TALES FROM THE CLOSET: THE CHICAGO COP AND THE PURPLE PEOPLE EATER
I first published this story in September of 2005 but as today is National Coming Out Day, I felt it was more than worthwhile to publish it again.
In some ways it is the perfect piece for today, describing some intimate aspects of closet life as well as one of the powerful coming out moments I have ever experienced--a coming out that played a significant part in profoundly changing and saving my life.
In 1981, the "Gay Cancer" added yet another padlock to the door of my personal Closet. Not only did it become the most compelling of my many rationales for remaining closeted, it provided a completely new and almost nuclear-level power source for my fear of gay sex, I had always believed that coming out would destroy me and now the media had provided scientific proof.
The headlines were clear: Come out and die.
The threat of AIDS killed any remaining hope for a happy life and certainly contributed to the utter despair that led me to finally choose suicide on the night of my 40th birthday, October 22, 1988. On that night, I considered that with my life half over, AIDS nipping at my heels like a rabid dog, there really was no reason to continue with this pounding misery.
My battle for survival depended on some degree of hope, hope that one day I would find the courage to come out and end the nightmare, the psychic and spiritual horrors of closet life. But AIDS, like some impenetrable jungle, seemed to have completely overgrown what I believed was an already very dangerous road.
But life actually is full of surprises and the human spirit is not so easily defeated. And my life-changing surprise would come from an unexpected and very unlikely source: A Chicago cop who gave me back my hope.
When Steve, the cop, entered my life, I did not and could not have anticipated what was to happen. But many years later I would realize that Steve was one of the most important people I've ever encountered. In fact, he now holds a sacred place in my own personal pantheon of heroes. Sadly, he doesn't know this and never will. He died before I could hug him.
The story of Steve begins in 1983. At that time I headed the world's largest medical public relations operation and we had just landed an extraordinary account: designing a global marketing communications plan for what was to be the first mainstream biotech drug and one of the first anti-virals from an international pharmaceutical company.
This was to be an exciting time:
* a scientific milestone in biotechnology and medical science,
* a major marketing, image and financial relations coup for the pharmaceutical company concerned,
* a major political moment for the Food and Drug Administration,
* a professional high point for me
* and a desperately needed and intriguing breakthrough for several patient populations that had heretofore been helpless to the ravages of viral infections.
The key marketing challenge was that the first use for the drug concerned an obscure disease and a patient population that was almost entirely homosexual-- a word that could not even be politely used within the halls of the drug company.
In certain homophobic quarters, the disease, Kaposi's Sarcoma was glibly called the Purple People Eater. Kaposi's Sarcoma was easily recognized by purple lesions that would appear randomly on the patient's skin, sometimes hidden by clothes, but often not. It was one of the first identified physical manifestations of AIDS. And one that was impossible to hide at a time when fear of AIDS was almost at an hysterical level. This was a time when mothers wouldn't allow healthy gay men in the same room with their children for fear of air-born infection.
We worked on this drug launch for a full five years before it actually received FDA marketing approval. While that was not an unusual length of time for the FDA to review the science for a new compound and develop appropriate product labeling, it was seen as extraordinarily cruel by a gay community that was measuring life in days, not years.
Most decent and sane Americans outside of the FDA and the White House understood the urgency to quickly bring AIDS drugs to market; the wait was agony for patients. The well-connected pulled strings and got themselves into pre-approval clinical trials. The unconnected suffered and died.
his was a time, thanks to the Reagan administration, when AIDS was ignored by the federal government. It simply did not exist for President Reagan. As a result, the FDA saw little urgency in "rushing" drugs to market for this fringe patient population.
And the drug company in question was furiously pursuing other indications for viral infections that were not so "gay." But more on that in a bit.
While it's tempting to digress and rave and rant about our 40th president, I will stick to my story and just say that when I hear how Reagan is described as one of the greatest presidents in American history, I can't help but to remember that his blind indifference to the plight of thousands of HIV-stricken Americans is partly responsible for tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. This part of the Reagan legacy has been conveniently "forgotten."
