And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition (54 page)

In the weeks after Dr. Silverman’s press conference, the posters and brochures were distributed to bathhouses. A few honest bathhouse owners posted the notices prominently, but most put them in the darkest corners, if they bothered to post them at all. The syntax of AIDSpeak was in word not deed. Dr. Silverman did not dispatch anyone to see whether his orders were executed. By the thousands, gay men continued to go to the baths, and by the thousands they would later die.

June 3

There was venality, and there was also courage.

Gary Walsh’s friend Mark Feldman died one month after he joined other AIDS patients in the candlelight march. Gary took his friend Lu Chaikin with him to the memorial service. Mark was the first to die among those early AIDS victims who had gone public with their plight. Though near death, they had braved social hysteria and personal rejection from friends so they could make people understand, so they could make people care.

Mark had died a particularly gruesome death. For weeks, his mouth was so engulfed in excruciating herpes sores that he could not eat. He was fed intravenously while the Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions covered his insides and
Pneumocystis
protozoa filled his lungs.

Gary was grim at the service. Lu wasn’t particularly cheerful herself, because she couldn’t put aside the thought that one day she would have to sit through a similar service for Gary.

Gary scanned the room. He saw the faces of those who would die; he saw the faces of those who had died; he saw himself.

Despair overwhelmed Gary Walsh in the days after the service. He started lodging calls to Secretary Margaret Heckler’s office. She should talk to him before she goes around saying that the government is spending all it needs to on AIDS research. She should talk to somebody who has had a friend die, he said. Gary tried to get an appointment with Governor Deukmejian, who had yet to utter one word of concern about the epidemic. He even wrote Ann Landers. For once, fighting didn’t salve the anger, the depression, or the fear.

A few weeks later, Gary mentioned to Lu that he didn’t think he would be going to any more memorial services.

The service also marked the first such ceremony for Bill Kraus. Bill had gone with his friend Ron Huberman, who had dated Mark Feldman before his illness. Afterward, Ron noticed that Bill was unusually somber. Ron thought it was because Mark’s death battered any remnants of denial they could have about the severity of what the community was facing. This wasn’t just hitting those other people—the fist-fuckers on Folsom Street—it was affecting respectable middle-class gays like themselves. Bill had a broader concern as well.

“Anita Bryant couldn’t destroy our community. The FBI could never destroy our community; the police couldn’t; Dan White couldn’t; the government couldn’t do it,” confided Bill. “But AIDS might. We’ve made all this progress only to be undone by some virus.”

Mark Feldman was one of the people with AIDS who had signed the letter asking the
Bay Area Reporter
publisher to fire editor Paul Lorch. When Lorch learned that Feldman had died, he pulled out the list of AIDS patients and crossed off Feldman’s name.

P
ASTEUR
I
NSTITUTE
,
P
ARIS

Luc Montagnier now knew that the new AIDS-related retrovirus was not a leukemia virus. He no longer called it RUB or HTLV. He had devised a new name, stemming from its retrieval from the lymph node of a lymphadenopathy patient. It was now called LAV, or lymphadenopathy-associated virus. Montagnier was surprised that there wasn’t more enthusiasm about the Pasteur Institute’s announcement of a new retrovirus. Most scientists wanted to defer final judgment until more research came from Robert Gallo’s lab at the National Cancer Institute. Gallo was, after all, a far more famed retrovirologist, and he was talking HTLV. Montagnier, however, felt his group was more on target. In recent weeks, Pasteur researchers had isolated LAV in the blood of some hemophiliacs. Montagnier was gaining more confidence that the Pasteur Institute had indeed discovered the virus that caused AIDS. Still, he was stumped as to which family of viruses LAV belonged. If not HTLV, then what?

