The New Republic

June 5, 1995

The White Cloud

Freddie Rodriguez is discouraged. He has just come from his afternoon's activity of trying to stop men from having unprotected sex in Miami's Alice Wainwright Park, a popular gay cruising spot. Rodriguez, 29, is a slim, handsome Cuban-American with a pale, worried face who works for Health Crisis Network. "I take a bag of condoms to the park with me and I try talking to people before they duck in the bushes and have sex," he explains. "I tell them how dangerous it is. Sometimes I beg them to use a condom. Sometimes they listen to me. Today, no one was interested." Most of the men, he says, are Latinos and range in age from 16 to 60. Many are married and would never describe themselves as gay. "Discrimination is not really the issue here. Most Latinos do not identify themselves as gay, so they're not discriminated against," he says, his voice drifting off. "Ours is a culture of denial."

To understand why the second wave of aids is hitting Latinos particularly hard, one would do well to start in Miami. Once a mecca for retirees, South Beach today is a frenzy of dance and sex clubs, for hetero- and homosexual alike. "We have the highest rate of heterosexual transmission in the country, the second-highest number of babies born with aids and we are number one nationwide for teen HIV cases," says Randi Jenson, reeling off a litany that clearly exhausts him. Jenson supervises the Miami Beach hiv/aids Project and sits on the board of the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Community Center. "And we have the highest rate of bisexuality in the country." When I ask how he knows this, he says, "Trust me on this one, we know.... The numbers to watch for in the future will be Hispanic women--the wives and girlfriends."

Already, aids is the leading cause of death in Miami and Fort Lauderdale for women ages 25 to 44, four times greater than the national average. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (cdc), aids cases among Hispanics have been steadily rising. But any foray into the Latino subculture shows that the numbers do not tell the whole story, and may not even tell half. CDC literature notes that "it is believed that aids-related cases and deaths for Latinos are understated by at least 30 percent. Many Hispanics do not and cannot access HIV testing and health care." Abetted by widespread shame about homosexuality, a fear of governmental and medical institutions (particularly among undocumented immigrants) and cultural denial as deep as Havana Harbor, aids is moving silently and insistently through Hispanic America. It is the stealth virus.

"No one knows how many Latino HIV cases are out there," Damian Pardo, an affable Cuban-American, who is president of the board of Health Crisis Network, tells me over lunch in Coral Gables. "All we know is that the numbers are not accurate--that the actual cases are far higher. Everyone in the community lies about HIV." Everyone, according to Pardo, means the families, the lovers, the priests, the doctors and the patients. "The Hispanic community in South Florida is far more affluent than blacks. More often than not, people see their own family doctor who simply signs a falsified death certificate. It's a conspiracy of silence and everyone is complicitous."

Freddie Rodriguez--smart, affluent, urbane--didn't learn that Luis, his Nicaraguan lover, was HIV-positive until it was too late to do anything about it. "He was my first boyfriend. He would get sick at times but he refused to take a blood test. He said that it was impossible for him to be HIV-positive. I believed him. One day, he disappeared. Didn't come home, didn't go to work-- just disappeared." Frantic, Rodriguez called the police and started phoning hospitals. Finally, Luis turned up at Jackson Memorial Hospital. He had been discovered unconscious and rushed to intensive care. When Rodriguez arrived at the hospital, he learned that his lover was in the aids wing. Even then, Luis insisted it was a mistake. Two weeks later, he was dead. "I had to tell Luis's family that he was gay," Rodriguez says, "that I was his boyfriend and that he had died of aids. They knew nothing. He lived a completely secret life."

Although Rodriguez was enraged by his lover's cowardice, he understood his dilemma all too well. He remembered how hard it was to tell his own family. " When I was 22, I finally told my parents that I was gay. My mother screamed and ran out of the room. My father raised his hands in front of his eyes and told me, Freddie do you see what's in front of me? It's a big, white cloud. I do not hear anything, see anything and I cannot remember anything because it is all in this big white cloud.' And then he left the room." One of Rodriguez's later boyfriends, this one Peruvian, was also HIV-positive, but far more duplicitous. "He flat out lied to me when I asked him. He knew, but he only told me after we broke up, after we had unsafe sex," says Rodriguez, who remains HIV-negative. "Part of the machismo ethic," Rodriguez explains, " is not wearing a condom."

