I felt left out. How had TAP come about?
“Well, you know when Otis and I were diagnosed as having HIV infection, I began to look around for community support. The director of St. John’s Church mentioned an organization that he thought he had heard about—Tennessee AIDS Project. Of course, that turned out not to be the name, but he did have the phone number for a woman, Elaine Shuman, who worked at the medical school. She was coordinator of a very loose group of medical students, psychologists and other professionals—they hadn’t actually met in several months. Elaine convened the group for their first real meeting as a result of my call.
“We’ve had several meetings. The first were just feelers, you know. I keep pushing for things like bylaws, Robert’s Rules of Order, and so on, and people just say, ‘Oh, we don’t really need that.’ All we have in terms of a budget is about three hundred dollars. The organization office is basically Elaine Shuman’s dining table. She will be leaving shortly, and in all probability, the office will move to Bettie Lee’s dining room!”
Bettie Lee was Fred’s sister. I had met her a few times. She was very supportive of both Fred and Otis. It didn’t surprise me that she had become actively involved in the community response to this disease.
Fred went on: “There was quite a bit of awkwardness, particularly in the first few meetings. I try not to be too pushy; I’m not that used to working with straight people. We have one real firebrand in our group: Dale. Dale has experience with an AIDS support group in Knoxville. He’s full of ideas and really motivated, really charged, which I think is great! But there’s a clash of personalities between him and Elaine. She feels he is trying to come in and take over. She really resists. And so do some others. I think they resent him as much because, uh, because he is gay as anything else. That’s irony for you: the people who try to work with AIDS still have their homophobias!
“There’s lots of people in the group who are ‘interested’ and gave it lip service, if you know what I mean: ‘Oh, we want to do this and we want to do that,’ but when it comes time for them to actually do something, for one reason or another they don’t have time.”
I recalled with shame that Fred and others had mentioned the first few organizational meetings of what turned out to be TAP to me. I had begged off, largely because I had little faith that much would come of these meetings. My clinical load was getting so large that I felt overwhelmed by patient care; and patient care made me impatient with all committees. Besides, I felt the AIDS lectures I gave all over the region, and for which I was now in some demand, represented my community effort.
“The professionals want to meet during the day, and the rest of us—those who have the virus—want to meet in the evenings,” Fred said. “The professionals basically want to meet during office hours and count this as part of their work—get paid for it, you know? Whereas for me, my livelihood depends on getting to the tobacco warehouses on time, or visiting offices in the daytime to pick up my receipts.”
Fred continued: “I can’t tell you how important TAP has become for me. It’s made me feel that there are people interested in me. And that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Would you refer new patients to us, or patients you have that I may not know about? I really have no idea who else could use our services or benefit from the support group; we aren’t at a stage where we can like, take an ad in the Johnson City Press. Can you picture it? Seeking persons with AIDS to form a support group; meeting at the Unitarian Church. We’d be firebombed or else have the KKK drop by.”
I promised that I would send patients to TAP. It would ease some of the pressures on Carol and me. We were novices at trying to get patients their Social Security supplement, their Medicaid, their handicapped parking stickers, and the myriad other needs that blossomed with this kind of illness.
Fred invited me to come to the support group. Be the “facilitator” if I chose to be. I told him I was very interested in being supportive but had to beg off. I wanted to be sure to save energy to fulfill my clinical role as effectively as I could and to have something left over for family. “Time is my currency,” I said to Fred.
“Mine too,” he replied. We were both silent for a while. “Living in Morristown and driving down here for all these meetings, what with Otis getting sicker, it’s going to be tough to make it all happen. And to keep up with my work. But I’m absolutely committed to the idea of TAP.”
I had forgotten how Fred made his living. “You work as a bookkeeper, right, Fred?”
“I’m an accountant,” Fred said.
I was amused: these were two incongruous images: bear and accountant.
