Peter Awn

Peter Awn was an Islamic religion scholar and the dean of the School of General Studies for two decades.  He joined the Columbia University faculty in 1978.

During his tenure as dean and across his 40+ years at Columbia, he helped integrate General Studies Studies into Columbia undergraduate student life, and expanded the school and its programs, particularly to US armed services veterans. Awn was also a consistent and fervent supporter of Columbia’s LGBTQ+ community.

Peter died in early 2018 from injuries he incurred after a car struck him on his walk home from campus. He received a posthumous Doctor of Letters degree for prestigious scholarship and societal contribution at University Commencement in May, 2019.

Interviewed by former GHAP Advocate, Will Hughes — June 28, 2012

Q: I really wanted to figure out how the university reacted to AIDS, in that the committee they formed was very much “we don’t want to get sued, we just want this to go away and do the bare minimum.”

Awn: That’s exactly—

Q: As is the university’s general trend in its actions. And I also wanted to—just the amount of student activism that came out of it and how politically—when the spirit of ’68 was alive and well—

Awn: I think that’s right. But you know, I wish one could say we initiated some of it, but the activism was a reaction to, in a very good sense, things like ACT UP, things that got into people’s faces. At a time when no wanted to talk about it. You know what to me is the most horrible part? It’s that we walked around not knowing both who had it and who didn’t. I remember the first time I heard about it, I was with a bunch of friends at a party, and someone read this little article about “The Gay Disease.” And I was just furious at the effort of the right wing to stigmatize the gay community, and thought it was a big joke. And then you went through periods of doing what eventually the straight community did, by saying it’s only them, they’re the only ones who get it. It’s only IV drug users, people who have already ruined their immune system, but everyone else is going to be fine. And they had no test! And you had no way of really evaluating I mean, in research protocols, they had some ways of identifying. But to show you how crazy it was, I dated a doctor once who was actually a Columbia College grad, and a dentist. Both had been in the Hepatitis B study at the time when they were testing the vaccine. So they had people’s blood samples from that whole protocol. And they went back and tested that blood and found it was something different, but they didn’t know what it meant. So I had, honestly, it’s really no joke. Mercifully, the doctor’s still alive, but who knows why? And, with the dentist, both were guys in great shape and healthy and duh duh duh duh… We separated for reasons that have nothing to do with this, but I stayed with them three years, and you just waited for the bus to hit you because you had no way of knowing what the issues were. And perhaps, what I think made it harder to kind of be open about was the one thing you fear is that you would start showing lesions. What you don’t realize is [Kaposi’s Sarcoma] was everywhere. And it was like wearing your scarlet letter. The minute you had KS on your face, no matter how many times you tried to get it removed, it would pop back up, and literally you wore the plague. You know, and walking down the street people would avoid you and dentists wouldn’t…There was a whole series of physicians and especially dentists who said they wouldn’t treat you.

Q: And that was still when casual, all the casual contact fears were at their height?

Awn: Oh absolutely! So there was no sense of what was really transmitting it so you would just hear more horrible cases coming and that I think was Columbia, for good or for ill, reflected all of those terrible things, and how did we know? I was on the faculty but I have contacts in the administration as well. And then somebody got pneumonia, you sort of guessed, this must be, whatever it is, he’s got it and now it’s going to kill him.

Q: And I imagine that was outing out the time too.

Awn: Absolutely. You know again, what were the issues with the faculty? One of the big issues was as a junior faculty person, you lived in terror of the tenure process. Now, when I started, I was told I would never get tenure and they weren’t tenuring anyone. But by the mid eighties, it started to break and so even if you wanted a job elsewhere, the last thing you wanted colleagues to know was that you were gay because it was another way to blackball you. Tenure reviews are confidential, you don’t know goes what on. You get somebody on the committee that’s a homophobe and I assure you — men were a little better at it, being willing to say yes, I’m gay but that’s not the only thing that defines who I am. The women were the most, most closeted. It was tough enough for women to get faculty positions, and rarely, rarely did they ever come out in any public way. Even today, I’d say, I’d still say that’s more of a challenge. There’s lots and lots of active gay men in the faculty. So a lot of it had to do with this unknown. And then you start seeing people drop. [laughs] And there’s nothing you can do! You had palliative care, but the minute you got PCP [pneumocystis carinii pneumonia], which was you know the sign. I remember when one of the senior administrators here, I had been on a number of committees for the college with him. He got pneumonia in the summer.

Q: That was the one who was the associate dean of GS?

Awn: Is it or isn’t it? In fact, it was another very senior advisor here, just wonderful guy. African-American, which made it even more complicated. And the one thing I mentioned in the “It Gets Better” video was there was this immensely talented, esteemed guy, distinguished guy, Hispanic that we recruited from Yale and on his deathbed we did not tell anyone why he died. No, no, no that’s the way — So even, that’s the most effective way, to watch the obituaries were all laundered. “Died of cancer,” “Died of pneumonia.”

Q: “Died of a long illness.”

Awn: Yes, whatever it was. You’d have to sit and say why is there no way. But people were still talking about quarantining individuals, tracking you to ensure that you don’t, God forbid, pass it on. So the level of paranoia of what public disclosure would bring. The university was at a total loss, they didn’t know what you do in this kind of—and then it started losing students. To me, the administration and the faculty, okay they could play hide and seek about everything. But when you start seeing twenty year olds, there is a scholarship over at the college, you know, again in the name of the Hispanic undergraduate who was wildly active in public service and was also very gay. And right after graduation, he went to Latin America to do all of the social welfare stuff and died.

Q: I think I actually found the article in the Spec written after he died and it’s sad because it’s “liver disease” —

Awn: No, no, no, he must have caught something. And then you would have families weighing this and they couldn’t bear to have the stigma after that. Believe it or not, especially in the suburbs, a very close friend of my sisters in suburban in New Jersey, he had heart surgery at a time when they weren’t checking the blood, and lo and behold, he ended up with HIV. He went through all of that and died a very slow death and they never said what he had. And you look and you say, how can you bite it if you don’t name it?

