men that Russell, Walter and I have become familiar with on our walks.
Nathan Paxton lives in Capitol Hill and teaches political science.
Opinions
WorldPride begins — let’s hope it ends well
D.C. events kick off despite boycotts, Trump attacks
As WorldPride begins with Trans Pride on May 17,, we can only hope when it is over on June 9t we will all be raving about its success.
When D.C. first got designated as host city in November 2022, after Taiwan didn’t work out, there were initial estimates of 2.5 to 3 million people showing up in D.C. to party and celebrate. We talked about this 50th anniversary of Pride as celebrating five decades of advocacy, visibility, and unity, for the LGBTQ community in Washington, D.C., honoring the past, celebrating the present, and inspiring the future.
Anticipation was greatly tempered when Trump, the felon, racist, anti-trans homophobe, liar, and all-around SOB, won the election in November 2024. Then the planning became more difficult and stressful. But here we are and the excitement is palpable. The signs are up around D.C. and Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has been so great for the LGBTQ community, is walking a tightrope to keep D.C. afloat, never knowing what the felon in the White House will do next. To her credit, she is doing an amazing job keeping him at bay. But his vicious anti-trans positions, and his general homophobia, have put a cloud over WorldPride. His immigration policies have led countries around the world to tell their citizens to be very wary if they come to the United States. It is projected as foreign tourists stay away, the United States could lose $12.5 billion this year.
Despite all that, the people at Capital Pride Alliance, who are running WorldPride, have done a commendable job of putting together a program for everyone. From the Human Rights Conference, to the parade, to the festival, where Cynthia Erivo will perform. Shakira will be doing the opening concert at Nat’s stadium, and there are more superstars at the dance party at the RFK site, that should be the site of the new Commanders domed stadium by 2030.
But let us never forget all this is taking place at a time when the United States has a president who is creating havoc in the world and embarrassing us even among our allies. He is a liar and a grifter, a man who thinks nothing of putting people’s lives in danger whether it is sending people illegally to prisons in El Salvador, or creating a culture so nasty, a trans person takes their life in their hands just walking down the street.
He surrounds himself with people like Stephen Miller who wants to suspend habeas corpus, and his Nazi sympathizing co-president, Elon Musk, who just got Trump to invite a bunch of racist South Africans to move here. It’s going on while we have a Secretary of HHS, RFK, Jr., who takes his grandchildren swimming in a polluted creek, and tells others to risk their children’s lives by avoiding vaccines. A president who has cut $800 million in grants from NIH meant to do research to save lives in the LGBTQ community, along with cutting grants and programs that have worked successfully to save people in Africa from dying of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and polio. This is what we are dealing with. Like it or not, this is the backdrop to WorldPride 2025.
Yet, if we give in to this horror, we make it even worse. WorldPride is a way we say to people here in the United States, and those around the world, we in the LGBTQ community are never going back into the closet. We are proud, we are smart, and we are valuable. We make the world a better place, and we will continue to do so despite the pig who occasionally sits in the Oval Office when he is not out golfing or grifting. We can never allow the gay Republicans who make excuses for him, the gay Secretary of the Treasury who has yet to speak out for his community, to go unchallenged. Their silence hurts us as much as the felon sitting in the Oval Office because as the Blade wrote, they are traitors. It is unfortunate, but once again the slogan silence = death has never been more real.
So, speak up, speak out, never stay quiet. Let the world know you are here, and you care. Your life is important and fuck them if they don’t understand that or value it.
Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.
Opinions
Let love and compassion guide our response to Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis
Former president is diminished, but he and family deserve love and prayers
When I heard Joe Biden had serious prostate cancer, I felt immediate compassion for him and his family. I am a prostate cancer survivor myself. Then I heard how Trump, and some of his MAGA Republicans, responded and was amazed at how they are able to constantly sink to new lows. Trump’s son posted on X “What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another cover-up???” Clearly, they will never give up on being vile human beings.
The equally disgusting Joe Scarborough had on a doctor who declared he positively knows Biden must have known about his cancer years ago, although he knows nothing about the case. The reality, coming from many specialists, is at this time only Biden’s doctors know when he was diagnosed, and whether he even had regular PSA tests done, and when. Based on the latest research, the American Urological Association (AUA) age guidelines are that they do not recommend routine PSA screening for men 70 or older. This is because prostate cancer is normally very slow growing, and if you were to be diagnosed after 70, you will likely die of something else. Then you had the felon in the White House talking about “stage nine” cancer. Is he really so dumb? Guess he is as he tries to prove it nearly every time he opens his mouth. Talk about diminished.
Now is Biden diminished from what he was years ago? It is clear he is. Should the people around him have tried to hide that in order to have him run again, no! But the-then president’s hiding health issues is nothing new. Wilson was severely impaired and it is said his wife Edith ran the country for his last year in office. The same was said about Nancy Reagan when they hid Reagan’s Alzheimer’s. Kennedy hid his Addison’s disease and other infirmities, and Trump hid how sick he was from COVID, when being helicoptered to the hospital. Is it wrong to hide these things from the American public, yes, but clearly not unusual. Actually, the media is often complicit in this, which many said they were in Biden’s case. Then you have a guy like Jake Tapper who is happy to be complicit, so he can now write a book about it and make loads of money. Very sad.
I think the time has come in the case of Joe Biden, for us to just offer him and his family some love and prayers, and the hope he will be able to manage his cancer and live a long life. Then turn the page and deal with the things that will matter more to the lives of the American people today.