“I know, I guess I don’t look much like an accountant. It’s not a bad job. I have two real busy stretches every year: January to April—tax time—and Thanksgiving to January when the tobacco market peaks. This is a slow time for me. It’s my uncle’s business, you know. Yeah, he was in tobacco for years, and his business gradually evolved into a one-man accounting business: taxes, inventory, audit, payrolls and issuing checks, all for the tobacco warehouses. When I returned home to Morristown, my uncle’s health was failing and so I took over the accounting business. It’s still a solo affair. The Burley warehouse accounts are at the heart of my business.”
I was familiar with the tobacco warehouses around the area—New Burley, New Dixie, Farmer’s One and Two, Central One and Two, Grower’s Warehouse, Jimmy Green’s. They feature prominently in the directions you are given if you are in Greene County and ask for help. They stand like airplane hangars, but with ne’er an airfield in sight. I had been to a tobacco warehouse in Virginia once, even attended an auction. I remembered the event distinctly and could picture the warehouses Fred was now describing to me. When you walk in, the scent of tobacco floors you, brings spittle to your lips and makes your stomach call out as if in hunger. Picture opening a fresh can of Prince Albert or Copenhagen and sticking your nose into it; magnify this picture fiftyfold and you will know the sensation.
Each warehouse has an “office” in a corner with a large wood stove. It is here that the farmers wait on benches or fold-up chairs, wait for their checks. Some farmers dandy up when they come for their checks; a few others send their wives or children. But the rest are here in person, dressed in jeans, flannel shirts, denim jackets or down vests, and ball caps. A telltale bulge under their lower lip is where they have parked their dip; it gives them a serenity that by late morning borders on frank torpor. They wait and wait, stepping outside every now and then to spit, or else using a Styrofoam cup held carefully in their hands for the same purpose.
While they wait for their checks, they talk about the weather and how it was on the leaf. They talk about the price the Burley fetched at the last auction. The farmers all know each other and are linked in the same way a small rural Southern Baptist congregation might be.
A staircase leads up from the waiting room to a work area above where “the girls” sit and calculate how much each basket of tobacco brought. “The girls” are on the average over sixty years old. The heat from the wood stove rises up through the stairwell and between the gaps in the floorboard. The girls have the warmest spot in the building.
Downstairs, next to the waiting room, is an enclosed office. It is this spot that Fred or whoever does the warehouse accounts shares with the BSC men—the Burley Stabilization Corporation, the regulatory agency that monitors sales. The BSC office, as it is called, is very cold. At the expense of losing some privacy, of which there is little to begin with, one can remove some boards at the base of the wall that separates the waiting room and its wood stove from the BSC office, thus allowing heat to come through from the wood stove.
The offices occupy the smallest corner of the warehouse; the rest of it is row upon row of “baskets,” each containing up to two hundred pounds of tobacco leaves wrapped into bundles. It is these baskets that the buyers from the big companies come to inspect and to grade.
There are Oldsmobile Cutlasses or Delta 88s or Chevy Impalas pa
rked outside the Burley house. Small stickers on the bumpers indicate these belong to Hertz or Avis or National. All around the sedans are row after row of pickup trucks, some shiny and with Armor All on the tires, others with mud on the wheels and a dirty truck bed. The pickups belong to the farmers; the buyers are in the sedans.
Inside, the buyers are in suits; some wear topcoats against the cold. They have little briefcases in their hands. One can sometimes see these individuals in the Holiday Inn lounge or the Sheraton in Johnson City: shrewd-eyed city men with a matchless understanding of how to do business in rural Tennessee.
The buyer grades the tobacco prior to the auction. It is a process similar to grading tea, except nothing is put in the mouth, nothing is lit. Some buyers use a simple A,B,C rating. Others—the younger men from the big companies—use a much more elaborate system. The grading is based on color, on how dry or wet the tobacco is, on how much of each lot is available around the tristate area that season. The buyer is searching for just the right kind of tobacco to make his company’s particular blend, create the distinctive company “flavor.” The thick, oily pull of an extreme American cigarette like a Camel, the raw, roasted flavor of an archetypal American cigarette like Marlboro or Winston, the silky, almost sweetish taste of an English Rothman’s, all result from the purchase of a particular lot of tobacco at these auctions.
