A PROGRAM OF MIX – THE NEW YORK LESBIAN & GAY EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL Interviewee: Michael Nesline Interview Number: 014 Interviewer: Sarah Schulman Date of Interview: March 24, 2003 © 2003 The New York Lesbian & Gay Experimental Film Festival, Inc. ACT UP Oral History Project Interview of Michael Nesline March 24, 2003 SARAH SCHULMAN: If you just say your name, how old you are, today’s date and the address of where we are? MICHAEL NESLINE: We have to stop. Okay, my name is Michael Nesline, and I live at 171 East 2nd Street, Apartment 6, in New York City, and I’m 51 years old. And, what else did you need to know from me? SS: Today’s date. MN: Today’s date is the 24th of March, 2003. SS: Okay. Michael, do you remember the first time you heard the word AIDS. MN: Not the very first time, no. I don’t recall the first time I heard AIDS. SS: Do you remember when it first came close to your life? MN: Oh yeah, definitely, clearly. In 1985, in March of 1985, a man that I had a long love affair with became ill with what was then diagnosed as pneumocystis pneumonia. That occurred and that was the first person who was most close to me. I had known a couple of individuals, prior to that who – one fellow, in particular, about a year earlier, had died from what I guess was being called AIDS at that time. I’m not sure. I mean, I remember someone was diagnosed with Cat Scratch Fever, and that must have been, like, 1982, maybe. And, thinking back on it later, we realized that that must have been –- that he had AIDS, and nobody knew what it was. And, I do remember that there was something called GRID, for awhile, but exactly when it became AIDS is not clear to me anymore. Michael Nesline Interview 2 March 24, 2003 SS: So, at that moment, Michael, who were you? What kind of life were you looking forward to? MN: Well, I’m not – I was not the sort of person who, particularly had any ambitions, so I was looking forward to – I don’t know – just getting by. I was living in the East Village, I was driving a taxicab, some friends of mine and I were running a nightclub in the East Village. SS: What club was that? MN: It was called Limbo Lounge. And, I was trying to keep up with people who were 10 years younger than me, basically. I’m still doing that, but other – I was, sort of a frustrated artist. SS: Were you making art? MN: No. That was what was frustrating about it, I guess. SS: So, where did you grow up? MN: I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC. SS: So, did you move to New York to be an artist? MN: Sort of. I left Washington, after high school and went to Austin, Texas, because I’d heard there were hippies there. And there were. They were in sundresses, shopping for avocados in the middle of the day at the Piggly Wiggly and that made me very happy. And some friends and I there started a theatrical troupe called Esther’s Follies, which still exists, if you’re interested. So, after nine years in Austin, I decided I needed to get out of the fire and into the frying pan. The other way around, actually. So, I moved to New York – sort of with aspirations to get involved in theater. SS: So, how did Limbo come about? Michael Nesline Interview 3 March 24, 2003 MN: Because, it seemed like a way that I might be able to get involved in theater. We had performances, and served food and showed art and it was sort of like a prototypical East Village – you know – happening. SS: Who were some of the other people involved? MN: No one that is germane to our discussion about ACT UP, but a fellow named Michael Gormley, who goes by the name, Michael Limbo, today, and, I believe, still lives upstairs from Maria Maggenti; Stephen Evasew, and a man named Tri Garraty. The four of us were sort of a gang, and we started this place together. SS: So, when your friend got sick, how did you proceed? MN: Well, Joe [Hollis] was hospitalized at St. Vincent’s. He contacted his Tape I family in Georgia and they told him that he could not come home, which is, really, all he 00:05:00 wanted to do. But they were very upset that he turned out to be gay, much less to have AIDS. And so, they didn’t want to ever see him again. And, he and I had lived here in this apartment at different times, together. And, though, at that point, he was living in Hoboken, and I just said he was in St. Vincent’s and that’s inaccurate. He was, actually, in a hospital in New Jersey. He was in St. Mary’s Hospital in New Jersey. And I actually believed that his parents’ refusing to have him come home was a momentary aberration on their part, and believing that that was the case, I said, well, Joe, you can come stay with me, for as long as you need to, because I assumed that in 24 hours, they were going to change their mind, and everything would work out the way that he wanted. They never did change their mind, and when Joe was discharged from the hospital, he did come here, and we just proceeded to live together. And, Joe was well. He was taking Bactrim everyday, as PCP prophylaxis. There were no medications for HIV, at that time. Michael Nesline Interview 4 March 24, 2003 He began taking AZT as an experimental drug, sometime in the late summer of ’85, and there were fistfuls of hair falling out of his head. And, in the late summer, he and I began to have discussion about actually finding a larger place to live, having decided that this was a good thing that was happening between the two of us, and he needed the, sort of the emotional and psychological support of having someone care about him, and I felt capable and motivated to be that person. But, before we could actually put that plan into action to look for a place, Joe became ill. He began to develop what I now know is called petichiae – it’s little, small broken blood vessels on the tops of his feet – his capillaries were bursting, and he was hospitalized and his platelet count was very low and they’d began giving him platelets, but no sooner would they give him platelets but that his platelet count would drop even lower, and they offered to do a splenectomy on him. They had never seen this before, or, at least, Barbara Starrett, who was his MD had not seen this. And, so, she recommended – they had stopped his Bactrim and he was on – they recommended that he have his spleen removed. But, Joe was a very vain person, and the idea of having an operation and having a surgical scar, having the integrity of his body interfered with was anathema to him. So, he chose not to do that, and he said, no, I prefer to just let nature take its course. And, now, I’m a nurse, and so now I understand better, the implications of what he was saying. But, at the time, I didn’t really understand, except that I could see that his doctor was very alarmed, and so, I asked her, well, what does that mean, then? If he says that he’s going to let nature take its course – the three of us were standing in the room together – he’s in the bed, and Barbara and I are standing, and she said, well, then, it’s just a matter of time before Joe will die. Michael Nesline Interview 5 March 24, 2003 And I said, well, are we talking days or weeks or months? And she said, well, no, we’re talking probably days or weeks. And, as a matter of fact, we were talking 24 hours. And so, I spent, essentially, that last 24 hours with Joe, and the next morning, Joe passed away. And, parenthetically, it was the exact 25th anniversary of my mother’s Tape I 00:10:00 death when Joe died and that had great emotional resonance for me, and it had a real transformative effect on my life. Losing Joe, made me realize that I needed to do something more constructive than just what I was doing – driving a taxi cab and being a frustrated artist. And so, I enrolled in nursing school, in the fall of 1985 or January of 1986. SS: Did you have any support from any of your other family members when Joe was sick? MN: No, but only because I didn’t share that information with any of my family members. SS: Why not? MN: Well, because I didn’t share much of my life with my family, period. SS: So, were you in the closet to them, at the time? MN: Essentially, yeah. SS: So, what do you think is the impact of not having any family support for you or Joe, on your situation? MN: I have no idea, Sarah. I cannot answer that question. I know what the – having family support now, in some form, and realizing now that I’m very grateful and happy that I have family that I feel loved by – that matters so much to me, and I feel so grateful that I’ve managed to transform my life and make that part of my life.