Q: And of course that meant the CDC, if there wasn’t this huge public saying “These people are dying of AIDS” then of course there’s no political pressure.

Awn: And Reagan, he never mentioned the word.

Q: Until 1987?

Awn: Until so many people were just dying. And even the positions the public was never willing to admit. You know, I always go back and read Thucydides on the plague in Athens. Plagues have been symbols in literature, and it’s of chaos and everybody has to come up with a kind of mythological definition of why certain people get it. So you can be comfortable that you are not going to get it. And that’s what it was, to make it a gay disease, when any public health physician who was worth his or her salt knew full well, when you go to Africa, you go elsewhere, it’s a completely heterosexual disease.

Q: It’s just sad, because they knew that in 1982. It wasn’t after years and years…

Awn: Look, I lived in India in 1986 and the government was announcing, “There is no AIDS in India.” And the stuff that went on! And they said, “I’m sorry we correct ourselves, there was one case in Bombay that was brought in by an Air India steward. That’s it.” And the place was being ravaged! And they didn’t, you know—so people died.

Q: And of course now they have one of the worse case loads in the world.

Awn: And Africa was the same. In more traditional societies where admitting publicly what the sexual behavior of the society is even in normal times, you just don’t do that. And you find that in Europe, the French are somewhat similar. But if you’re gay, no one talks about that in public, and if you’re married, that’s irrelevant.

Q: And of course, just what you were saying about it being a gay disease is reflected in all the press because then it’s all “Oh, AIDS now threatens heterosexuals” and—

Awn: But nobody believed that though. They really didn’t.

Q: The risk exists, and that’s what makes it newsworthy. Is that it posed a threat to people that mattered.

Awn: And I think that’s the only time.

Q: No, it is.

Awn: And it’s very hard to get the government to put money into something that they thought was doing a public service, I hate to say it. Having fewer gay men around was not bad news for lots of people.

Q: And then you get these people like Ryan White or whoever, who are now — who come out and act like, “They did this to me, the gays—“

Awn: Or that the only people who got a lot of publicity were the ones who got it through blood transfusions. So that they wouldn’t be sinful. But since we have such an aberrant sexual behavior, that this is God’s judgment on us.

Q: On the prostitutes –

Awn: And people were more than willing to, you know, publicly every religious community was – to show you how cynical it was, I don’t know if you know my background, I’ve had a rather checkered background, I’m an ex-priest. I was a Jesuit for twenty years.

Q: I didn’t know that.

Awn: When I started teaching in 1978, I was still a priest. The New York archdiocese had people dropping like flies. They had a bishop who died of AIDS. When he was getting very sick, they shipped him to the Midwest, put him in a hospice environment. When he died, on his death certificate, his occupation was listed as day laborer. He was acting now. That’s how –

Q: Just didn’t want to be associated with it —

Awn: Nobody –

Q: In any sense.

Awn: So you just watched people die. Now, I don’t want, but then you look at GHAP, people like Paul Douglas, who I found so astonishing. Here is this, he was a big six foot two, six foot three, he was built, he was incredibly good-looking, PhD student in the engineering school. But basically, Paul refused to stay in the dark about what needed to happen. And he and Laura, I think, really, at least two of the key people in getting GHAP up and running and having the University admit this is important for the community and importantly more broadly.

Q: Yes, and what they did in terms of writing that fact book, that was just this Columbia internal publication that turned into this national –

Awn: Immense – they became this sort of beacon for at least education in terms of the younger generation. But again, the 1980s were still this kind of, both among the heterosexual community and the gay community – the worst thing you could get, I remember going to my doctor who was this lesbian who mostly dealt with a gay practice and she said, “I became an internist presuming all I’d be doing would be giving people shots for the clap,” and then she ended up on the front lines. And then you would go for a visit in the office and it was packed with people close to death and someone actually died in the office, literally came in for his appointment and died. And the pressure on physicians, I mean a lot of them had, they were all in therapy, they had to recover very quickly because how could, they would have twenty, thirty people in the hospital. And all of them were terminal. There’s nothing you could do.

Q: Exactly, and even it was just watching T-cells fall because, when was AZT, 1987?

Awn: Maybe it was 1986.

Q: But still that did so —

Awn: And they gave you so much of it!

Q: That it killed you! The AZT equals poison –

Awn: And they were right. I can remember, all we did was go to the hospital and go see people on one floor, and then go see people on the next floor above. And to sort of you know, try to guess how the process would go.

Q: Yes, and it was just such a, some people were fine for years and years, and some people, it was just a totally random who would –

Awn: And the doctors would try to guess why this was happening, and I remember when Roger Kallman was testifying before Congress, at one point, and he had, the minute you showed a lymph node that was inflamed, that swollen gland, at one point they said that’s the sign. You got the kind that’s going to kill you. So there he was standing, testifying saying I may have two or three years left, when in fact it’s an irrelevancy [laughs] but now we know that doesn’t tell you anything, it’s your body trying to fight but once the virus itself mutates so often, which they never knew, so that it depends on the quality of the virus, and your own kind of bizarre genetic makeup as to how quickly or not.

Q: Yes, and if you’ll ever get opportunistic infections or if you’ll just be fine.

Awn: They had no idea why people have lasted twenty-five or thirty years without much of anything other than miserable —

Q: Side effects.