Having inspected every basket and made their judgment, the buyers now wait for the auction to take place. The auctioneer begins his breathless descant. The buyer is looking at his list. He decides what he will pay. He keeps in mind how much of the season still remains. He pictures the other towns in Virginia and North Carolina that he will hit before he is done.
It was difficult to picture Fred in the midst of this activity. Such a contradictory image: Fred, sitting in the BSC office, taking the data from “the girls” and preparing the checks.
I asked Fred how Otis was doing. Did he help with Fred’s business?
“Otis is just too tired these days, too tired to work. My sister set up a job for him, sitting with an elderly man at nights. He did that for a week or so but it got to be too much for him. At times he helps me picking up checks or delivering checks. It’s often late evening when I get home—my home is also my office. After supper with Otis, if it’s not a day when I have choir practice or something else, I frequently have to put in another hour or two of work in the office to stay abreast of it all.
“It doesn’t help that many an evening I dash into the house, grab some dinner and head off to Johnson City. Otis doesn’t care to come to TAP, nor does he appreciate that I spend so much time with TAP. Morristown is a good thirty-five-minute drive from Johnson City. When I get back, Otis is often asleep. And he might still be asleep when I leave for the warehouse early in the morning to make up for my early departure the previous day!”
Fred’s description of his home situation sounded like many marriages I knew. I had to prod myself, remind myself that this was a gay couple infected with a deadly virus. Taking advantage of Fred’s gregariousness, I asked him some of the questions I had been wondering about, questions about gay men.
Did he know he was gay from an early age?
He pondered this for a while, pulled on his chin hairs. “I can look back now and categorize feelings of difference that I felt that I can now label as being gay—as early as six or eight years of age. But in a way that isn’t fair because I didn’t really think that at the time. I was overweight—in some ways even a bigger difference than being gay. You become more of an outlier in the spectrum of schoolyard society by being fat, rather than being gay. I was, uh, very intelligent and that also set me apart. All those differences kind of worked together for me. I came to view my differences as something to be proud of, not to try and change. When someone gave me a hard time—say for maxing a test—I attributed it to them. It was their problem.
“In high school, I discovered people with similar feelings to mine. We had no word like gay. And yet we were experimenting. We got, harrumph! shall I say, uh, pretty damn well advanced. Some guilt, of course. Especially the first couple of times. But then I rolled up this difference—this experimenting and liking it—with all the other things that made me different. I said to myself: I’m okay. They’re different! I wasn’t going to take a lot of guilt that others lay on me. Still don’t.”
This explained something of Fred’s demeanor, the way he had shrugged off the nurse who had looked at him disapprovingly when he hugged Carol. He felt no compunction to be apologetic for his lifestyle.
Carol poked her head in and wished us goodbye. The office was closing. Fred seemed in no hurry and I was enjoying getting to know him. I brought us the last two cups of coffee in the pot.
I told Fred how I had gone through college with little or no awareness of the existence of a real gay culture. I was aware of homoerotic acts among men in the college, even aware of men who were rumored to be gay. But, in general, homosexuality in India was regarded as a joke of sorts, evidence of the frustration of the Indian college male who has very little contact with women. And how it was only with my return to America, and with the onset of the tragedy of AIDS, that I became truly aware of the existence of a gay culture, not just in the big cities, but even in the small towns of America. I asked him when he became aware of a gay culture.
“For me it began when I went to college at Florida Southern. I lived in a dormitory and had a straight roommate. He was very nice, but I didn’t like the idea of a roommate, a straight one at least. The rest of my time there I opted for a private room. My junior year I went to Germany on an exchange program. I had picked up German so well in my freshman year that I jumped at the chance to go there. It was also a time when I lost a lot of weight. I went from 255 pounds to 180 pounds.”
