May Lose Home Over Gay Athletic Event : Dying AIDS Victim Wages Fight With Olympic Panel

Dr. Tom Waddell, a tall, muscular blond Greek-god type when he represented his country in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, still looks pretty good. Lankier now and bearded, in his favorite dress of sweats and sneakers, he still suggests the supple strengths of the man who was once the world’s sixth best decathlon competitor. Not bad for a guy pushing 50. Not bad for someone dying of AIDS.

“It’s not that depressing,” he says, showing a visitor through his house, an old sports club hall in the San Francisco Mission district that Waddell has lovingly converted into a home and where he also holds concerts and lectures, from string quartets to a speech by Sen. Alan Cranston.

Whether the house eventually passes to Waddell’s daughter--as he hopes--or to the United States Olympic Committee, is something the U.S. Supreme Court undertook to decide Monday, when it agreed to hear his appeal of a judgment the USOC won against him in the U.S. Court of Appeals’ 9th Circuit.

In 1981, Waddell founded an athletic event he called the Gay Olympics. The second of the event’s two quadrennial meetings in 1986 attracted 3,500 athletes from around the world. What Waddell overlooked, however, was that Congress had awarded the USOC exclusive use of the word olympic . In 1982, the committee sued Waddell for trademark infringement and won, obtaining a lien against his house to recoup its $96,000 in lawyers’ fees, plus interest. Since then, Waddell’s appeal, contending that the USOC could not claim exclusive use of a “historic, popular and common English word” (San Francisco Arts and Athletics vs. USOC, 86-270), has been making its way through the federal courts. Washington is its last stop; if he loses, the house goes.

At the moment, though, he’d rather call a reporter’s attention to the hummingbirds swarming around the lovely garden off to the side of his house, pick a visitor’s brain for advice on the best word processor or offer his views on arms control. Death, when it comes up, is discussed as absence from a life that has been wonderful.

“I’ve had an incredibly rich life. I don’t feel like I’ve been cheated. I competed in the Olympics, I got my MD, traveled all over the world, pursued a couple of dreams, saw them come to fruition, not the least of which is my daughter, who’s 3, which was the greatest miracle in my life. I just can’t get enough of this kid.”

Bumps in Neck Glands

The doctor is now a statistic at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, one of the 26,566 humans whose immune system has succumbed to the dread AIDS virus, which is now thought to have entered the bodies of another million or two Americans. Most of them don’t yet know that the virus is with them, not having felt, as Tom did one morning, the tell-tale bumps in their neck glands or heard the cough that doesn’t go away.

As a physician with considerable emergency room experience, Waddell’s gotten used to the idea of death, in general, although he confesses it’s a bit more difficult when you’re the patient and you’ve already gone through the pneumonia and TB that often accompany this dread disease.

“Being a physician,” he was saying in tones that suggested he was becoming bored with the subject, “I always had to deal with it. I’m not afraid of dying. No one has ever devised a way of avoiding it. I have two choices. I can either look at this situation and get hysterical and become a basket case, or I can say, ‘Look, I have so much time, let me make it as productive as possible.’ ”

Waddell knows the virus--he is a specialist in infectious diseases, has been a virology researcher at Stanford and has kept up on the literature. When first interviewed in September, he had concluded that none of the medicines available were worth taking. But, after the release of some positive findings on the drug AZT and given the progression of some pain up his leg, he decided to give it a go.

Messages to Daughter

He needs the time so that he can finish the notes and tapes that he is preparing for his daughter to listen to at different stages of her life, explaining who daddy was, what he wanted from life and how he came to die this horrible way.

“How do you explain to a young girl growing up that your father was gay and died of AIDS and your mother is a lesbian?” Waddell asked out loud before answering: “I’m gay. But I always wanted a family. I’m sorry I waited so long. I was waiting for the right person to come along, and there was Sara.

“We met during the first Gay Olympic Games. She came on board and said, ‘I’m a jock and I like what you’re doing. And we gotta know each other,’ and it turned out we both had the same wish, which was to have a child, so we did.”

How do a lesbian woman and a gay man produce a child? The old-fashioned way, Waddell suggested. “You know, sexuality is such a nuance, anyone who’s 100% of one thing or 100% the other is probably a little bit Martian. I for one dislike the whole labeling process, you know, gay and straight. What the hell does that mean? Sexuality is a question of preference, and it’s all a nuance.

“My sexuality,” Waddell continued, “is certainly different from yours, mine is different from my two tenants downstairs, two guys that have been together for 32 years. It’s just an individual preference as to how it’s manifested, and it annoys me that the minute you say, ‘Well, OK, I’m attaching myself to the gay community as an openly gay person,’ you’re suddenly pigeonholed. This is what you are, this is what we expect you to be and this is how we expect you to behave.