But Reagan wasn't alone in his contempt and homophobia. AIDS had put KS on the map, so to speak. And of course, virtually every patient in the clinical trials and every patient with KS was homosexual. And this was of great concern to the drug company.
They did not want to go to their shareholders and to Wall Street with the news that the results of years of biotech research investment had produced a drug for homosexuals.
We had our orders: position the drug as a breakthrough cancer drug, a revolutionary anti-viral therapy and the first major practical application out of biotechnology. Under no circumstances should the drug be described or promoted as an AIDS medication. This was not to be an AIDS drug, it was not to be associated with the gay community. This was not to be a "gay" drug.
The Gay community has few enemies more dangerous or treacherous than a gay man in the closet so I of course worked diligently to deliver on my client's orders--knowing full well that it would cost lives and cause suffering. We would launch this drug, use KS as our vehicle to get it into medical practice, but then promote it for other cancers and viral infections. Once we had it on the market, approved for the KS indication, we would put the full force of the public relations and lobbying machine behind unapproved indications for "mainstream" conditions.
We would not support its use for AIDS patients, we would not provide necessary education and we would do all that we could to bury the story as it related to saving the lives of gay men.
But this is also a story of the best laid plans of mice and men...and boy oh boy, did they go astray.
Deeply in the closet when I first landed this assignment in 1982, I was as removed and as distant from "gay" as anyone could have possibly been. The human inside of me was a long-forgotten prisoner in an iron mask.
But by the time the drug was actually launched on November 21, 1988, it was also a month past the night that I had decided to commit suicide. By the evening of my 40th birthday, October 22, 1988, I had become a barely functioning human being. For all outward appearances, I was extraordinarily successful, wealthy, influential and one of the stars of my profession. But I was a golem, a creature of clay with no soul.
My then wife had surprised me with a birthday party and as I sat at the dinner table surrounded by my 25 closet relatives and friends, the sense of isolation and the complete lack of intimacy was more soul-crushing than it had ever been before. I even found myself wondering if I'd be able to stand. Of course, I did, barely.
It would not be until the following August and after two unsuccessful suicide attempts that I would first have sex with another man. But from that night in October of 1988 through the afternoon of August 5, 1989, my first gay sexual encounter, I lived through the most painful and emotionally dark time of my life.
In the middle of all this, I was still running the largest and most influential pharmaceutical and medical public relations division in the world. Additionally, I was now Chief Operating Officer of the New York division of the overall firm. I also sat on the company's board of directors. To the outside world, I was a powerful man; at home I was filling a shoebox with the pills I would use to end my life. I walked through those days like a zombie, watching myself from a distance, operating my brain and body as if by remote control, professionally surviving thanks to my own momentum.
And now it was time for the launch of the KS drug, the first major big drug company breakthrough from the biotech industry, one of the most prestigious moments in the history of my public relations firm--and at the head of this monumental undertaking? A golem from the closet.
As I explained earlier, from the very beginning of this project we had worked hard to design and implement a strategy that was, we believed, going to successfully steer all discussion of the drug away from the gay cancer, away from AIDS and away from the word "gay".
Key to our strategy was to find a patient for media interviews, a patient who was heterosexual and as "ungay" as possible. After six months of interviews and research, we hit pay dirt. It was as if Saint Ronald of Hollywood had delivered unto us a marketing miracle.
We not only found our patient spokesperson, we found a John Wayne. This was a patient who could speak out for the miracle of this drug and a patient who would be everything that a gay patient was not: masculine, mainstream and heterosexual. And, not only did we succeed in finding the perfect "poster boy" for the new drug, he was a perfect poster boy for heterosexuality: an all-American boy next door, a handsome, strapping Chicago city police detective with blue collar and middle-American origins.
Our plans for Officer Ultimate Heterosexual were extensive: a regional talk and news show circuit tour, national television including the TODAY show, all three network news programs and speaking engagements for media, physicians and the financial community.