Awn: Well, and you know, blood work, miserable side effects from medications, and so it’s – well the one good thing though, I have to say, what’s one of the amazing positives and it’s again something I again have no idea if your generation is aware of it, how at least in New York, the gay and lesbian community had nothing to do with one and another. In fact, I would say, my friends and other gay men were misogynist down to their fingertips. They hated women. You couldn’t as a man get into a lesbian bar, the bouncer. I remember trying to go with a friend, she threw me out. You’re not allowed. The extent to which the women stepped up was extraordinary. They really played over time an absolutely pivotal role, in Act Up, in advocacy organizations, and in just simply, basic care for people who were dying, which never would have been the case, they never would have fraternized. Now San Francisco, I used to go to San Francisco, my ex in fact ran, have you ever heard of Different Light bookstores? They used to be these gay and lesbian bookstores. But anyway, he had stores in LA, in San Francisco, in New York.

Q: Are they still around?

Awn: No, why? Because the joke is it became very conventional. He said, “I’m delighted to say that we created the sort of road map for our own extinction because we carried gay and lesbian literature, academic literature, novels, blah blah blah.” But then, Barnes and Noble and everyone else caught on that you could actually make money having a gay and lesbian section. And lo and behold, and Amazon! And independent bookstores in general were on the skids, they were no longer in a sense needed, because you could what you needed elsewhere. And it would be cheaper. So it was very amusing. But that was huge! It was huge to have a place that did nothing but deadly serious gay and lesbian literature. And they had visitors and academics coming in to talk. But every time I’d go out to San Francisco with him, it was, you’d go to a bar, and you’d see men and women. There was no, there wasn’t this same sort of New York misogyny. There were rules and you never broke the rules. Never.

Q: Well, I think what you said about lesbians really, women really rising to the occasion, it’s this whole thing of how the community took care of itself.

Awn: I think that’s right.

Q: With GMHC, with the Shanti Project on the West coast.

Awn: And that’s exactly right. And GMHC, I thought, for all of it’s craziness, and God knows, the place is still a loony bin. They did a lot. They really did.

Q: And also, it’s this horrible irony of Reagan saying people need to take care of each other, and that’s exactly what they gay community did, because they couldn’t rely on government anything so they took care of themselves.

Awn: I think that’s absolutely right. There was no one else. And the number of people whose families just walked away from them. That was the saddest to watch really. You know, we don’t want anything to do with you, you’re contagious, so just go down quietly, don’t make a lot of noise when you do it.

Q: It’s insane thinking of how, it’s so different now.

Awn: It is so different, but you know full well God knows because you’re so engaged with this, that convincing people you really don’t want to take twenty pills a day for the rest of your life.

Q: Yes, entirely.

Awn: You know, there’s this sense in which, you go to Craigslist, and how many Columbia students are on there? I’m looking for bareback sex, and again if you do it with people who you know and can at least trust that they are negative and you know how they behave. But you have to realize the consequences of it, yes it’s a manageable disease but it’s manageable for the rest of your life. And they haven’t gotten the faintest idea what happens forty years later in terms of what damage the medication does. And in my generation, it’s hard to tell because people went through so many years with nothing, so the guys who have been positive since the early 1980s and still are alive, I mean it’s an interesting case study, but not really what your generation is going to face. Either by the time you seroconvert, you can live and take medication to render the virus undetectable, before the damage apparently gets done. But again, another crazy part of the process, even when there was medication, there were very serious theories that you shouldn’t start the medication until you were in really bad shape, or you could start and then you stop. And that’s –

Together: Insane!

Awn: [laughs] Absolutely insane. But you would find again, insurance companies pushing stuff like that because it was costing them too much.

Q: And of course, now insurance companies are pushing things that are treatments rather than anything that is a cure.

Awn: In the hospitals, because the minute you hit the hospital it’s ten times what it would cost to fund your medication and these days you don’t have to take as many. I mean, in the old days it was five of this and two of this one, four of this one, twenty-four hours a day, crazy stuff. So now, three or four.

Q: Laura [Pinsky] was telling me, what was that Israeli fat thing? That smelled awful?

Awn: Lecithin, is that the one? God knows, that was huge. And then Compound Q, which you had to go to China to get. No, no, no, the lesbian, my doctor her girlfriend used to go to China.

Q: Was it, did it end up being effective at all?

Awn: No one thinks it did anything other than give you a sense of maybe you were finally able to deal with this.

Q: Or nonoxynol-9.

Awn: Oh right! Now that’s just a lubricant that did kill the virus, but then they found out it did terrible things, especially to women, to the lining of the rectum and vagina. So where everyone was lathering it on. [laughs] But again, it’s just so funny I keep wondering to be you, to grow up in a world where this is the world you walk into. When you want to become sexually active, you know full well what the issues are. Wearing a condom, for my generation, I knew one person who sort of got off on wearing a condom. We all thought that was weird. He said, “This really enhances my sexual experience,” we all said, “You must be out of your mind!” So it was this kind of sense, of why would you do that? But again, I was living in North Africa, in France, in the mid 1980s. There would be these huge articles in Paris Match in things like that, about why condoms were just pointless. And that they so took away from any sexual pleasure, who cares what you’re going to catch.

Q: And you’re right! My generation grew up with you always use condoms. Even with the terrible sex ed that we get in the public school system.

Awn: But that the word was even uttered! It had no place within gay society. Why would you wear it? No one’s getting pregnant.

Q: I think some gay community activist has this really famous quote where he said, “I didn’t become gay to use a condom.” And it was a rallying cry!

Awn: And it became this sort of, leave me alone, I will control my own. Which again, I will defend you, you do what you want, but you have to be aware, what you do affects other people. You just can’t. These days, it’s just dumb. It’s not pretty; it’s not nice. Maybe there will be a vaccine, but in the mean time, get used to it.

Q: Exactly. It seems like for people your generation there had to be such a paradigm shift to using condoms regularly. For us, since we were brought up, to be fortunate enough to not know having a lot of sex without that. People my generation don’t know anything different, and we should be lucky.