Miami's Body Positive, which provides psychological and non-clinical services to aids patients, is housed in a pink concrete bubble off Miami's Biscayne Boulevard. The building and much of its funding are provided by founder Doris Feinberg, who lost both her sons to aids during the late 1980s. The gay Cuban-American star of MTV's "The Real World," Pedro Zamora, worked here for the last five years of his life and started its P.O.P. program--Peer Outreach for Persons Who Are Positive. Ernie Lopez, a 26-year-old Nicaraguan who has been Body Positive's director for the last five years, estimates that 40 percent of the center's clients are Latino, in a Miami population that is 70 percent Hispanic. On the day I visit, I see mostly black men at the facility. Lopez warns me not to be fooled. "The Latino numbers are as high as the blacks, but they are not registered," he says. "Latinos want anonymity. They come in very late--when they are desperate and their disease is very progressed. Often it's too late to help them."

"Soy completo," is what they often say in Cuba, meaning, "I'm a total human being." It is the preferred euphemism for bisexuality and in the machista politics of Latino culture, bisexuality is a huge step up from being gay. It is this cultural construct that prevents many Latin men from acknowledging that they could be vulnerable to HIV, because it is this cultural construct that tells them they are not gay. Why worry about aids if only gay men get aids? "To be bisexual is a code," says Ernesto Pujol, a pioneer in Latino aids education. "It means, I sleep with men but I still have power.' I think there is a legitimate group of bisexuals, but for many bisexuality is a codified and covered homosexuality." Self-definitions can get even more complex. "I'm not gay," a well-known intellectual told me in Havana last year. "How could I be gay? My boyfriend is married and has a family."

Without putting too fine a point on it, what defines a gay man in some segments of the Latino world is whether he's on the top or the bottom during intercourse. "The salient property of the maricon," my Cuban friend adds, "is his passivity. If you're a top,'--el bugaron--you're not a faggot." Moreover, there are also many heterosexual Latino men who do not regard sex with another man as a homosexual act. "A lot of heterosexual Latinos--say, after a few drinks--will

a transvestite as a surrogate woman," says Pujol, "and that is culturally acceptable--absolutely acceptable." Hence the potential for HIV transmission is far greater than in the mainstream Anglo world. According to Pujol, "only Latinos in the States are interested in other gay men. They have borrowed the American liberated gay model. In Latin America, the hunt is for straight' men. Look at the transvestites on Cristina's (the Spanish-language equivalent of "Oprah") talk show. Their boyfriends are always some macho hunk from the bodega." Chino, a Cuban gay now living in Montreal, typifies the cultural divide. "I don't understand it here," he says scornfully. "It's like girls going out with girls." "If you come out," says Jorge B., a Cuban artist in Miami Beach, "you lose your sex appeal to straight' men" (straight in this context meaning married men who have sex with other men). The Hispanic preference for "straight men" is so popular that bathhouses such as Club Bodycenter in Coral Gables are said to cater to a clientele of older married men who often pick up young lovers after work before joining their families for dinner. Some men will not risk going to a gay bar, says Freddie Rodriguez. "They go to public restrooms where they can't be identified." While many gay Hispanics do eventually "come out," they do so at a huge price--a shattering loss of esteem within their family and community. "The priest who did Mass at my grandfather's funeral denied communion to me and my brother," recalls Pardo. "He knew from my mother's confession that we were gay."

Latino attitudes here are, of course, largely imported, their cultural fingerprints lifted straight out of Havana, Lima or Guatemala City. Consider Chiapas, Mexico, where gay men were routinely arrested throughout the 1980s; many of their bodies were later found dumped in a mass grave. Or Ecuador, where it is against the law to be a homosexual, and effeminate behavior or dress can be grounds for arrest. Or Peru, where the Shining Path has targeted gays for assassination. Or Colombia, where death squads do the same, characteristically mutilating their victims' genitals.

While Latino hostility to homosexuals in the United States tends to be less dramatic, it can also be virulent, particularly when cradled in reactionary politics. In Miami, right-wing Spanish-language stations daily blast their enemies as "communists, traitors and Castro puppets." But the epithet reserved for the most despised is "homosexual" or "maricon." When Nelson Mandela visited Miami in 1990, he was denounced daily as a "marijuanero maricon"--a pot-smoking faggot--for having supported Fidel Castro.

