World AIDS Day 2012: In Memory of Joe Galanti

"He Kills Me": AIDS activist art from Gran Fury. Ronald Reagan, burn in hell!

I wish I had a picture of my late friend and comrade Joe Galanti. I have a vivid if incomplete memory of a specific photograph: taken at a revolutionary counterprotest of some KKK/Nazi rally in the midwest in the late 1970s, it shows Joe and other comrades charging forward against the enemy lines. The comrades are wearing painted football helmets and bearing shields: the anti-fascist confrontations of those days were serious business. I remember the expression on Joe's face in this photo, yelling some warcry: it's like a battlefield photo, which I guess indeed it was. I don't remember if Joe was charging the fascists directly in this photo or up against their police protection. I vaguely remember this action ended in arrest, but it was taken right before I got to know Joe, and the details are lost to time.

Joe was born Joe Alongi, but in the ways of the revolutionary left of those days renamed himself Joe Galanti, picking an old family name for his nom d'guerre. The Chicago left wasn't so huge that he was a stranger to me when we finally became friends in 1978 or 1979: I had surely seen him around at demonstrations or events. His party, the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) was notorious for its anti-Klan/anti-Nazi work. While not quite as notorious as the Communist Workers Party who had comrades literally martyred by fascist killers down in Greensboro, North Carolina, at the end of that period, the RSL was definitely committed to building counterprotests that could literally stop the fascists in their tracks. Others on the left called them adventurists for their tactics, and remembering that photo there are certainly grains of truth in that argument. Chicago's segregated suburbs were infested with fascist vermin, of both the home-grown Klan variety and swastika-bearing, uniform dress-up German-style nazophiles. These were dangerous situations: I remember coming back from one suburban confrontation, must have been 1979 or 1980, when our car was followed from a counter-rally by a carload of Nazi sympathizers who tried ramming us off the highway: we escaped at high speed through a maze of suburban streets. The RSL had given up the football-helmeted charges by then but not the war itself.

The funny thing was that Joe was a pussycat. If he could be dynamic in action and a deft speech maker, he was soft-spoken and goofy in person. He was brilliant, with a great grasp of revolutionary politics and obviously a real commitment to fighting for his vision. Joe was also proudly out and gay, at a time when the left's relationship with the gay struggle was marked by great deals of ambivalence or even hostility.

Even though I had been warned off their adventurism, when I came out those many decades ago it was only natural that I would be forced to reevaluate the RSL since I was looking to integrate my communist politics with my newly open self-identity. I don't remember when I decided to treat Joe as something other than a raving lunatic, but at some point we began talking politics, and he really rocked my world.

He gave me a lot of space: he introduced me to another person in the RSL periphery, Michael Botkin, who would shortly become my roommate and also Joe's lover. We formed a sort of transitional organization, the boldly named Gay Revolutionary Discussion Group (GRDG, which we pronounced "Grudge"), and drew others toward the RSL from the gay activist world through this nominally independent core. Eventually I was ready to return to the hardcore left, formally joined the RSL, and GRDG folded into the League. It was smart organizing on Joe's part: and all the time we were studying the issues and organizing protests and intervening in the community. We organized protests against the movies "Cruising" and "Windows" and got involved in a fight against police repression of the Chicago gay community. I was really won to the RSL by Joe, who built a bridge between the critical Leninism of the RSL, community activism, and personal expression and identity.

Joe was fiercely charismatic: if he was intimidating at first, everyone who knew him soon fell in love with him. Having lived in New York City now for over thirty years, it's easy to forget how novel New Yorkers like Joe seemed to us quaint midwesterners back then. His New York accent and his dark Italian good looks were charming and compelling. I was happy when he and Michael became an item. We, sometimes with other comrades, would socialize frequently, going out to gay bars and discos or holding houseparties. Partying, Joe became a kind of psychedelic hippy, and warmly touchy and feely in ways enticing to those of us who grew up in Chicago's icy urbanity. He was an apostle of free love, and adored the icons of early gay counterculture.