Awn: No, no, no, and I remember when my dentist boyfriend came back and said you know, I just went and checked in with this original study, because they asked can we use their original blood to look for anomalies. As with the doctor, they both said, whatever it is, I’ve got it, they think. And the only recommendation they had was use a condom. And it was like, “What the hell is that about? I’m not an IV drug user, I don’t drink, I lead a healthy life. And so you didn’t do anything.” It was, when you didn’t know what the parameters were, and you couldn’t do anything about it, the impulse to hide was powerful. What good was it? Especially if you were sick, to go around and say you were sick. Other than, losing friends, losing your family. I have to say, it was for me, it was a maturing process in ways I would not wish on anyone. But having to help so many people die, who were in the prime of their lives, was an act of revelation. My ex who ran the bookstore, had just visited someone, and he turned to me and said, “You know, people who get AIDS, if they’re nice people seem to get nicer when they deal with this. But people are really pricks.” [laughs] We had just visited someone who was a lovely guy, but a pain in the ass. He was hopeless. It was so hard, in a sense, to help him, without being lectured on what a victim he was and how horrible the world is, and people, but it’s all natural. And then the whole issue, of you know, I’m not publicly engaging in it, but I really think people really do have a choice of when it’s time to go. So all these debates about assisted suicide, what do you think went on in the hospitals? When people got very bad, you could, as we did with one of my closest friends, you convinced the doctor to put them on a morphine drip. It took about eight days, and then it was done. And it was usually the individual. My friend at one point had a terrible, terrible bout of kidney staph that destroyed his kidneys, but his doctor was so proud he had gotten him through it. He was on the mend. But he said, “This is no quality of life left. I want this over.” And he said it in this methodical, reasonable way. And we pressed him and pressed him and pressed him, and then we got his doctor engaged. And we put him on a morphine drip, and he was out for most of the period, but in the middle of it he woke up, and I happened to be there. He said, “Peter, are we on the program?” I was stunned. I said, “Yeah, Bill, we are.” And he said, “Thank you.” And those are the last words ever spoke. And this was a real, sort of party queen, not someone you thought had that depth of self-awareness. But for him, it was exactly the right thing to do. And physicians and the people in the hospitals really had respect for people’s ability to choose. Simply keeping an organism alive, in more pain and discomfort, when it got to your brain, and when you walked down the hall, there would be people screaming and yelling, simply because the impact on the brain was horrific.

Q: Those opportunistic infections, like cryptosporidiosis and a lot of the fungal ones –

Awn: Oh my god, the blood stuff, the blood fungus, all the things that once you got them, it just was so hard to control. And the ones who went blind! I have one friend who’s still alive, God bless him, but totally blind in one eye. And you just think there’s nothing they can do. So you can understand why on campus everyone was so ambivalent. Trying to naively think that this wasn’t going to get us.

Q: And that mentally still exists.

Awn: That’s terribly sad. You just have to be pragmatic, this is the reality, this is real life.

Q: Yes, that this isn’t a punishment, this is a disease.

Awn: It’s not a moral statement, or anything. That’s exactly right. You can get a million viruses if you travel around the world that can do terrible things to you. But you have to protect yourself against it! And that’s all this is about, it really is. And I still think the heterosexual population is worse. The young, you know, Columbia students who are straight, you know, I wonder how many times they’re in the sack and having sex, whether they flip out a condom or not, whether the women insist.

Q: It’s this horrible vestige of in the 1980s, it was “AIDS is a gay disease, so it’s not going to affect me,” but now it’s “AIDS is the disease of sub-Saharan Africa, so it’s not going to affect me.”

Awn: Or worse, it’s “AIDS is the Harlem disease. It is of the social class of which I am not a part.” No, no, I think that’s exactly what it is, so it’s more of a Hispanic thing. Well you go down to GMHC, it’s a much more minority community now, who is served by GMHC, and it’s mostly straight people, not gay people. To the same degree, anyway. I find a classism that is really distasteful. It doesn’t matter how much money you make.

Q: This sense of, “that’s not going to come to me, here at Columbia.”

Awn: Yes, “look at how everyone takes a bath, everyone showers” Again, in the 1980s nobody drank, or you did, but not really. Even at the Saint, which was one of the major discos, they didn’t serve liquor. You could get free beer and soda. They had a license for that. But they never sold hard liquor, they didn’t need to. The place was just crawling with dealers. Everybody – [laughs]

Q: [laughs] I was so confused for a second, with people not drinking?

Awn: No, no, no, they weren’t drinking but everybody had their brains fried on twenty other things. Special K, and coke, and meth, and all of that was readily available. And they actually, this is so cynical, they actually had staff who went around and literally would pick up people who had OD’d or passed out, and discretely get them out the back door before they called the ambulance. [laughs] So it wouldn’t disturb the rest of the people. [laughs] But there still was, people didn’t believe it. Again, my friend Bill who died, we had been out the day before and then we went to another club, then another place afterwards, there was someone he had dated a couple times, and the guy was a big muscle queen, and he said, “Gee, isn’t it funny I’ve got this spot here. And they tell me I got this thing, but you know, I feel fine, there’s nothing going on, it’ll go away. It’s not ever going to mean anything.” In those days, people, you wanted, people to talk their way out of what was inevitable. Even when testing came out, and started to be covered by health insurance, and that wasn’t until, I think, close to 1986, 1987, when there was a relatively available test.

Q: But it was a two week time in between your test and your results.

Awn: Oh absolutely, that’s exactly right. Then what? So the great debate was, do you want to know the bus is coming down the road to hit you? Or do you want to just wait and get it? And I’d say it was more the latter than the former. Because, what is the point of knowing? So you sit around getting depressed at home, saying I’m going to die.

