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For Neyfakh, “this debate of freedom v public health obviously resonated” in the era of Covid and it also shone light on the complicated fissures that cracked open within the gay community. While some, including many gay men, wanted them shut down, others insisted they remain open, viewing their closure as a dangerous step on the road toward recriminalising sodomy nationwide. Once seen as a liberating space where gay men could express their sexual freedom, the rise of HIV quickly turned them into a potentially dangerous source of infection. One of the most interesting, and difficult, episodes zeroes in on the war over bathhouses in San Francisco.
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“In New York and San Francisco and LA, gay liberation was in full swing when this began and there was a lot of resistance when Berkowitz and Callen started advocating for safe sex because it felt like turning the clock back, it wasn’t just about being told you had to stop your party, it felt for many that it was like being told that people had to conform to mainstream society in a way that was anathema to gay liberation.” “One thing I didn’t appreciate until we started working on this was the fact that this period followed an explosion of gay life,” Neyfakh said.
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Callen was diagnosed in 1982 at the age of 27 but alongside Berkowitz and with the directive help of doctor turned HIV/Aids researcher Joseph Sonnabend, spent the next decade, before his death at the age of 38, working on hugely important, and at the time unprecedented, pieces of work such as the foundational manual How to Have Sex in an Epidemic.īut what Fiasco details is that trying to police the sex lives of gay men was an uphill battle and for understandable, often too easily simplified or harshly judged, reasons. There was Michael Callen, a New York singer turned activist who worked alongside self-proclaimed “S&M hustler” Richard Berkowitz, to spread awareness among the dangerously uninformed gay community. Neyfakh called it “a dichotomy of dread and mourning but paired with an irrepressible drive to survive and find a way out” and it’s something we see in both those that he speaks with and those who are no longer here with us but whose stories are shared. We’re always trying to find the human beings who populated these stories and we want to defamiliarise them from the abstractions in which they generally come to us.”Īt the beginning, and for far too long after, a diagnosis was essentially a death sentence (it took until 1985 for an official test to even be available), and with little to no awareness of what it was and the specifics of how it was transmitted, gay men were forced into action even as their friends were disappearing around them. “We’re always much more inclined to air out the complexities of these issues and let people present their point of view and explain where they’re coming from and let listeners take away what they will. “I don’t think we’ve ever made a season of our show that had a message with a capital M,” Neyfakh said over Zoom, eager not to position the show as a form of public service. Protestors in 1989 lie on the street in front of the New York Stock Exchange in a demonstration against the high cost of the Aids treatment drug AZT. Previous seasons have explored the Bush-Gore election of 2000 and the battle to desegregate Boston schools. They’re the heroes of the fifth season of Audible’s Fiasco, a dense and often devastating podcast docuseries devoted to clarifying the day-to-day realities of a particular historical event. Years later, Elders was one of many still sounding the alarm (before being abruptly and cruelly fired after insisting on more open and honest forms of sex education) but back then, it was left up to gay men, and then their devoted allies, to militarise, searching for the solutions that no one else was. “Any time you’re talking about sex or drugs, it’s a moral issue, not a public health issue,” says Bill Clinton’s former surgeon general Joycelyn Elders on the podcast. But under Ronald Reagan’s administration, at a time when the majority of US states still upheld sodomy laws, dealing with a condition that mostly affected gay men, and then eventually needle-sharing drug users, was not seen as a priority. While there are many, still-to-be-unpacked problems with how the US and many other countries mishandled and continue to mishandle Covid-19, there has been at least some sense that it was being handled. “Just knowing that you might have it but you don’t know for sure and you might not know for months or years because for a long time there was no way to check while at the same time, all your friends were dying.” “I think fear was the overwhelming feeling,” journalist Leon Neyfakh said to the Guardian, having interviewed many who survived the era for the most recent season of his Fiasco podcast.