And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition (35 page)

The stranger stopped Gaetan Dugas as he walked casually past the window of Ail-American Boy, the quartermaster depot of the “Castro clone” look, where even the manikins had washboard stomachs. He grabbed the flight attendant’s arm and wouldn’t let go when Gaetan tried to jerk away.

“I know who you are and what you’re doing,” the man said. “You’d better leave town if you know what’s good for you.”

Volunteers at the Kaposi’s Sarcoma Foundation help line, who had long been apprised of Gaetan’s bathhouse escapades, were now hearing that a group of gay men had decided to drive the “Orange County connection” out of town for so purposefully spreading his disease.

Gaetan tore away from the menacing face and said something defiant before ambling back down Castro Street. These people are hysterical about AIDS, he told himself.

It was around then that he confided to Canadian friends that he was thinking of moving back to Vancouver.

December 12

Dana Van Gorder, Supervisor Harry Britt’s aide, called Bill Kraus in his congressional office with the news. Mark Feldman, whom Bill Kraus had dated some time ago, had been diagnosed with both Kaposi’s sarcoma and
Pneumocystis carinii
pneumonia. Bill was stunned. It wasn’t that they were great friends as much as the fact that Mark was so much like Bill. He was successful, handsome, and politically involved to the point that he publicly announced his dual diagnosis with KS and PCP only days after he got the word from doctors. He wanted to raise peoples’ consciousness about the disease, he said. Like Bill Kraus, Mark Feldman was young, healthy, and strong. They even worked out at the same gym together, and now, Mark had suddenly started dropping weight and looking as though he were aging rapidly. Intellectually, Bill had always tried to banish the idea that the illness was some kind of metaphor, something that only the sleaze-balls who fist-fucked on Folsom Street contract. That idea, he knew, wasn’t politically correct. Still, the shock at Mark Feldman’s diagnosis educated him as to how much he had seen AIDS as the problem of other people. Sure, he had worked on it as an issue and had repeatedly instructed Phil Burton that it was the top-priority gay issue, but Bill had never seen it as an issue for himself, except in some dark corner of his imagination.

In the days that followed, Bill Kraus contemplated his own future and his own fear that some day a doctor might tell him he had this sentence to die. He did double-takes on this or that spot, found while he was scrubbing his shoulder in the shower; the fear was pervasive. Bill always remembered that day of early fear, December 12, 1982, because it was the last time he ever had a sexual encounter that involved the proverbial exchange of bodily fluids.

A number of San Francisco physicians would remember the end of 1982 as an invisible demarcation line for their patients. There weren’t any formal studies, but, in their evaluations of patients, doctors noted that gay men who had stopped getting inseminated by the end of 1982 tended to avoid infection with the AIDS virus; those who were infected tended to be those who carried on into 1983 and beyond. It was just a rule of thumb, of course, because later studies indicated that at least 20 percent of San Francisco’s gay men were probably infected with the AIDS virus before the end of 1982. The most recently infected would constitute the swelling caseloads and mortality statistics of 1986 and 1987. Such numbers meant that, by 1983, it would be very difficult to be at the receptive end of semen deposition and not get this virus.

In New York City, where the virus apparently arrived first and was probably more widespread, a fierce debate had already consumed the gay community in the final weeks of 1982, precisely on the issue of promiscuity and AIDS. Two people with AIDS, a rock singer named Michael Callen and one-time hustler Richard Berkowitz, had fired the first volley with an essay in the
New York Native
called “We Know Who We Are.”

The piece blasted all the fashionable talk about how the gay community was getting a bad public relations rap with the discussion about sexual activity and gay cancer. When Callen made media appearances to talk about his AIDS diagnosis, he was counseled by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis to say, “I don’t know,” if he were asked how he got the disease. Callen had no doubt how he got the disease. He had frequented every sex club and bathhouse between the East River and the Pacific Ocean and had gathered enough venereal and parasitic diseases to make his medical chart look like that of some sixty-five-year-old Equatorial African living in squalor. He had spent much of 1982 going to support groups for other AIDS patients, many of whom were still attending their old pleasure parlors in the bowels of Greenwich Village.

The politically correct line, emerging from a handful of “AIDS activists,” maintained that talking about the gay community’s prodigious promiscuity was part of a “blame-the-victim mentality.” Michael Callen saw a fine line between blaming the victim and taking responsibility, and he thought it was time for some straight talk about the disease if gay men were to survive. Merely moderating sexual behavior, as most gay doctors and health officials counseled, was not enough, he and Berkowitz wrote in the
Native,
Strong measures needed to be taken; it was time to think about closing the bathhouses, they wrote. “If going to the baths is really a game of Russian roulette, then the advice must be to throw the gun away, not merely to play less often.”

Callen and Berkowitz were quickly denounced as “sexual Carrie Nations,” and the letters column of the
Native
was filled with angry rebuttals. Writer Charles Jurrist responded with his own
Native
piece, “In Defense of Promiscuity,” which highlighted the popular party line that a gay man was more likely to be killed in a car accident than by AIDS. An infectious agent might be hypothesized, Jurrist wrote, “…but that’s all it is—a theory. It is far from scientifically demonstrated. It therefore seems a little premature to be calling for an end to sexual freedom in the name of physical health.”

The disputes over sexuality also gnawed at the board of directors of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Many board members were outraged at what they perceived as prudery on the part of Callen and Berkowitz. Although they were on the forefront of educating people about AIDS and had largely cut back on unsafe sex themselves, the GMHC board thought that issues like bathhouse closure presented profound civil rights questions. You might start by closing baths, but what would happen next? they asked.