“We’ve been conditioned from day one. You’re wrong. You’re abnormal. You’re bizarre. I grew up not being able to discuss my homosexuality to anybody, not my priest, mother, father, brothers, I couldn’t do it because they would have viewed me as some diseased individual that should have been eliminated.”

Football Scholarship

At 19, Waddell, who had been attending what he described as a “conservative little jock school college” on a football scholarship, met the first adult who did not despise his homosexuality. He was “a 63-year-old Jewish Socialist intellectual” who had been associated with Ernest Hemingway in publishing a literary magazine during the Spanish Civil War. They became lovers and spent the next 25 years together. The older man died last year at the age of 90, still in the closet of his choice.

Laughing at the suggestion that the old veteran of a lost, more discreet world had died from something as modern as AIDS, Waddell said, “No. And I’m glad he died when he did because he didn’t know that I got it. You know, he was born in 1895 and the attitudes then were very different. He always used to say to me, ‘Don’t ever tell anybody that you’re a homosexual, you’ll ruin your career.’ ”

When Waddell called his own family to tell them he had AIDS, there was disbelief. “They can’t believe it. Why me? Why you? ‘Of all the people I would have expected of getting AIDS, you’d be the last, Tom.’ I said, ‘That doesn’t matter. I have it.’ ”

Although gay, he didn’t seem a prime candidate to contract AIDS: “I’m healthy and athletic and a doctor, and I specialize in infectious diseases and I haven’t had an outrageous sexual life and there’s the baby and, you know, all these impinge on people’s minds, they say, ‘Well, if anybody’s safe, he’s safe.’ But I have it. Doesn’t matter where or how I got it. I’ll never know.”

Felt Safe From Disease

When people first became aware of AIDS, it was thought that only participants in the wilder side of gay life were at risk, the people who frequented bathhouses or did lots of drugs. Not sober, clean-living professionals like Waddell. As he noted, “I felt, up until about three years ago, that this couldn’t happen to me. It’s not a subject for me to worry about. I’ve always been rather shy sexually, my experiences were relatively few, I didn’t want to embarrass the company I worked for. I didn’t want to get myself in trouble.

“Also, I didn’t really think that running around looking for sex was all that productive, so, you know, I was mostly an observer. I don’t drink, so gay bars even in other cities and other countries never appealed to me.

“I had several friends who had come down with it. And I really felt badly for them. And then I began to realize, gee, you know, there’s no pattern to this. It’s not people who are outrageous, necessarily. Because I thought, if it has to do with promiscuity, the people I know who are really outrageous sexually are going to be the ones who get it. Didn’t happen that way. I found it was happening to the whole spectrum. People who I never would have suspected as being promiscuous. There’s just no pattern to it. And I realized that all it required was one exposure. That’s all.

“I began thinking that the logistics of this thing are just going to be horrendous. And here it is. It’s here. The epidemic is here. The virus just went through the community like wildfire.”

He is understandably irritated by any suggestion that gays have brought this disease on themselves. “The knowledge wasn’t there. Whenever I got AIDS, which could be anywhere from two to 10 years ago, I wasn’t aware! I didn’t say to myself, ‘Gee, this is wonderful sex but potentially lethal.’ I didn’t know! If the people who got legionnaires’ disease had known that there was such a thing, you know, they might have avoided that hotel, but they didn’t know.”

But Waddell is critical of sexual preoccupations that had come to mark a segment of the gay community and which provided a fertile breeding ground for sexually transmitted diseases, including this one.

He mentions the orgies that had become a synonym for parties in some quarters: “Orgies were like a normal thing, people would say, instead of ‘Let’s go to a party,’ ‘Let’s go to an orgy.’ ”

He views it as an unhealthy but expected response to repression:

“You grow up for the first 20 years of your life and in total frustration of expressing your sexuality. You really love sex and can’t talk about it to anybody, can’t do it because it’s morally wrong and people frown on it. So you go to San Francisco in the ghetto where that’s all they do. Hurray! I’m here. I’ve arrived. Isn’t this great! So what happened? The VD rate started going up like crazy. ‘Well,’ they said, ‘I don’t care how many times I get gonorrhea, there’s always penicillin.’ Then, all of a sudden, something comes along and it’s lethal, oh, there’s no pill for this one!

“The sexual thing was going in some pretty bizarre directions. It was starting to look like Rome, you know, towards the end of its heyday. But it was a rather small group who were just off on a tangent.”

‘Erotic Capitalism’

Waddell blames what he terms “erotic capitalism,” that intense world of bathhouses, sexual boutiques, porn stores, for defining gay culture even though it involved, in his view, only a minority of gay men. “It was a very small number but they were the most visible.”

He believes that the gay olympics that he helped create provides an image of gay life that is closer to the truth.

“We have a culture here, you know, we’re just people. We didn’t create the gay community, the straight community created the gay community by telling us ever since we were born that we were wrong, that we were immoral, so the result was a ghetto. But who are we really? We’re everybody else’s brother and sister and father and mother and children, that’s who the hell we are, that’s how we were raised, same values as everybody else.