On the other side of the country, aids Project Los Angeles is the second-largest health provider for aids patients in the United States (after Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York). It's a sparkling facility with a food bank, a dental program and all manner of support services. Housed in the David Geffen Building at the corner of Fountain and Vine, it is well-provided for by a generous Hollywood community. Currently, aids Project Los Angeles attends to the needs of more than 4,500 clients, 60 percent of whom are gay men. Roughly one-fourth of the total are Latinos, and the majority of those are Mexican. Thirty-two-year-old Troy Fernandez is one of the project's senior aides on public policy. Born in Yonkers and of Puerto Rican descent, Fernandez is a caramel-colored black man with long dreadlocks streaming down his back. Dressed in crisp white jeans, he's as slim and elegant as a fountain pen. He's also HIV-positive--part of the second wave.

Although Fernandez "did the downtown dance scene and Fire Island," in his 20s, he didn't go to the bathhouses, and he was never on the front line of the party scene. Even when the political equation of the gay revolution--"the more promiscuous, the more liberated"--still had currency, Fernandez was warier than his peers. By 1981, friends of his had started to die of the mysterious illness then known as the gay plague. Fernandez got himself checked out as soon as HIV testing became available, and came up negative year after year while he continued to practice safe sex. Then he moved to Los Angeles and met Rodrigo.

Rodrigo was a well-educated Mexican-American, a high-level insurance executive, a Republican conservative and "completely closeted." Among Rodrigo's tightly knit family, only one of his brothers--also gay--knew his secret. When Fernandez asked his partner if he was HIV-positive, he said no. He'd never been tested, but he knew he wasn't. He also insisted he was monogamous. "It's all about what risks you are willing to take," says Fernandez slowly. "I understand why people stop practicing safe sex. One is always renegotiating the risk factors at some level. You see, you want to believe that your lover is telling you the truth."

In 1990, Rodrigo got sick. By then Fernandez had become suspicious, and pressed his partner to be tested. "I told him he had to do it for my sake," he says, "if nothing else." When Rodrigo learned he was positive "it was a double whammy," says Fernandez. "He had to admit that he was sick and dying and worse--he had to admit that he was gay." Within the year, Fernandez learned that he, too, had the virus. Remembering, he lets loose a long sigh. " I don't have an answer for why I took a chance. I knew better, but it only takes one time." Fernandez surmises on the basis of personal anecdotal experience that as many as "90 percent of gay Latinos are closeted. Many may have self-identified but tell no one else." He bases his estimate on the number of married men who come into aids Project Los Angeles. "They always say they need the information for their brother or brother-in-law."

Rarely visible in the statistics are the wives and girlfriends of these men- -the group that experts predict will soar to the top of the aids charts by the end of the decade. Currently, blacks and Latinas make up 77 percent of all aids cases among women; the number of Latina cases is seven times higher than that of Anglo women. Researchers have long known that the "receptive partner," is at greater risk of contracting not only HIV but all sexually transmitted diseases. For reasons generally unknown, women tend to get sicker sooner and die faster. Moreover, for many Latinas striving to be good Catholic wives in a culture where church and family are the co-pillars of the community, contracting HIV is an unfathomable betrayal and an irredeemable disgrace.

Ernesto Pujol remembers a Salvadoran housewife in her mid-50s, then living in Brooklyn. "She had just tested positive. She was crying. She was so bitter- -so angry at her husband and the waste of her life. She had bought the whole Latina martyrdom of being the faithful wife." The husband was a drunk who had battered her, belittled her, and who would finally kill her. Still, she maintained that her husband had been infected by female prostitutes--and never looked at the evidence that he had had sex with men. "None of the women I worked with ever admitted that their spouses were gay or bisexual," says Pujol. "They would say, He drinks, you know.' They would rather blame prostitutes than consider the culturally unacceptable possibility of other men."

Wanda Santiago, 36, has lived much of her life as a pariah. A Puerto Rican lesbian, born and raised in Brooklyn, Santiago learned in 1989 that she was HIV- positive. At 13, she started doing drugs when her family moved to a rough neighborhood in Williamsburg. At 16, she was pregnant and married and drinking. After three years, her husband left. "I knew I was gay since I was 8," she says, "but I thought getting married would cure me." In 1978, Santiago came out and turned the care of her young son over to her mother.

Santiago suspects she contracted HIV during her romance with an Ecuadoran woman who was stationed with the Navy in Virginia. "I was crazy about her," says Santiago, who lived with the woman for three years. "Every now and then, she would bring a man to our bed," says Santiago. "It could have been one of them, or maybe I got it from a needle." A few years after her relationship hit the skids, Santiago sobered up for good, but by then she was feeling tired all the time. "For a week after I tested positive, I refused to believe it," she says. "Total denial."