Meanwhile, Larry Kramer was growing more militant in his stance that GMHC needed to get down-and-dirty with the facts about AIDS and tell people that, if they wanted to survive, they should just stop having sex. He also was edging toward the position that bathhouses should be closed.

GMHC board meetings often degenerated into heated battles with Larry Kramer on one side and everybody else on the other. Kramer was just continuing his vendetta against the gay fast lane that he had started with
Faggots
years ago, other board members thought. Some privately worried that the arguments might end up as the subject of some new literary effort by Kramer. Everybody knew that a number of his friends had formed the basis for characters in
Faggots;
some had never spoken to Kramer again. Worry that board members might end up in
Faggots II
did nothing to ease the growing tensions.

December 13

The New York Blood Center’s records on a suburban matron who contracted AIDS in August turned up a donor who was an intravenous drug user. Dr. Dale Lawrence interviewed him on the Monday morning after Friday’s announcement in San Francisco. Maybe he shouldn’t have donated blood, the man confided, but there was a blood drive at work and he didn’t want his boss to know that he once had been in a methadone program. No, he didn’t have any AIDS symptoms, but one of the guys with whom he had shared needles had come down with a strange blood disease, he said.

Lawrence checked the other man’s name with the master list in Atlanta—he was a diagnosed AIDS case. They now had substantiated a second transfusion case. Other investigators were checking out more reports, and at the CDC’s prompting, the U.S. Public Health Service had called for a meeting with blood bankers and representatives of AIDS risk groups for the first Tuesday in January. CDC virologists were racing to do studies to determine whether there were any existing blood tests that might help screen out AIDS-infected donors. The agency hadn’t been able to do much to actually control the spread of AIDS among gays, officials knew; at least with the blood industry, which was firmly under federal regulations through the FDA, they had a chance to save lives if they moved fast.

December 15

C
ASTRO
D
ISTRICT
, S
AN
F
RANCISCO

Joe Brewer knew something was wrong as soon as Gary Walsh called and said they had to have lunch. For Christ’s sake, Joe thought, their respective offices were next door to each other. Why did they need lunch? Joe was busy enough, pulling together their trip to Yucatan for the weekend, having to tend to extra details because Gary just hadn’t had the energy to pull his end.

“The doctor tells me I can’t go to Mexico,” said Gary sullenly, not looking at his friend.

“Why?”

“He’s sort of worried that I might get intestinal parasites,” said Gary, staring at the floor during a pause that seemed far too long. “He’s worried I might be pre-AIDS.”

Joe Brewer knew Gary’s stolid, conservative doctor and knew that if he was “sort of” worried about something he actually was extremely worried. He would never do something as drastic as tell Gary to cancel a trip unless something was very wrong.

“He’s afraid if something happens down there, away from good hospitals…” Gary let the sentence drift off.

Gary was going to die.

Even in his numb state, Joe knew that, and all the hints he had never fleshed out suddenly sprang into a life of their own. Of course, he should have seen it; now it was real. Gary had AIDS and he was going to die.

That evening, at Gary’s comfortable apartment on Alpine Terrace, Gary finally told Joe about the skin problems he had suffered, the different salves he had to use. Gary opened his mouth to show his friend the white spots. Candidiasis, the doctor had said, more commonly known as thrush. Joe began to realize how sick Gary was, how sick he had been.

Time was important now, Joe thought. They couldn’t waste it. Joe quickly began putting together an alternative plan. They could go to Key West. That was tropical and still near all the conveniences of modern medicine. Within an hour, Joe had booked the last open flight reservations to Key West and lucked into the last two available rooms at a popular gay guest house. They’d make a trip after all; life would not end.

As Joe drove from Gary’s house, perched on the hills over the Castro District with the dark silhouettes of downtown skyscrapers in the distance, he realized their lives would never be the same. December 15, 1982, was his point of demarcation. From then on, he cast his life in terms of Before this event had happened and, now, After.

December 17

C
ENTERS FOR
D
ISEASE
C
ONTROL,
A
TLANTA

For the second consecutive week, the small, innocuous-looking
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
contained a bombshell in its gray pages with the report: “Unexplained Immunodeficiency and Opportunistic Infections in Infants—New York, New Jersey, California.” Even in the dry prose of the
MMWR,
each case read like a horror story.

There was, for example, the black-Hispanic baby, born in December 1980, who had grown slowly in his first nine months and then stopped growing altogether. At seventeen months, he suffered thrush, various staph infections, and severe calcification of his brain. His bone marrow was swimming with
Mycobacterium avium-intracellular,
a horrible bacterial infection normally seen in birds. The baby’s mother was a junkie who seemed healthy at the child’s birth but developed candidiasis and decreased T-cells in October 1981, only to die of
Pneumocystis
a month later. The infant, now orphaned, was itself hovering near death. There was another, Haitian baby, who in just thirty weeks of life had contracted
Pneumocystis,
cryptococcosis, severe cytomegalovirus and a panoply of other infections before lapsing into respiratory failure. Altogether, the CDC had reports of twenty-two babies who seemed to fit no existing category of inherited immune defect; all were children of people in high-risk groups for AIDS, either intravenous drug users or Haitians.

The report was not cheerful reading, but the CDC staffers hoped it would pound another nail in the case they were still trying to prove to a reluctant scientific establishment—that a new infectious agent was making substantial inroads into diverse corners of American life and threatening unimaginable tragedy.