Eric Sawyer Leveraged His Property-Buying Skills to Create Housing for People with AIDS in 1980s-90s NYC
Now 70, the longtime AIDS activist talks about rehabbing abandoned buildings in the blighted Harlem of yesteryear—and about how he still has to explain PrEP and U=U to some of his young f**k buddies.
Happy new year, Caftaners! I hope the year is starting out on a cozy note for you. It's a very bright, cold day here in NYC. I saw Babygirl with Nicole Kidman and that hottie Harry Dickinson a few nights ago.
I thought the ending was tied up in too neat a bow but otherwise I liked it—it was sexy and often funny! (However, I should also add that I am tired of movies and TV shows about insanely rich people who live and work in sleek, digital settings, but whatever!) Next on my list to see are Nosferatu (tonight in fact!) and Queer.
My first interview of 2025 is with the longtime New York HIV/AIDS activist Eric Sawyer, 70, who is also a longtime friend. I usually shy away from interviewing people I'm close to, but as Eric and I were chatting about this and that the other day, it occurred to me that he had a particularly good story about how he leveraged his skills buying and renovating abandoned townhouses in Harlem in the early 1980s into procuring housing for homeless people with AIDS in the late 1980s and through the 90s, including as a cofounder of the nonprofit Housing Works.
Frankly, I've always been fascinated by people who not only had a nose for buying property whose value would increase—or even knowing how to raise the money to do so—but also knew how to navigate all that crazy bank and city paperwork and do a great deal of the renovations themselves. I don't even like to paint my own house or hang my own shelves! And I always look back ruefully on a certain moment in the late 90s where somehow I'd managed to save a considerable chunk of money and, had I been a person like Eric, would've known to invest it in real estate (probably in what was, at that time, the "wastelands" of Brooklyn). I spent it mostly on DJ equipment instead! Oh, well!
Eric told me that a certain queer public intellectual (who shall not be named because I don't have the textual backup on this at my fingertips) has called him, in print, a gentrifier, because of his somewhat speculative purchases in Harlem at a time when much of the neighborhood was blighted. There is a lot of research (that I'm not intimately familiar with) on the effects of gentrification, with much of it finding a complex mix of outcomes both good (economic revitalization, increased resources and safety, rising values for preexisting homeowners) and bad (longtime tenants without some kind of rent protection having to leave as rents competitively rise, cash-poor homeowners not being able to pay rising property taxes, a sense of cultural loss as neighborhoods that have long been majority Black or otherwise specific to an ethnic group fills with newcomers who are often white or at very least far more affluent than the base population). I'll let you hear Eric's whole story and decide what you make of it. Whatever you think of what he did in Harlem in the early 1980s, I think you'll agree that he likely wouldn't have been so savvy and effective creating housing for homeless people with AIDS without the skills and know-how he acquired in his property-buying years.
Meanwhile, I am working hard to line up great interviews for you in 2025! (I’m getting a much-fought-for 30 minutes—too short!—with a major icon next week.) As ever, much thanks to those who've pay-subscribed—you are slowly but surely helping me grow this enterprise, with my total paid and unpaid readers now well into the thousands, which is a great feeling. Please stick with me in 2025—a year that I hope contains good things for you, even as we brace ourselves for madness in D.C. xo Tim
Eric, thanks so much for talking to Caftan. So, you're 70—you had an amazing birthday party at Julius' bar last February… (there is great video here of Eric breaking down as he walks into his surprise party…courtesy of Jason Rosenberg)…
…and I'm hoping for another one soon, if not necessarily a blow-out like last year! So you grew up in upstate New York, yes?
Yes, in a one-traffic-light town outside of Binghamton. My mother was a housewife and my father was a long-distance trucker, but most of my extended family were dairy farmers and periodically we would go to different family members' farms to help with haying or gardening. Everyone went to my grandmother's house for Sunday dinner and everyone would bring their green peas they'd gardened and take home quarters of frozen beans we'd picked.
I graduated in 1976 from Oneonta State with a degree in psychology, then went to University of Colorado-Boulder for a grad degree in public administration.
When did you come out as gay?