Those are the things the felon in the White House, and his Nazi sympathizing co-president, along with the MAGA Congress, are trying to do to them. Things like taking away their healthcare, and thereby also causing the closure of some rural hospitals. Things like the mass firings of federal workers, including thousands of veterans. Things like making it harder for our veterans to access their healthcare by cutting services at the Veterans hospitals. Things like increasing costs for groceries, and other items, due to the felon’s ineffective use of tariffs. Things like seeing college costs go up, as foreign students who pay the full fare at most schools, are sent home or denied visas. Things like making it harder to file for social security by closing so many offices, and pretending to lower drug prices, but not really doing it. Things like cutting research looking for cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, MS, HIV/AIDS, and a host of other diseases, which will hurt people for decades to come. Things like creating havoc in the world, and bowing down to dictators. Things like walking away from our allies and making the world a less safe place for all of us, including abandoning Ukraine, and cozying up to his friend Putin. I always believed Putin has some dirt on him. Trump said Zelenskyy would be responsible for WW III. But it’s Trump who will be, if it happens. Then we must put a focus on the idiot who is secretary of HHS, RFK Jr., and whether he will allow the flu and covid vaccines, being readied for the fall, to be available in a timely manner. Will he continue to disparage all vaccines, and by doing so, cause deaths here, and around the world. Things like abandoning the fight against climate change and thereby screwing the planet and future generations.
These are the things the American public really needs to know about, and care about. It may have been wrong to hide Biden’s being diminished, but he is no longer in office, and he no longer impacts people’s lives on a daily basis. The felon in the WH does, and that is where the focus must be.
A first generation American from Queens, N.Y., Kameny was a decorated WWII veteran. With a prodigious 148 I.Q., he earned a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University. In 1957 he was recruited by the Army Map Service, a pioneering agency in space exploration.
In 1953 in the wake of McCarthyism, President Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450 that prohibited homosexuals from military or civilian employment. Having nothing to do with workplace conduct, the Army learned that Kameny might be a homosexual. When confronted, he equivocated and was terminated. Unlike then thousands of other homosexuals terminated from government employment, Kameny fought back.
He took on the military and Civil Service Commission including being the first openly gay man to file an appeal about gay rights to the U.S. Supreme Court. He helped co-found and chair the Mattachine Society of Washington, the first gay rights organization in the nation’s capital.
He wrote letters to, among others, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. He founded and chaired the Eastern Conference of Homophile Organization, the nation’s first regional gay organization.
In the 1960s homosexuality, even with a consenting adult in the privacy of one’s bedroom was criminal. The police entrapped and extorted gay men. The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental illness. A bar could lose its license if there was more than one homosexual in their establishment. Homosexuals were considered dangerous, deviant and demented.
Kameny coined the phrase “Gay Is Good.” He organized picketing called Annual Reminders each July 4 from 1965 to 1969 at Independence Hall. The picketers were the first to call for gay equality. The 1965 Annual Reminder had 39 activists making it then the largest demonstration for gay rights. In the mid-1960s the country had an estimated 300 gay and lesbian activists.
He published a newsletter that became the Washington Blade, now the nation’s oldest LGBTQ weekly newspaper. Kameny and Barbara Gittings, the mother of the movement that demonstrated for the right to be heard at the 1971 American Psychiatric Association meeting. Their panel at the 1972 meeting with a masked psychiatrist using a pseudonym and voice modulator was so impactful that the APA created a panel to determine if homosexuality as a mental illness was based on science or discrimination. In 1973, that classification was removed.
He advised gays and lesbians who were the subject of discharge from federal government service. He identified test cases and referred them to the ACLU, Lambda Legal and other counsel. Slowly, but surely those cases began a process for LGBTQ equality.
His efforts led D.C. to be the first city to overturn its sodomy criminal laws. He helped found the first national LGBTQ organization, the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations. His efforts laid the groundwork for HRC and National LGBTQ Task Force.
After Stonewall in June 1969, he chaired a meeting of NY, Philadelphia and D.C. activists that authorized and helped organize to help remember Stonewall the first New York Pride Parade. He believed that Stonewall could be the movement’s Boston Tea Party. He marched in that 1970 parade holding a picket emblazoned with “Gay Is Good.”
He was the first out person to run for Congress as the D.C. delegate. Money left over from his campaign was used to fund the first gay rights television commercial. In July 1975, he was the first to be advised by the Civil Service Commission that it would eliminate homosexuality as a basis for not hiring or for firing a federal civilian employee. In 1977, he attended the White House’s first meeting with gays and lesbians.
Kameny died on Oct. 11, 2011, National Coming Out Day. He lived to see marriage equality approved in several states. He attended the signing by President Obama of the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which enabled gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. Kameny is buried in the Congressional Cemetery. On his tombstone is inscribed “Gay Is Good.” Over 70,000 of his documents are in the Library of Congress and picket signs from the pioneering demonstrations are housed in the Smithsonian Institution.
On May 21 LGBTQ national organizations gather in front of the Supreme Court. One hundred activists will each hold a candle for his 100th birthday. Fifteen national leaders will engage in picketing similar to the 1965 picketing at the White House and Independence Hall. They will honor Frank Kameny; celebrate the 10th anniversary of marriage equality (Obergefell v Hodges, 2015); and push back on those who would attempt to render us invisible, deny our history and undermine our equality. We will remember the nation’s loss when it fired a Harvard Ph.D. in astronomy because of his status as a homosexual. History repeats itself. This month the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the federal government to terminate transgender servicemembers solely because of their sexual orientation. How far we have come. How much farther we have to travel.
Malcolm Lazin is the national chair, Kameny 100. He is the executive director, LGBT History Month and executive producer of three LGBTQ documentaries including Gay Pioneers. He was an adjunct professor of LGBT History and Rights at New College of Florida. www.kameny100.org.
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