“So here’s the games, here’s 3,500 athletes, here’s 20,000 people doing the sort of things that everybody else does. They’re playing softball and they’re bowling and they’re swimming. What does the straight media do, they come into the ghetto or to a parade and there’s a stadium full of people and they’ll focus in on the most bizarre element and say: ‘This is what gay people are,’ and that’s everyone’s image. They don’t get the 5,000 on either side of those who look like your brother or your sister, who talk about politics and LaRouche and who talk about their new car and what’s wrong with the transmission and what have you. People will believe what they want to believe, and they want to believe that homosexuals are bizarre.

“I’m openly gay, but I never feel the need to say to somebody, ‘By the way, I’m gay.’ It’s irrelevant, totally irrelevant.”

He is optimistic about changing patterns of sexual activity within the gay community: “I think you’ll tend to see fewer new cases (of AIDS) in the future because people have modified their behavior. I mean, you can’t ignore what is so. Sex can be lethal. And that’s impinging on people’s consciousness now. People are thinking, ‘I’ve got to have less sex. I’ve got to have safe sex. Otherwise I’m going to die.’ ”

Behavior Modification

Waddell attended meetings of the Stop AIDS Project, which promotes behavior modification. “I thought the meetings were great. There were 12 of us in a room and you say, ‘OK, how many of you have had unsafe sex in the last month? How many of you have not? How many of you have had more than one partner? Are you familiar with the statistics on the easiest way to get it, or the least?’ And suddenly they’re confronting this, and it really does have a terrific impact.”

He is on record in gay publications as opposing testing for the disease because the information could put the person at risk both socially and psychologically. “They place themselves in jeopardy by suddenly having that printed somewhere that they’re positive (for the AIDS antibodies). It’s not information that you can do anything with. If I’m going to have another child, that’s a compelling reason to find out, but I can’t think of any other reason. You mean you’re going to be more or less careful depending on if you’re positive or not? Sometimes people who test positive just freak out just waiting for the other shoe to fall. It can create psychological basket cases.”

Waddell has already been very ill as a result of AIDS and he knows full well what terrors await him as other infections take hold. But he resented a reporter’s probing of his equanimity and said, “I’m a realist! There’s something that’s bothering you about my attitude?”

No, was the answer, just baffled by how you can hold it together.

“I just don’t want to get hysterical about it and go off the deep end,” he replied. “It was interesting to have this discussion you know two or three years ago when people were speculating about what would you do if you had it and some said, ‘Oh, I would take pills and do away with myself.’ And someone else would say, ‘I’d buy a boat and I’d go sailing and I’d never come back.’ And I would always say, ‘You know you’re just fantasizing. It doesn’t matter what you say now. You need to have it before you can make those decisions. You don’t know how you’re going to feel.’

‘I Feel Very Calm’

“Now that I have it, I feel much differently about it. I feel very calm about it. My social life has dropped virtually to zero. I’ve got a board meeting tonight on the next gay olympics, which are to be held in Vancouver in four years, and that’ll be pretty much the extent of my social activities for weeks. I find myself mostly interested in reading and getting my computer straightened out and writing and finishing up my house.

“I want to leave it for Jesse and Sara to just have a wonderful time in this house. I feel it’s like my legacy to be leaving them a really spectacular place to live, and I want Jesse to get a sense of what the potential is here. Let her grow up and have her own little parties and lectures and concerts and what have you.

“I do a lot of taping, video tape, I talk to her. I sit down and say, ‘Jess, you know, let me tell you about what happened last week and let me tell you how I feel and sorry I’m not around but,’ so I’m just accumulating a lot of stuff for her, tapes, cassettes, video tapes, a diary. I’ve kept a diary to her from almost the night that Sara and I conceived her, you know, explaining what our lives were like and why we wanted to have her, how she fits into our lives; who we are; what do we do; Sara’s an activist, real active in the women’s community--I hate to say leader, but I suppose she is.

“I know what the natural history of this disease is, I know how long I’ve potentially got, from two months to two years. And I say to myself, ‘What am I going to do with that time? Buy the computer I’ve always wanted? Start writing my biography,’ mentioning things you think are useful. That’s what I’m doing.

The Hurt Inside

“I’ll tell you it hurts. I can’t define the pain. I just feel this hurt inside. You know, I immediately start thinking: Jesus, do I want to hurt a lot? No, I don’t want to hurt a lot. How much of this do I want to accept without going to pieces? Well, you have to accept it all without going to pieces or you’re going to go to pieces.

“I know I’m going to die sometime in the next two years and I know a lot of my friends are going to die, and it’s hard to keep all this in perspective all the time, and yet I say to myself: ‘This is what is! This isn’t what I’d like it to be. This is what is!’

“I have AIDS. I’m going to die. But, in the meantime, I’ll finish this house and the diary for my daughter.”