Q: Well that’s what GHAP had to deal with a lot, when they were talking to these people making sure they had the psychological coping mechanisms to know, and having to evaluate. And so many people, so many people (because Laura [Pinsky] has saved all the files, all the patient files) so many people come in talk to someone in a counseling session, and then say, “I change my mind, I don’t want to get tested.”

Awn: That’s exactly right. Well, fear, they know they’ve engaged in risky behavior, they just don’t want to know. But now, that is just so dumb, simply because. But you know, people your age, the big issue is equally how much your family is accepting of the fact that you’re gay. You know, if you have a miserable relationship with your family or really haven’t come out, then all of a sudden you go home, and say, “I have to deal with this.” The fears anyone would normally have about coming out, is this the end and I’ll never get a job when people find out? It’s just crazy. But, that’s how one deals with these kinds of things emotionally. But it was so sad to watch people really suffer in silence on campus during the 1980s. And really the medications didn’t become really effective until the early 1990s. Because the few things available even if you took them in the right dosage, which you almost never did. Norvere was another one of these drugs that just destroyed your liver. And they were giving them at a right, you know when AZT first came out, they overprescribed, it was really shocking. So people started to have liver failure, they would have hepatitis that was induced by medication so there were so many ways to see the medication simply as something that was going to make you feel like hell and maybe give you another two years. It was only really when you had the protease inhibitors that that began in the 1990s—I joke even Siquinivere, I remember talking to one, my lesbian doctor that retired, and a younger gay man took over, and I kept saying “Don’t you remember what we used to call that drug? He didn’t even know what the drug was, no one then did. It was not Siquinivere but Save a Queer. “[laughs] But it really made a difference and you could feel that perhaps coming down the pipeline be long term maintenance. For many people, not all God knows, people were still dying. But it is startling to me now, to read an obituary where someone dies of AIDS. It’s really out of the ordinary.

Q: Yes.

Awn: But then again, even in the 1990s, my friend Bill died when I was already Dean, so it must have been, it must have been 1998. He was resistant to absolutely everything. Nothing made a dent.

Q: The cocktail was 1995?

Awn: Yes. But he was on new stuff, quite startling how little effect they had. But that’s a rare, rare, rare case. But now! They’re actually able to start treatment early. He was one of the “why get tested? Why would I want to know?”

Q: When the bus was coming.

Awn: So he waited until he was sick. Anyway, and you know, it’s much harder once you start getting opportunistic diseases, it’s much harder to control. Simply because you’ve beaten down your system to such a degree. But it was, I have to say, it was refreshing when we finally began to admit and name what was going on in people’s lives here. We were always very careful about—you want to be able to celebrate someone’s life, but if they didn’t want people to know. Or we’d get even more pressure from families, “Oh, you’re going to have a service? You can’t say anything. You can’t do this to us.”

Q: And it’s still very much the same way, in that GHAP, we see, mainly Laura and Daniel work with the positive community on campus, there’s still a very strong emphasis on maintaining confidentiality, which makes a great amount of sense.

Awn: I think that’s right, you don’t abuse people’s ability to manage their own life. I think people admit to what’s going on publicly when they’re comfortable and they may never be comfortable. And one can understand that. Not everyone goes around and announces “I’m a diabetic!” Because there still is a certain social stigma, there really is, there’s no doubt about it.

Q: Well, it’s like what you were articulating, that it’s your fault in some way if you have AIDS. Or if you are HIV-positive, rather. And it’s this holdover from the 1980s, even for me, who became conscious long after that, there still is some sense that you don’t know quite where it comes from but it’s your fault.

Awn: It’s your aberrant sexual behavior. This obsession both in right wing religious communities and the religious right in general, and the right wing, that this is aberrant behavior, that we’re freaks somehow, that this is normal somehow. It wouldn’t be much fun if it weren’t normal. [laughs]

Q: The number of religious figures, or right-wing figures rather, that were perfectly comfortable saying, and Senators, saying, “Yes, this is God’s punishment.”

Awn: No, no, you could get away with saying almost anything you wanted that was anti-gay, and you could get a whole room of people nodding. Why would we spend tax dollars trying to save these people? That was the level of debate until the fear of this becoming a public health catastrophe. So it was not caring about the dying homosexuals.

Q: Or the dying Haitians.

Awn: No, no, no.

Q: It was transfusions and hemophiliacs.

Awn: So we were finally seeing good people, normal people, who were being affected by this. Who shouldn’t have to suffer that. You think about it, again going back to these kinds of, the way plague used to looked at in the medieval period. It was all moral, it was all reduced to a moral argument, nothing to do with medicine. What was the movie with the seventh seal? Mark Bergman’s movie, a classic. There’s this huge penitential procession during the plague they are flagellating themselves, just crying to God to say, “Tell us what we’ve done, so we can repent.” And this is God’s punishment on these people. It’s a moral famine. It’s interesting, you find the same thing with mental illness now. The valedictorian this year in GS, was a fellow, who was kicked out of high school because he was depressed and anxious and couldn’t function. And they basically ascribed it to character flaw, saying “Buck up, kid.” He said, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t function.” And they said, “We don’t do that, get out. And you’ll never amount to anything.” And he graduated with a 4.2 and gone off to this fabulous, he was the only graduate student accepted by this big time neuroscience program.

Q: Good for him!

Awn: No, no, and he’s a friend of mine. He said, “This is one of the reasons I studied neuroscience.” To help destigmatize the fact. He said, “Look I was depressed and anxious because there wasn’t enough serotonin in my brain. You can’t will more serotonin into there.” And it’s the same thing with this. There’s so much moral because we’ve always been seen as marginalized that allows you to quickly go to the moral argument. And there were faculty, look there were a lot of stupic things being said at very prestigious universities about HIV and who deserved to die.

Q: It’s interesting, the right wing viewed it as a moral issue, so many people viewed it as a civil rights issue, like “I have the right to fuck whoever I want,” and just how few people saw it as a public health issue.