It turned out Joe also had a personal secret dark side. He would sneak off to leather bars where he lived a whole different kind of life, one that even Michael didn't learn about til months after they had started becoming involved. This proved a bit of a challenge for Michael who didn't share the seriousness of the leather/S&M world, but he was game at least for a while. I remember sitting in our living room listening to music when Michael came out of his bedroom looking thoughtful and a little perplexed. "Hey I just fistfucked Joe." He announced before turning around and going back to his room off the kitchen in the back of the apartment. Joe seemed even happier having come out of this sort of second closet, though the intensity of Joe's sexuality became a tension on their relationship.

I was sad to leave Joe and Michael behind when I moved to New York in the late summer of 1981. I moved here to work for the League itself, and soon lived and breathed politics 24 hours a day. I stayed in touch with them, and saw them occasionally at national gatherings. But then that world just ended.

I remember several disturbing phone calls a couple years later. Calls from Joe, or Michael, or a mutual RSL friend. Joe was sick. Michael was sick. There was some weird factional trouble in the Chicago RSL. Michael left. It's confused in my memory... I remember a difficult conversation with Joe over the phone when he seemed deeply panicked...he had indeed been diagnosed with AIDS. Not a brand-new disease by then but still always a death sentence. He was discussing his plans: "If I live long enough..." the rest of this terrible pronouncement is blotted out of my memory by a rush of noise.

I saw him one more time. He came home to NYC on a sort of last pilgrimage...this was somewhere between 1985 and 1987. He seemed well, but much thinner.  He had a list of things to do. He wanted to feast on Nathan's oysters: he was shocked that they had become so expensive. Shortly thereafter I fell away from the League myself: personally terrified by AIDS and demoralized by the Reagan era, I was in political retreat and heading for hibernation. I don't even remember when the call came, or who it came from, that Joe had sickened again and succumbed to the disease. I'm guilty as hell that I was nowhere to be found. I miss him still: I miss his passion, his commitment, his courage, his ability to synthesize revolutionary politics into a compelling narrative. There's so much Joe didn't get to see. What a terrible terrible loss.

Joe loved to dance. He loved disco, and loved the adventurous new sounds that crept into the music after its r&b/funk base seemed to tire. One song I remember he loved to no end was "Pop Muzik," by M. This one's for you Joe.




I have been trying to honor my friends lost to AIDS each World AIDS day. Click here for my previous writings about them and the struggle against AIDS.

World AIDS Day: In Memory of My Friend John

I met John Moroney in the early 1980s at the Beacon Baths on the east side of midtown in New York City. Although I was proudly out, I was terrible at dating. I met guys at gay bars which led to the occasional hookup, the rare date, and the occasional friendship, but the place that holds a special memory for my mid-1980s social/sexual life is that pit of gay bathhouse. It was two random floors of a random office building. If you stayed overnight on Sunday, you found yourself leaving on damp-smelling elevators as the building's other tenants arrived for their regular office jobs. The Beacon was legendary for catering not to the downtown pretty-boy type but to closeted commuters and regular guys; it also proudly had the market cornered on the pre-bear world chubby-chaser scene: big guys like me could go there and feel welcome and desired. As though a study in contrasts the place was staffed by mostly straight immigrants from Bangladesh: they would hand you a towel and escort you to eiher your locker on the first floor or your little cubicle on the second, occasionally copping a feel.

Calling it a bathhouse is generous: there was a steamroom and a shower but this was a place not for spa-like recreation nor sporting activities but for sex. It was dimly lit and divided up into plywood cubicles with small little platform beds in each room. They played music from an extraordinarily small collection of cassette tapes; I still have flashbacks every time I hear Diana Ross's "Touch Me in the Morning" album with its cover of John Lennon's "Imagine." Imagine, indeed. I certainly didn't go every weekend, but when I went I almost always had a great time. And to my surprise, along with some great sex and occasional STD I also picked up quite a number of friends there. That was the way of things in that era of gay male culture. AIDS was unknown the first time I went there, and I believe the Beacon was among those closed in 1986 or so by public health officials. By then we were all pretty freaked out about AIDS and had stopped going to such places with such wanton enthusiasm.

Anyway one night I went and this incredibly handsome man with a bushy red beard started cruising me. This was a bath, not a bar, and there was no social chit-chat. I went into his room and we had what I recall being an incredibly hot encounter. In the way of such things and such places the social interaction was saved for afterwards. We were making out when I asked him what he did for a living. "I'm a cop!" he barked out and left it like that, almost as though it were the script of some kind of porn-movie fantasy scenario. Which meant we immediately had sex again.