Until 1991, Santiago worked for the Health & Rehabilitation Service screening Latinas with sexually transmitted diseases for HIV. "A lot of them refused to be tested," she says. "If they did test positive, they wouldn't believe it. The fear overwhelmed them. They would say, Don't talk about it,' I don't have it' and Don't tell my husband.' Many were in denial about their husbands screwing around. They thought they would get blamed for getting the disease. It's much worse in Hispanic culture than it is for whites or blacks because Hispanics won't even talk about it. A lot of the women were afraid to use condoms because they would get beat up by their husbands. See, if you're infected by a man, you're a whore. If you're infected by drugs, then you deserve it. But it's OK for a man to have HIV because it's OK for a man to whore around."

Mary Lou Duran has been working with the community in East Los Angeles for twenty-one years, the last three and a half of them as a case manager for the HIV patients at Altamed Services. Her clients are women: primarily Mexican- American or Central American refugees, both legal and undocumented, ranging in age from 17 to 56, and including "several grandmothers." A few of the older women may have gotten the virus from blood transfusions during surgery in Mexico, before the availability of HIV testing. But the overwhelming majority were infected by spouses or lovers. "One woman, from Guatemala, died in October," Duran says. "She had a very aggressive virus and died in less than three and a half years. She got it from a boyfriend and left a child behind. I feel the majority of the women I see are innocent victims--wives and girlfriends who have no idea what is going on." Duran then relates a more personal experience: "In my own family, there have been three deaths--three nephews who were gay. But my family says, No one has died of aids.' They call it cancer. We can't comfort each other because we can't discuss it. They weren't gay,' they say, and They didn't have aids.'"

By coincidence, one of Duran's ailing nephews ran into her at a clinic where she was working. "He was shocked to see me," she remembers. "He was sick--very progressed by the time he came in for help." They chatted briefly, awkwardly. It was her only personal contact with the tragedy in her family. " I have always been a community worker and my family has come to me when they have a need of sorts, but never while I do this work. They have never asked for my help. They have no interest or curiosity in my work. They never ask any questions. Nothing is ever said. The entire community is in denial. They just don't believe it is happening. They think that aids is about gay white males."

When not manning the aids project, Troy Fernandez makes the rounds of Hollywood bathhouses, doing what amounts to "interventions"--foisting condoms on men before they have sex. "The culture of the bathhouses has changed," he says, his voice brightening. "Some people sit around and talk. Sure, it's still mainly sex but there's some talk." Fernandez doesn't believe closing the bathhouses serves any purpose. "If you close the Hollywood Spa or the Compound, people will simply go to Plummer Park or the restroom at the Beverly Center. My friends in New York say the bathrooms at Juilliard are very busy these days. Face it, we are not going to stop people from having sex."

What then are the prospects of halting the second wave? Fernandez is initially speechless, and it takes a few minutes for him to get pumped up again. "We should get real that what we're doing is not working." He sings the praises of another program he's involved in--Saber es Poder (Knowledge is Power), which enables him and others to go into heavily Hispanic schools and talk to kids in grades seven through twelve. "But I can't say dick' to a kid in a school program without losing funding," he complains. "The truth is, Joycelyn Elders was right. We have to start talking to kids when they're young, not when it's too late or the second wave will keep rolling along and then the third wave and then the fourth wave."

As for Ernesto Pujol, he says he will never forget Carla, a soft-spoken, graceful Puerto Rican he met during his days running the Brooklyn aids unit of New York's Crisis Intervention Services. Happily married to a Brazilian man, Carla was at work on her doctorate. "The entire family got sick about the same time," says Pujol. "Her husband, she and their 2-year-old daughter. He died first, then the baby. I remember the day in the hospital that she told her family that she had aids and of course they became hysterical. It was very sad. She was a devout Catholic and aids caused her a great crisis of faith--like a slap in the face. As a couple, they had everything going for them--white upper-middle-class Latinos who could pass, educated and charming. Her husband had told her that he got it from an old girlfriend who was an addict but I suspected that he had had prior bisexual behavior. She chose to believe what her husband told her and I wasn't about to take that away from her. He was a very terrific, wonderful guy who was also working on his doctorate. But he was haunted by his past--and HIV is a past that won't ever let go of you."