Awn: That’s exactly right. And even now, you’re right. It’s a whole subculture that says bring it on, who cares.

Q: And in the same way a lot of people, all the people who said, the doctors and such, to work on AIDS in the 1980s, you were political, you didn’t have a choice. You couldn’t do it just as medicine.

Awn: No, you couldn’t. And the fact that you did, you know every one of them deep down had no idea whether or not they’d end up with it simply by treating people. In the beginning, they would wear all sorts of gowns and gloves.

Q: And funeral homes wouldn’t take them.

Awn: There were lots of them. To me, a physician in the health care professional, who would say, “I will not go in your room. I will not treat you.” I find that just –

Q: Or all the researchers who first isolated the virus were shuttled away from it, “Oh, there’s no prestige, there’s no Nobel in studying this gay disease, just get out of it, just stop doing that.”

Awn: And there’s even for the pharmaceutical companies, the fear was there wasn’t even a big enough population to waste money on them. The R&D was going to be very expensive, which is why the government had to fund so much of it. Because the companies said, “Who cares if we come up with the maintenance drugs or whatever? How many people are we talking about here?” And it’s usually the way it worked. The most you could count on were Americans and upper class, middle class Europeans, but the minute you got the to places that were being ravaged, who cares? You had a drug but you couldn’t sell it, nobody was going to pay the price. So, it was all terribly cynical along those lines, it really was. And the level of denial, I mean Rock Hudson was dying. Giving excuses for why it wasn’t that. Again in the 1980s when I was living in North Africa and France, the most famous French comic, had AIDS. Never admitted it. They flew him to Washington for treatment and nobody admitted even then that he was dying of HIV and would eventually die. They said, “Oh, yes, I guess it was that. But we never knew he was gay.” Oh stop, everybody knew he was gay. And Foucault and all these – it’s just that terrible fear of the unknown that was so pervasive. And everybody needed to find a defense mechanism both within the community and with families and friends. So at least, we can celebrate it’s identifiable, it can be managed, you know where you are. And it’s not a death sentence. It really isn’t.

Q: And that the stigma, while still existing, has lessened.

Awn: I think that’s exactly right, simply because there’s no, it’s not in everybody’s face anymore. But you’re right to say then people get complacent. And that’s where, I think that’s a harder battle for GHAP to keep people aware without making them think, “Oh, they’re just being dramatic. It’s a cause-y, they need a cause and this happens to be it.”

Q: It’s what you said earlier, toeing the line between, “You really don’t want to get this, this is a serious disease,” but then also people who are in, who are freaking out, saying, “But at the same time, it’s a manageable disease.” How do you say them both?

Awn: That’s exactly right. I think that’s absolutely right. And I see that, absolutely with the undergraduates, you know, who all of sudden get bad news at GHAP, that all of a sudden, they have seroconverted. The graduates too. I mean, going back to the rooms, talking to them, the process of, the time it takes to process that, first personally and then how are you going to deal with it with people you love and care about. And you’ll be suspicious, I don’t care how close your friends are, you’ll be suspicious of everyone that he’s going to turn against me or she’s going to think I’m a freak.

Q: Or people’s internal, even though casual contact has been completely disproven, the internalized, “You’re dirty somehow or whatever.”

Awn: Unclean. It’s the classic ritual of purity. The stuff we’ve been around since humankind. Did you touch me and get a cut? Oh my god. But when you think of it, saliva? How long did it take us to say, no kissing isn’t going to transmit HIV. You’re not going to get it from kissing.

Q: It’s just sad because the number of household studies done, normally in the Bronx, those were done by the end of 1983, that it was known for a long time. People didn’t want to hear it.

Awn: Everyone wanted a second line of defense.

Q: Exactly.

Awn: That I don’t believe what the doctors say, since it’s taken them so long to get it right.

Q: And doctors were doing the same thing of leaving the trays outside.

Awn: Absolutely, no, no, no, they didn’t want anything, if something happened, some big crisis, they threw up on you or something happened. If you dealt with any bodily fluid, it was going to be you know, if somebody had terrible intestinal problems, you’d clean them up in a hospital. Who would want to do that? So it’s, it was the most I think depressing time at this University. To see how hard it was for us. Again, I’m always, we do measure up eventually, and I think GHAP was by far the most important thing that happened here to mobilize the entire community. And believe it or not, in the 1980s, because it was still such a political stance, to be gay meant you were fighting a series of oppressive legal structures, political structures, social structures. That, you’ll be surprised at this, we just had relatively regular meetings of what was then called GABLES. It still is, it’s simply a kind of you get emails from them. But we would have meetings with everyone in the community! The undergraduates would be heavily involved, the graduate students. So you get to talk to administrators, grad students, faculty, all of whom shared a certain call and this was it God knows. And we’d feel a room in Low Library, you know, the Faculty room of 150 people, 200 people, with no trouble at all. But now, God knows, the undergraduates and graduates never talk to anybody.

Q: Yes, it’s this whole thing of, since it’s not your friends dying, it’s not you dying, being gay doesn’t have to be a central part of your identity.

Awn: That’s right and I do think that’s true.

Q: It can be just some – and I think it’s hard, on the one hand, it’s so great that progress has been made, where it can be like, yes, that’s whatever, and be open and not closeted about it, like, that’s not what I’m all about. But at the same time, it’s been a recurring theme, that’s what leads to complacency.

Awn: And honestly, I have enormous respect for you, you’re arguing that position because that’s exactly the case. That it gets hard to fight the battles that don’t touch you directly, and yet those battles are so, or at least what we should be fighting at least is out there, we could make a list of things. That really need people’s engagement, serious engagement, not just lip service. Mobilizing the community for any one cause, marriage is surprising, it got so much attention, but –

Q: It’s just, on the undergraduate level, this phenomenon of people coming, normally men, gay people coming from these either very rural or horrible repressive suburban, whatever background, coming here and within two months, forgetting how bad it was, and forgetting that it isn’t always like this, you can’t always walk around.

