Before AIDS. Katie Batza
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of gay liberation—to radically overhaul societal sexual norms through a wide variety of protests, services, and personal interactions to destigmatize homosexuality. This political framing would not have translated well to other places because it was either too gay or too radical, illustrating the importance of local context in understanding gay liberation as a political movement and rhetoric.
Tandem Activism
Neither background nor primary force, gay liberation factored into the development of gay health services in Chicago as a social and personal awakening rather than as the larger political movement characteristic of Los Angeles. In 1965, David Ostrow began attending the University of Chicago as a sixteen year old with little interest in political activism and an internal struggle with his homosexuality, which he described as “something to be overcome in myself … it wasn’t natural.”61 Upon arriving in the city’s South Side Hyde Park neighborhood, Ostrow pursued not only his bachelor’s degree but also set out on an academic path leading to an MD as well as a PhD in biochemistry. In the wake of a failed two-year marriage to his high school girlfriend, Ostrow, then immersed in his medical school training, finally came to terms with the sexual attraction to men he had felt since early adolescence, coming out as a gay man in 1972.62 In his limited spare time, he began to explore Chicago’s growing gay geography, visiting bars and bathhouses in the city’s near and far north neighborhoods. In these gay businesses, he found a surprising number of other area medical students representing many different medical colleges who often complained that “a lot of what was taught to us in medical school was either homophobic or was ignorant. So, a bunch of us said … let’s form a social organization to support us.”63 Thus, a gay medical students group was born. The formation of the group was in many ways typical of the period’s zeitgeist, in terms of both student activism and a vibrant and growing gay community in Chicago. Ostrow recalled, “It’s what everybody [did]…. You fe[lt] isolated from other people with whom you share[d] an interest and you fe[lt] left out at your job or school or something and you form[ed] a … group.”64
Equal parts social and professional support, the group quickly moved from simply supporting gay medical students to also addressing the health needs of gay patients. As they set their sights on offering accurate, nonjudgmental, low-cost, and gay-friendly services, the gay medical students group had only a vague understanding of the tremendous need in the gay community and all that offering health services required. Ostrow recalled, “We had no idea of how we were going to do it.”65 The driving force behind their goals for gay health was a deep commitment to and love of medicine, rather than a political ethos, as in Los Angeles and Boston. For many members of the gay medical students group, medicine was not simply a career path or job, but a lifelong dream that, as they finished medical school, was becoming real. For those group members who went on to be central gay health activists in Chicago, a love of medicine, research, and science propelled them. In this way, gay health activism in Chicago combined both a passion for medicine and gay liberation symbiotically.
Among their initial efforts, the gay medical students group began educating area doctors and public health officials about how to better treat and engage the gay community—a decidedly different approach than the pickets and protests in Los Angeles. They created fact sheets, a very early and primitive version of the safe sex handbooks that would become common in the 1980s, which they sent to private doctors, city clinics, and gay men who called the group’s phone number asking for more information.66 Through these fact sheets and a few speaking engagements they arranged at local medical schools, city clinics, and professional development meetings, other organizations and gay community members learned of the group, adding to its ranks and reputation as an advocate for gay people in medicine. By the spring of 1974, as the group began to explore offering medical services to the gay community, nurses, medical technicians, and older and well-established medical professionals had eagerly joined the group. One such doctor was Dr. Stanley Wissner, who offered that the gay medical students could provide services under his medical license and malpractice insurance if they could find a space for a clinic.
In May 1974, a gay social service organization in Chicago, Gay Horizons, offered the group the space they needed to expand their services to include testing and treatment. At that time, Gay Horizons was a relatively small and new nonprofit organization with big plans for expansion. At the start of 1974, it consisted of a one-night-per-week coffeehouse, a collaborative program with the local gay teachers association to help gays and lesbians earn their GED, and a weekly business meeting open to the community.67 Despite its relatively meager service offerings at the time, the mission and vision of Gay Horizons put the organization on a trajectory toward growth and a wide range of programs similar to the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center, complete with “a Community Center and a professional Counseling Service.”68 The stated purpose of the organization, “to promote understanding and healthy development through assistance to … Gay people in bringing about an awareness of themselves as human beings and acceptance of their individual lifestyles, and an upgrading in the quality of their lives through the active promotion and support of specific programs to meet educational, emotional and social needs,” complemented the aims of the gay medical students group in wanting to improve health care and education in the gay community.69 While Gay Horizons and the medical students group were mutually beneficial for one another, they also had very different interests and methods. Gay Horizons was first and foremost interested in creating gay community, which its structure and programs reflected, while the gay medical students were concerned with science, health, and medicine. Despite the culture difference between these two groups, the benefits of collaboration drew them to one another. Reacting to numerous requests and the gay medical students group’s growing reputation as gay medical advocates, Gay Horizons organizers asked if the gay medical students group would offer free testing and education during an organization-sponsored weekly coffeehouse event where gays and lesbians could gather, read poetry, and mingle in a space rented by Gay Horizons. With Wissner willing to assume liability, the free coffee shop space, and a group of medical students ready to volunteer their time and services, the student group began offering weekly VD testing. Even as the two groups had different, though complementary missions, a mutually beneficial collaboration grew out of Gay Horizons’ desire to expand into a full social service organization and the gay medical students group’s plan to provide VD testing.
Like the early days in Boston’s Fenway Community Health Clinic and the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center, the coffeehouse “clinic” reflected the needs of the gay male community, the relaxed regulation of community health services, and the entrepreneurialism of gay health activists of the period. One of the medical students group’s most active early members (besides Ostrow) was Kenneth Mayer, a medical student at Northwestern University. In just his second year of school, Mayer jumped at the chance to work with patients and volunteered weekly to do exams and conduct testing. He commented in an interview, “In retrospect this was something we would never allow now … because my training was minimal, I was really early in my medical training and the level of supervision was really minimal but you kind of quick-study. It was a really incredible learning experience.”70 In 1980, after finishing medical school, Mayer moved to Boston, where he became instrumental in transforming the Fenway clinic into a world-class research institution. The casual, make-do approach to staffing permeated nearly every aspect of the clinic, which consisted of “a coffee pot, a portable kitchen table, [and] a room above an old grocery market.”71 Ostrow explained how the ethos translated into the health services:
Wednesday evening once a week … We were mostly medical students and a couple of residents and maybe a couple of actually licensed MDs. So we couldn’t really officially be a treatment site, but we would try to have a doctor there every Wednesday night, and if there was a doctor there he would write a prescription for medication. But if we couldn’t get a doctor there or the patient didn’t have money for the prescription, we would actually pilfer the medications from the stockrooms at our hospitals where we were training.72
Mayer concurred, “There was a lot of begging, borrowing, and stealing,” just as had been the case in Boston.73
Within months of its opening the gay health clinic also began to go by its own name, which reflected