This was extraordinary weight loss. Now he weighed about 200 pounds. How had he lost the weight?
“My motivation was that I had read somewhere that every twenty pounds over normal that you carried on yourself was like carrying another suitcase. That kind of stuck in my head. I was going to be carrying a backpack and a few other things in Europe. I had this vision of these three additional suitcases on my body—suitcases dripping with fat. It was a grisly image, it did something to me.
“That entire time was a period of enormous change for me—college, Germany. I did some heterosexual dating. I was kind of pushed into it by friends, sort of a ‘How-can-you-knock-it-till-you-try-it?’ thing. I enjoyed it as far as it went. Even had, harrumphf! sex with a girl! No problem. But no thrill. No spark. With this one girl it got pretty serious. It in fact became a major traumatic event. She was getting demanding, wanting to make long-term plans. Rather than encourage her, I decided to tell her all, to put an end to it. I liked her very much and didn’t want to mislead her. I called her on the phone. I picked a bad day to do it—turned out she had just been to the dentist and had a tooth pulled and its root extended into one of her sinuses, so she was in a pisser of a mood. But she didn’t tell me that at the time.
“When I told her why it wouldn’t work between us, she got so mad. She went up and down the dormitory telling everyone that would listen that I was gay. I was really embarrassed. . . . It was one of the low points in my life. . . . I felt as if the world was collapsing in on me.”
Here Fred paused, and his features became wooden as he relived the moment. The clinic was silent now; most everyone else had left. He sat up in his chair as if to break the spell of the memory.
“Surprisingly, it had very little effect! Nobody seemed to worry about it. Mind you, this was, I think, just before the Stonewall riots. But people in general were cool. And the ones who shied away from me after that I figured to be the ones I didn’t want to have anything to do with anyway.”
I asked Fred to tell me about his emergence as an openly gay man. Did he remember when he first visited a gay bar? Was the Connection around when he was growing up?
“I knew nothing of the Connection when I was in high school. The fir
st gay bar I went to was in Florida. The bar was called the Green Parrot. I had it pointed out to me by some friends—heterosexual friends—as we were driving by. Someone said ‘That’s where the faggots hang out,’ and everybody said, Oooh! and I said to myself, Ah-haah! It was a long time before I actually went in there. I remember a strong sense of unease—it was a small and very dim place. I think my unease was because I had a sense I was walking into a different society. I was looking at gay society as one homogeneous group. Knowing what I know now about how layered and fragmented gay society is, it’s really funny. But at the time my feelings were like, ‘Wow! I’m actually here!’ But I also had feelings of terror. I thought I was fresh meat walking in!
“People in the bar were very friendly. I was at one end of the long bar. Someone told me how the bartender tended to hang around the middle of the bar and that if I wanted a drink and some attention from him, then that was where to sit. Pearls of wisdom like that! I tried to be friendly, but didn’t really know the signals.”
Signals? What signals? Was Fred talking about the red or yellow or robin’s-egg blue handkerchief in the pocket? The key chains? The shorthand signals of sexual preference that were used on Christopher Street or in the adult bookstores?
“Lord, no! I’m not talking about those kinds of signals at all. I’m talking about signals really not that different from a heterosexual bar. If you look and exchange a long glance, it indicates interest. Accepting a drink says you are open to conversation. There is also lots of hugging and touching, physical contact. That’s not necessarily sexual. It’s more like an affirmation. Gay men hug a lot. It’s a way of saying you’re OK. But the lingering nature of a touch or a slight massage with your touching hand can be a message. And it’s interesting how you terminate a hug: You ever notice how a friendly hug always terminates in patting the back? That pat means ‘You can let go now.’ Later, I went to large gay bars in the big cities in Florida. But I was glad that I had the experience of the smaller bar. I think I would have been blown away by one of the big, huge bars.”