Awn: Look, I had, the president of the GS student council, he had been in the joint program with the Jewish Theological Seminary, and he came out relatively late, as a junior or seniors, he’s a big in real estate or finance, when they found out he was gay, they froze him out. No promotions. You couldn’t verify that they didn’t make jokes, say terrible things, and he just had to leave. I mean, it was so oppressive, you know, the wanted to take him out to strip clubs, it was that kind of, you do find some offices downtown, where it’s we work hard, we play hard, and we don’t tell our wives.

Q; And it’s just sad, the number of, the medical community is very much like that. And a lot of business particularly, the number of industries where that’s still, and in New York.

Awn: And if you can get away with it in New York, you can imagine what goes on in Cleveland and the Midwest, they can do whatever they want.

Q: And it’s this whole idea, even in the 1970s or earlier on, that we can create these communities in the Castro or in the Village, we can create our pockets or whatever, but if people are still doing that in New York, then what have we really won? But on the other hand, it’s so great that Columbia, particularly on the undergraduate level, is so welcoming.

Awn: And you know, I give credit to a Provost who was here for about fifteen years, who actually had lots of power, Jonathan Cole is his name. Jonathan’s son went to the College, and was gay. And Jonathan was the one who fought the trustees to get domestic partner healthcare approved. We were one of the first universities to move in that direction. And because Jonathan would not take no for an answer from the people who did not want to waste money on this kind of stuff. No, no, no, it was his sensitivity to the needs of the gay community and during the HIV crisis, his willingness to begin to try to deal, it was the most important issue for us.

Q: Was that, do you happen to know if he was around in 1967? Because we also have the oldest gay student group in the world.

Awn: No, Jonathan’s son, he married a recent GS grad, Jonathan’s son, so they’re only in their thirties.

Q: Columbia had, the number of things, with GHAP we had the first HIV campus clinic and the only one for ten years.

Awn: That’s exactly right.

Q: And we have the oldest gay student group in the world.

Awn: Which is a wonderful thing.

Q: And that it was pre-Stonewall too.

Awn: No, I know. Can you imagine what kind of grief they took? The homophile league, it’s just extraordinary, it really is. And you know, Allen Ginsburg, there’s a whole tradition of people who are out there, but always on the fringe. The hostility, look I can remember when you would have anti-gay banners hanging up in the dorm room. “Guys, yeah, come do this, suck my cock faggot,” and this stuff. And the bathrooms, we’d be going month after month, we’d be calling facilities to get all the stuff off the walls in the public bathrooms, I mean really vicious homophobic stuff, but people thought what the hell?

Q: And that continued. There was this incident, where someone in the dining hall who worked there kissed another man, and the, one of the football coaches got the entire football team to write comment cards, like “You’re going to give us all AIDS” “Get out of the kitchen, fag” and that was I think 1999.

Awn: No, no, no, no! It is startling, and yes, you’re right, with the gay athletes, you know, now you’ll get a couple who will come out but not many. Not many.

Q: To speak nothing of the fraternities.

Awn: That’s exactly right. No, I remember a couple athletes who were wonderful, wonderful guys, but you know, they’re sneaking around, doing it with some guy, God forbid anybody should find out, and they would deny it anyway. Never admit what was going on. So there really is a lot to be done, but it’s just so hard to mobilize the kinds of support for various things, and maybe that’s the new model. It’s not going to be the entire community fighting the same battle, but trying to get a core group that tries to interest people and fight a different kind of battle that makes a difference socially and economically and in terms of advancement. I mean, I’ve been sort of privileged, why? The academic world, bad as it was in certain ways, I’ve never felt something was done to me because I was gay. I know some people hated the fact, but I’ve never felt discriminated against in any substantive way, other than the regular kind of stuff that used to go on, by individuals, words, looks, and wondering what I’m doing, am I screwing children? No, no, no, that’s another thing of the 1980s. the number of students who were victimized, who were mostly graduate students, who were mostly women and you couldn’t do anything about it. The women who complained were then branded as troublemakers and they’d never get a job. So the kind of sexual harassment that went on, was outrageous. Absolutely outrageous. And nobody would control it. But it kind of came with the prerogatives of being Professor X.

Q: At least progress has been made in some areas.

Awn: I think that’s exactly right, that people are sensitive to what power relationships mean. And that’s what I keep screaming, it’s very interesting, the GS population, the average age is 29 and the orientation, I give a sort of, mostly amusing presentation, on how you deal with the faculty and fraternization. I don’t care if you’re 40, if your University writing professor is 25, that doesn’t mean she’s your friend, she is the power figure in the room. It has nothing to do with age, nothing to do with experience. And you have to learn to navigate that reality and not make believe you can just blur it.

Q: See, and it’s interesting that you give that speech, because I would characterize Columbia College, or more traditional undergraduates, as much more likely to lip off to professors about how smart they are, rather than people in GS.

Awn: No that’s absolutely right. I also joke to my colleagues, it’s also not uncommon to have the undergraduate as the aggressor. It’s nice to joke, oh I bedded that Professor X, but that’s irrelevant. People, oh well it was consensual, what are you talking about? [laughs] There is no such thing as consensual when you are a power figure either remotely or directly in somebody’s life. And if you can’t find an outlet in New York for your emotional life, get, what planet do you live on? [laughs] But it’s this sense of, oh no, I’ll take a nineteen year old seriously. Well no, nineteen year olds ought to be dealing with people around their own age, not with a 45 year old grown adult. It’s just wrong. Well, I won’t be a prude, but I really respect, power is power is power. We know what the limits are and what the boundaries are, and if you’re going to wield power, do it appropriately. And don’t put people in incredibly uncomfortable situations.

