The Gay & Lesbian Review

N 1976, at age seventeen, Sean Strub

got a job operating an elevator on the

Senate side of the U.S. Capitol. He

scarcely believed his luck. What could

be better than daily contact with the most

distinguished statesmen in the country?

“There wasn’t much room in my elevator,

but I loved how large the world became for

me within its walls.”

Other boys went girl-crazy; Strub found

his passion in politics. Soon enough he learned that it didn’t

have to be chaste. Washington was a very gay town. Passengers

in the elevator included men who spoke a certain way, dressed

with particular flair. Strub noticed them, and they noticed him.

He discovered the existence of a sexual subculture that com-

municated with secret codes, a demimonde at play in niche

restaurants and bars. A bright and ambitious young man could

make friends in that kind of environment. Strub forged alliances

useful for a public-service career. But there was a problem. His

sexual side had to remain hidden.

This memoir reminds us how taboo it was back then to be

gay. Paradoxically, however, gay men ran some of the country’s

sharpest political organizations. Why did they choose a profes-

sion that could ruin them? Strub’s motivation, which applied to

a number of notable gays in politics—Bayard Rustin, Allard

Lowenstein, Gerry Studds, and Barney Frank come to mind—

perhaps can be summed up with one word: idealism. It was a

way to serve the country. Strub doesn’t theorize about connec-

tions between homosexuality and working for the public good,

maybe because it’s a question for the sociobiologists. He does

discuss the irony that he entered secret service, so to speak, on

the eve of gay liberation’s national eruption.

He had heard of Harvey Milk, a San Francisco city super-

visor and one of first openly gay elected officials in the U.S.

When a deranged colleague murdered Milk in November 1978,

most media covered it with an “only in San Francisco” angle.

Washington’s scruffy gay press saw it differently, as the mar-

tyrdom of a new kind of hero. Strub started to think about the

viability of gay politics. In October of the following year, mas-

sive numbers of lesbians and gay men converged on D.C. for the

first national gay rights march. It was a festive event, huge, con-

fident, inescapable. By this time Strub was leading two very

busy lives, one closeted, the other devoted to electioneering.

They didn’t intersect publicly because he wanted to make his

mark in big-time politics, where homosexuality remained anath-

ema. He had gay friends in the same predicament. Most of them

didn’t dwell on it and tended to make themselves scarce when

he brought up sexual liberation. It didn’t seem to Strub that he

could combine the two sides of his life.

AIDS intervened. The decade preceding

the plague had seen a rapid expansion of

gay entertainment culture. Liberation

meant a party, and why not? Homophobia

still ruled the land, but that provided all the

more reason to flaunt newfound self-confi-

dence. For the first time gays celebrated

themselves as belles of the ball. Strub notes

that it helped to dispel a sense of wounded-

ness that many gay men, including him,

had harbored since their bullied boyhoods. Erstwhile wimps

suddenly ruled a new world, from the dance floor no less. Strub

found the D.C. political closet increasingly restrictive. He

moved to NewYork, where doormen at Studio 54 waved him in.

And then, kaboom! AIDS crashed into gay life like a giant as-

teroid—like an extinction-level event.

Surprisingly little history has been written about the com-

munity’s response to the early plague years. Of course, every-

body knows that it was a harrowing time. Or maybe not; how

many are old enough to remember wraith-like men with purplish

skin barely able to hobble down the sidewalk? Strub tells his sto-

ries calmly, and he deploys a gentle sense of humor. At first this

comes across as a polite effort to help the reader through the

rough spots. Then you realize he’s describing experiences so

horrifying that just the facts will do. Here’s an example: A friend

of Strub’s collected exotic curiosities, mummy fragments, taxi-

dermy, and the like. This man’s lover was desperately ill; patches

of his body had turned “nearly black with thick, waxy, foul-

smelling lesions and dead skin.” One day they were preparing to

leave for the hospital. In the bed they found “a piece of dark or-

ganic matter about the size of a flattened walnut.” Apparently

the lover had molted a lesion. Strub’s friend took it to the hos-

pital for the doctor’s inspection. Later, back home, “he looked up

at the stuffed deer head hanging on the wall above their bed and

saw that it was missing its nose.”

Strub covers a lot of highly personal ground in

Body

Counts

. Gay men his age lost staggering numbers of friends, on

a scale otherwise known only to wartime soldiers. It was the

kind of loss that soldiers famously find hard to discuss; maybe

this is a reason that relatively few AIDS memoirs have been

published so far. But AIDS wasn’t, of course, just a personal or-

deal. I recall a widespread fear in the 1980s that authorities

would put gays in concentration camps. Strub didn’t feel that

degree of panic, but very early on, before AIDS had even been

named, he worried about the fate of gay liberation. If the dis-

ease became known as a buttfuck curse, would hopes for ac-

ceptance vanish?

That fear turned out to be naïve. But does it tell us some-

thing? I think so. It was only on reading Strub that I understood

how fragile and experimental gay legitimacy was 35 years ago.

The grand fanfare of the 1970s hadn’t really been all that suc-

cessful. To put it another way, if gay pride had been secure by

Being There in the Age of AIDS

EWIS

ANNETT

Body Counts:

A Memoir of Politics, Sex,

AIDS, and Survival

by Sean Strub

Scribner. 420 pages, $30.

Lewis Gannett, an associate editor of this magazine, has contributed

several articles on Abraham Lincoln’s same-sex relationships.

BOOKS

March–April 2014