In grad school. In undergrad, I was dating women but occasionally getting drunk and sucking cock. Guys on the wrestling, swimming and tennis teams would end up 69'ing with me under the right circumstances. But I think I subconsciously picked UC-Boulder for grad school because I'd read about how [the Beat poet] Allen Ginsberg had started an LGBT organization there—a group I joined as soon as I got there. It was very refreshing—some queens but also some pretty normal people. They had people from The Gay Activists Alliance come and speak to us about how there were normal people out there who were happy living the gay lifestyle. So I started by saying that I was bisexual and by December, I had a boyfriend but was still pretending that I was bisexual. Also, the VP of that club at UC-Boulder was Tim Gill, who started the software company Quark and then The Gill Foundation.
Why did you decide to move to NYC in 1980 after finishing grad school?
Because after living almost four years in Denver, which is a small town, I'd slept with everyone I was interested in sleeping with. In Colorado, I'd have sex with four or five people in six weeks, but I'd come to New York or San Francisco for a two-week break and have sex with 10 guys in five days. So I moved to New York for dick, girl!
So you arrive in May 1980. What was New York like then? What was your first year like?
I first lived with my straight undergrad college roommate in his parents' house in Canarsie [Tim: about as far away from gay Manhattan life at that time as you could get.] My brother put me in touch with a guy who owned a restaurant on 83rd and Third Ave. called Martell's, where I ended up working part-time while looking for an apartment and a job. I eventually ended up getting an apartment on 22nd St. between Ninth and Tenth Avenues in Chelsea, which was pretty run-down and just becoming a gay neighborhood, even though there were no gay bars or restaurants yet. It was an offshoot of the main gay 'hood, the West Village.
(Here is a full hour of NBC News B-roll of NYC in the 1980s if you really want to get into the vibe.)
I had co-bought and renovated a two-family home in Denver and ended up selling my interest in that. But it had given me the renovation bug and I tried to find a way to buy a townhouse in NYC. There was a place, a 22-footer (in width) on 23rd St. across from [the iconic block-size apartment complex] London Terrace. It was on sale for $115,000. But I couldn't pull it off.
How would you dress and where would you go out?
Jeans, T-shirt, flannel shirts, Chuck Taylors or boots. The gay world was basically yuppies or leather guys and I did the drag of whatever bar I was going to. Bars like Uncle Charlie's, Private Eyes, Danceteria, and on the more leather sleazy side Ty's, the Eagle and the Toilet.
So [Tim: Speaking of toilets!] I got a job in October 1980 working for American Standard as a wage and salary analyst. I'd had a fantasy of trying to become an actor. I was fucking long distance a very handsome mixed-race guy from Houston who'd been modeling there but then he got signed with The Zoli modeling agency and moved to New York and talked me into moving in with him.
He was going to try to help me get a modeling contract and/or get me into acting school.
So I ended up sharing that one-bedroom Chelsea apartment with the Houston guy, then two other people quickly moved in—both ballet dancers, a woman and a man who fucked Nureyev. But I got tired of chasing down their part of the rent and rented my own studio at 103rd St and Central Park West for $375.
Then I kept looking for a building to buy. I'd become friends by then with Larry Kramer and, in 1981, he and I and my boss at American Standard were trying to buy two brownstones for a total of $225,000 on 100th St. between West End and Broadway. But the deal fell apart after Larry's brother Arthur, a lawyer at a prestigious firm who was doing the legal work for us, discovered a bunch of liens on the building that the owner hadn't told us about.
So I'd heard that people were starting to renovate brownstones in Harlem, so I biked there, to Manhattan Avenue in Manhattanville.
I'd seen a house there listed in The New York Times for $26,000—a four-story brownstone with several squatters in it. So with money I borrowed from a friend of my father and the manager at Martell's, I was able to buy it. Then I moved in there with my new boyfriend [not the Houston guy]. There was no heat or hot water or gas, only electricity and cold water. There were water leaks everywhere and rooms filled with garbage as high as the refrigerator.
And you did all that removal and cleaning yourself?
Yes. My routine was that on our way home from work, we'd get at least two boxes of garbage bags and spend the evening filling them to put them out on the street until we were out of bags. This probably took two or three months.
What was the neighborhood like?
We were the only white people for 15 blocks. We'd get off the subway and people would yell "Whitey on the block!" or "Cracker on the block!" and would sometimes throw bottles at us. So I went to the ASPCA and adopted a 95-pound German shepherd to walk around the neighborhood with and I also put steel bars on the windows of the bottom two floors of the brownstone.