Q: The situation of having to turn someone down and having to stop that.

Awn: And you know, if I had one, I tend to think things don’t surprise me a lot, but the one thing when I became dean that did, now it hasn’t happened a lot, but it’s happened a couple of times and been very complicated. When we would discipline someone or throw them out for very appropriate reasons, in a couple of cases, they’ve sued and they’ve sued on the basis that I was a pervert and I made advances. And that because of me, the student wouldn’t sleep with me, that I engineered their dismissal. And in one case, that I was sleeping with his advisor, and that “they ganged up on me because I wouldn’t put out.” This went on for six years in court because he was a minority, that was an issue, and because sexual harassment is taken so seriously, you can’t dismiss a sexual harassment case. I mean, his lawyers quit when they found out he was such a sleazebag.

Q: Preying on gay stereotypes.

Awn: Did I think we would lose? No. But he named all sorts of other people who weren’t used to this sort of thing. But there was another student who we threw out, really problematic guy, very bright, but socially just shocking, who wrote to all the trustees to say I was a pervert, and I preach in class drug use and homosexuality. And I shouldn’t be allowed to teach here, and I’m anti-Christian. He was right wing, and this conduit to right wing Christianity and beat up his wife, and she used to call, and I’d say, then do something about it, I can’t do anything about it. But it was this kind of, but there was actually this one trustee, the lawyers were furious who actually wanted to pursue some kind of investigation, and the lawyers told this person, you must be some kind of idiot. [laughs]

Q: Just this reliance on gay equals pedophile, this horrible stereotype.

Awn: And that it can still get used against you in ways that you’d never do with a straight person. There’s always that suspicion that somehow you’re a touch more –

Q: You’re already a deviant.

Awn: So why wouldn’t they try to engage in inappropriate behavior? So that has been shocking that you end up with those kinds of legal complaints and litigation. Because obviously these days, if you don’t know I’m gay, I’ve made a mistake. [laughs]

Q: [laughs]

Awn: I wore my outrageous socks.

Q: I was about to say, that’s how I knew.

Awn: I was about to say, there’s a certain conventionality I have to follow, being Dean, but take a close look. [laughs] And put two and two together. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it, so what? And I’m really delighted in fact, that I’ve been the one recruiting veterans. And I joke with you know, once Don’t Ask Don’t Tell went away, I was more than happy to see ROTC come back. But the point is yes, the crazy lefty, and yes, I’m gay, but I think this is on a human level, an important thing to do. It adds more diversity to the community. If you can bring in, and they tend to be all over the political spectrum. Some of them make me look like a right wing nutcase, it’s really quite extraordinary. But you know, everyone things I’m some right wing, trying to pad the table.

Q: Who thinks that?

Awn: Believe it or not, the news people, I was on Fox News, telling how wonderful, one of the faculty at one of the events for the new GI Bill came to me and said, I’m so happy there’s finally a conservative balance. I said, you know I’m gay?

Q: It’s not just gay, it’s also not conservative.

Awn: And why does it have to be an issue based on that?

Q: Exactly.

Awn: The fun of even the ROTC debates, is that you couldn’t predict where individuals would land on the debate. The arguments were all really interesting on both sides, and it had nothing to do with your, you know, more conservative or more liberal. I mean, the head of the College Democrats, she got up and supported ROTC. Which I was stunned at, it was fascinating.

Q: That was, just how much debate that prompted.

Awn: But they were right, I think the gay community was absolutely right that they hadn’t dealt with the trans issue, but my argument was that society hasn’t dealt with the trans issue, so to me the military is only reflective to changes that go on in society.

Q: I mean, with a fair amount of inertia.

Awn: That’s right, they don’t do anything unless they’re told to do it, but this is really quite astonishing. That they would have a celebration in the Pentagon, which they did, they had on Gay Pride Day, for Gay Pride is really quite extraordinary. And to see so many people coming out, who remain in the military, you must know Sean, do you know Sean?

Q: Sean?

Awn: His last name is Srichanjik.

Q: I haven’t met him, but I’ve seen the name.

Awn: Lovely guy, big in CQA, and he was in the air force. [laughs] And he’s a vet. And I say, “Sean, how did you do it? How did you get by?” And he says, “It wasn’t easy, the rumors would start, so then I had to go start dating women.”

Q: Was there anything else about AIDS specifically?

Awn: No, I think that was the, again, I can’t say enough about Laura and GHAP. His [Paul’s] memorial service downtown literally filled Marble Collegiate, I think it was Marble Collegiate, I forget the name of the church. But literally, there wasn’t a seat that was empty. The influence that he had had and Laura had had broadly, not only at Columbia, but around the city and around the country was really astounding. Even when he knew that it was probably inevitable that that he would die, he didn’t stop. And that was the spirit that eventually emerged out of this place, which I think is really quite extraordinary. That is the Columbia that I know and love. So, it’s, Laura has been there and seen it all, and they were close as can be, he was her closest friend. So it’s, he’s a name that should never be forgotten. And in fact you know it’s Douglas from Senator Douglas, it’s a very, very prestigious political family.

Q: I didn’t know that.

Awn: His grandfather? Oh, no, no, no, very distinguished. And to show you how, in a way you had to be in your face, there was a rally out on the plaza, basically for HIV, and the community and gay rights, and Paul, who as I said was this big guy, wore a t-shirt, a white t-shirt, with big black letters that said, “BIG FAG.” [laughs] And I thought that was priceless, I said, “Paul only you would do that in the middle of the Columbia campus.” It was so terrific, it really was. But that was the spirit of it, once people began to mobilize, it was really going to be in your face, you’re not going to walk away from this. But you do great work, let me tell you, GHAP remains pivotal to this place.