Founder of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, Patrick Moore Talks About Moving Beyond AIDS-Based Shame

by Walter Wadas

“There was a way of living that has been lost.” Patrick Moore breathes his words out in a soft rush. If there is heaviness in his voice, it shows in a plaintive timbre of mellow longing. Moore explains how he came to write Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality.

“My book grew from the idea that I became more interested in talking about the culture that had died, in validating it, than in preserving the records of individual lives or the artifacts made by particular individuals.”

As founding director of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, Moore worked for ten years writing wills and planning bequests for the many gay men, and others, whose careers—and lives—were cut abruptly short by illness and disease [see Sidebar]. Yet, as he sits attentively in the Beacon Hill office of his Boston publisher, Beacon Press, Moore looks young and vibrant. Perhaps in the composure that joins body and voice he betrays the resignation which results from his years of close work with the dying and dead.

“I found that for my generation—forty and younger—it was almost impossible to look at the 1970s with anything approaching objectivity. All I could see and all I could think about was AIDS.” Then, his voice coloring with guilty sadness, he adds, “I even believed down deep in my heart that all the sexual abandon led to AIDS.”

Moore thinks that the Stonewall uprising, which many mark as the launch of the modern gay liberation movement, is too easily capped at the end of the continuum of 1960s’ radicalism. “It’s harder to put the seventies’ sexual exploration onto that continuum, and that’s what I wanted to do with the book. I wanted to find a way to look at the 1970s as a revolutionary time, as a time of artistry and creativity, rather than just a prelude to death.”

Moore is not sex-phobic. “Sex was the engine of creativity for gay culture,” he declares. “Sexual differentness, and the feeling of being different, gives us our specialness. The transgressive nature of much of the art which gay men produce is the very thing that makes our art special.” Then Moore turns pessimistic: “But I think ‘different and special’ have become ‘different and damaged.’”

How so? “Our impulse today is to be like everyone else.” Moore’s voice rises with metallic disdain. “Right now I think leading very traditional lives is being thought of as very revolutionary.” Moore despairs at this kind of accommodationist politics. “Something has to be said about reinventing the institution of marriage if we are going to embrace it,” he insists.

Moore also sees damage in semantics. “‘Men having sex with men’—that phrase makes me crazy. They don’t want to have an identity that says they are ‘gay’.” And, catching his breath, he adds without stammering at what may be a contradiction, “I think ‘gay’ is becoming a nothing term. As marriage becomes more and more the ideal, we have less and less to come together around. There is very little of our identity and our culture left.”

“‘Gay’ is a shallow consumer demographic,” is Moore’s sad assessment. “I think gay men in the seventies were not so interested in joining the rest of the world. They were interested in exploring how far they could move from the rest of the world.”

When “different and special” flip-flopped into “different and damaged”—as Moore thinks it did during the 1980s—shame replaced exuberance as the defining characteristic of the gay male psyche. The trust in experimentation, in anything being possible, eroded.

“There was a time in gay life when sex wasn’t so belabored with the idea of death and shame. There was a time when to be sexual was to be political....The gay world now is hunkered down. I’d like gay men to know what was possible.”

That’s why he wrote the book.

Walter Wadas works at Harvard University’s Fogg Museum of Art. He is a regular contributor to Lambda Book Report and also writes for Bay Windows and Southern Voice, the gay weeklies in Boston and Atlanta.

May 2004