I had pulled off a miracle, a major marketing coup. I had delivered the impossible. Our focus was clear, this good-looking cop had been stricken with a rare cancer during the prime of his life and we were giving him renewed hope. Our drug was an anti-cancer drug rushed from biotechnology to the desperate immune system of a Chicago cop. And the drug, now a proven anti-viral would ultimately be used for many other cancers and viral infections.
With approval only hours away, we flew to Chicago to prepare the cop for interviews and to produce a video news release. In a suite at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, several of us from the agency and the drug company were in the bedroom reviewing comments for our poster boy while the camera crews were assembling in the living room. ABC World News Tonight was the first to arrive and they asked for an on-camera pre-interview.
I approached our hero and asked him if he was ready. He looked at me with a dead man's stare and then, quite suddenly, without changing his expression, this man's man began to cry.
I put my hand on his shoulder. "Stage fright," I asked? Considering the importance of this event, I had personally media-trained the cop, and even provided tips for dealing with stage fright. I was good. People I trained did not cry. Steve was crying.
Confusion and anxiety spread across his face. He whispered, "I'm about to go on national television, aren't I?"
I was stunned and pissed. Duh, I thought, Dumb cop. What the fuck? "Uh, yes, of course, you know that. You know that. We media trained you. You have the schedule."
"No, no..I mean, yes, yes...I know that. Of course, I know that. I need to make a phone call before you let the cameras in."
"Of course." I handed him the phone. Did he need privacy? No. He looked around the room at the public relations people, the ABC producer, the drug company executives and laughed at the idea of privacy. "I'm about to out myself on national television, talking in front of you guys is small potatoes."
Out himself?
In front of us he telephoned his father, explaining where he was and what he was about to do. He told his dad that he had AIDS and that, yes, he was gay. "I love you with all my heart and I hope you can forgive me." And then he put the phone back on the hook and motioned for the cameras to come in.
And that night on ABC World News Tonight, the very heterosexual Chicago Police Detective outed himself.
The drug company execs and their PR team met late into the night to resolve this "crisis" but I wasn't listening. I could barely hold back a relentless need to vomit.
I couldn't focus on this obscene little meeting. A constant undertow of emotions made it difficult to even stay in the room. Outwardly, I was seated at the head of the table, in reality I was fetal.
Every cell in my body burned with the need to take Steve in my arms and cling to him until the end of forever. I needed my cheek against his cheek, our tears mingling. I wanted to press my body as close to his body as possible so that his courage would warm me and make me alive.
But instead, like the other heterosexuals in the room, I ignored the human drama that had just played out before our eyes and focused on saving the public relations program, preparing a crisis strategy for handling investors and the financial community, resolving an urgent marketing crisis and considering the possibility that we had just unwillingly launched one of the first AIDS drugs.
Never before had I been so conscious of the huge rift between me and me.
This Chicago cop had ripped open my heart and unleashed a flood of emotions that I did not know existed within the emptiness that I called me.
At the time, the situation seemed to quicken my resolve to end life. But it actually had exactly the opposite effect. I just didn't and couldn't see it within the moment but I did remotely sense that everything had changed. With one phone call this cop has ostensibly ruined five years of hard work. With one phone call this cop had rekindled my soul.
Seventeen years later
Just this morning, I had breakfast with a potential client and he asked about my family. And once again, I had to come out. The never-ending mini-coming outs that we never really talk about. You know what I mean. Would he be turned off? Would it cost me an assignment? I even hesitated and considered one of the many white lies we use, avoidance of gender-specific pronouns...but I felt the angelic presence of my Chicago cop and my courage and the rightness of who I am quickly returned and I came out, again. Remembering Steve always make my own coming out jitters seem silly, it puts my own problems in perspective and it allows me to use his strength.
OK, I'll say it. I'm going down the sentimental old queen road. But when you have a true hero in your life, the words carry meaning.
Sometimes, he is the wind beneath my wings. There I said it. And I'll say this as well: I hope he knows it because I was too afraid and too lost at the time to tell him when I had the chance . So, Chicago cop, can you hear me? You are the wind beneath my wings. I said it again.
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