I don't remember if it was that first time or the second time we happened to meet there, but we walked out together in the morning and he gave me a ride home. He wasn't, it turned out, much of a tough guy at all. He was a pussycat, actually. He really worked as a "corrections officer," ie, prison guard, in a career that shortly after we met went south. There was some accusation of something or other; and while John had some trouble finding worthwhile work for the rest of his life, that job hadn't been a good match for him. He was a working-class Irish-American native New Yorker but what John really loved was big guys and Broadway shows. I remember when he went to see "Cats," he explained every bit of that show to me despite my protestations that it sounded awful. He lived with his partner in an open relationship down in Chinatown; Randy was a playwright, and the two were completely open and tolerant of each other's busy social lives. I became one of John's many friends with benefits, and was lucky enough to be introduced to Randy; their relationship was strong and loving.

By 1987 or so John started getting sick, and soon enough he was diagnosed with AIDS. In a couple years he appeared to age twenty. He became gaunt, his hair got all wispy, and he was hospitalized repeatedly for pneumonia. He and Randy lived in a co-op John had inherited from his father. At one point his mother, a bitter harridan who hated John being gay but who lived in the same apartment complex, asked Randy what he was going to do when John died, where he would live. John was furious, the only time I'd ever seen him lose his temper. He raged at his mother assuring her that they had had papers drawn up to prevent Randy being turned into the street after John was gone. I visited John the last time in the hospital; he was comatose, still and silent. He died a day or two after my last visit.

At his funeral his mother and her relatives refused to acknowledge Randy or any of John's friends. We who had all known John as he really was, intimately even, were relegated to a corner of the funeral chapel. I have never seen such horrible cold-hearted people in my life. And true to her word, his mother immediately tried to force Randy out of the home they had shared together. Surrounded by the memories of their life together, Randy chose to leave the apartment rather than spend years engaged in a legal battle with such an evil human being.

I wish I could say John was the first or the only friend I lost that decade. Sadly neither is true. It seemed strangely commonplace back in the 1980s, when some acquaintance or friend of a friend disappeared from common sight, to assume the worst; how terrible that so often it was true, that another gay man had succumbed to the mysterious and awful AIDS.

I miss them all, and I feel like we owe it to all of them to keep their memories alive.

Sadly I have no photos of John. Graphic snagged from The Renaissance Society's website; that's a neon treatment of the old ACT-UP silence equals death icon.

World AIDS Day, 2009: Online Immortality?

December 1 is World AIDS Day.

The GLBT History Archive in conjunction with the Bay Area Reporter is launching an online obituary archive here, which should prove painfully fascinating, helping us remember those we have lost by giving them a presence online. I google my lost friends every now and then, wondering if they are granted online immortality.

I came up with these two links yesterday, though they're somewhat oblique. My friend Michael Botkin was my roommate in my last apartment in Chicago. We joined the RSL at about the same time, and he was dating Joe Galanti/Alongi, one of the leading members at the time. Michael's experience in the League ended badly: he seems to have been summarily drummed out of the group, whereas I sort of wandered away. Anyway, in the 1980s Michael went on to write for the ground breaking subversive journal Processed World, which covered the experience of working for a living in a newly computerized world from a truly human--and humane--perspective. Writing as "Kwazee Wabbit," Michael tied his experiences in the RSL to this brave new world, and the results are an entertaining read, albeit a sobering one.

Here's one article entitled "Progressive Pretensions" in which Michael documents the rude awakening of discovering that the good guys aren't always the good guys. Here's another called "The Art of the Purge" in which he tells the story of being purged from both the RSL and from an academic setting. His obituary from Poz Magazine is here; he died in 1996. Sadly I don't have a picture of Michael and wasn't able to find one online.

Most of us who are gay do not have children to carry on our stories. With so many lives cut so tragically short by the ravages of this disease, it becomes doubly important for those of us who have survived the past era to carry on their stories--the stories of our beloved friends--to the future. Always remember.

(If you haven't read my story of Steve Rose, today would be a good day to do so!)
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Update: thanks to the above referenced database (which doesn't seem to work in Firefox), here's an excerpt from Michael's obit, with a photo. Thanks to the BAR & the internet.