The chance encounter with another virologist on the Pasteur campus gave Montagnier the final piece to the puzzle. The associate mentioned a family of viruses, primarily found in animals, called lentiviruses. Lenti means slow. These viruses go into the cells, lie dormant for a while, and then burst into frenzied activity. Montagnier had never heard of the family before. He spent the night reading about equine viruses and was amazed at the similarities. LAV had the same morphology, the same proteins, and even looked the same in the electron microscope pictures. At the regular Saturday meeting of the doctors working on AIDS, Montagnier confidently announced that they had indeed discovered a new virus and it was not HTLV.

This proved to be a turning point in the scientific understanding of the epidemic. In the lives of the French researchers, it was noted as the beginning of the great frustration. They had taken the mystery out of the mystery disease but nobody was going to believe them.

June 13

N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY

The headline screamed from every newsstand in the New York metropolitan area. The
New York Post
had struck pay dirt: “L.I. Grandma Dead of AIDS,” read the bold headline. The blood bank wouldn’t admit it, of course, because blood banks still weren’t admitting that transfusion-associated AIDS even existed. The Mineola grandmother, however, appeared to have no other risk for AIDS than the blood transfusion she had received three years before during heart surgery. Like most transfusion-AIDS cases diagnosed in 1983, Lorraine DeSantis had received the blood in 1980, long before the epidemic was even detected.

Suddenly, again, AIDS seemed a threat to everybody, and the wave of hysteria that had started building months before reached its crescendo in the final weeks of June and the first weeks of July. No part of the country seemed immune.

Each anecdote had the same premise spoken in the rarely heard dialect of AIDSpeak whispered outside the gay community. “Scientists don’t really know…” In gay AIDSpeak, that meant that scientists couldn’t prove AIDS was spread by sex, so people shouldn’t take measures to protect themselves. When those same words were spoken with a heterosexual accent, however, they meant that scientists couldn’t prove that AIDS was not spread by casual contagion, therefore people should take any measure possible to protect themselves and society. Both dialects were rooted in the same language of paranoia, one political and the other medical, although they implied drastically different solutions.

During this wave of AIDS hysteria in 1983, the heterosexuals got the most press. Every corner of the country seemed to have its own twist on AIDS fright. Because the
New York Post
had mastered the art of fashioning exaggerated fear and paranoia into headline copy, it seemed the best stories were happening in the five boroughs.

The day after the Long Island grandma headline, the
Post
ran another frightening story: “Junkie AIDS Victim Was Housekeeper at Bellevue.” The story, strategically placed next to “A real-life Bambi finds a home in Westchester,” told of how a thirty-one-year-old drug addict had been toting sheets and changing beds at Bellevue. When police officers delivered him to court for an arraignment, they wore rubber gloves and surgical masks.

A day after that, jail guards showed up at suburban Westchester County Jail in protective suits and surgical masks. The county jail did have one AIDS sufferer, but he was housed a quarter mile away from the main prison building where the guards wore padded nylon coveralls with hoods. “Grim future is here as guards model garb for handling AIDS inmates at Westchester County Jail,” read the caption.

The news that a jail cook at the Queens House of Detention had died of AIDS complications sent officials of the prison guards’ union scurrying in protest. When a Department of Corrections official told guards that they had nothing to fear from AIDS patients as food handlers, the president of the Correction Officers Benevolent Association said he would buy a steak and lobster dinner for the entire Department of Corrections executive staff if the food could be prepared and served by AIDS patients.

San Francisco was suffering a simultaneous case of the AIDS jitters. The day after the
Post
’s classic grandmother headline, two AIDS sufferers were scheduled to be part of an “A.M. San Francisco” segment whose goal was to “demystify” AIDS and calm the fears. However, the two patients couldn’t appear on the show because studio technicians refused to mike them. Then, cameramen said they would not shoot the show if they had to walk onto the same sound stage as the two gay men. The two patients instead talked through a telephone in a separate room; only their disembodied voices appeared in the “demystification” show.

While this drama unfolded in the ABC studios, a Superior Court judge at San Francisco City Hall was handed a piece of paper torn from a pocket-sized spiral notebook. “We the undersigned protest having to sit in a confined space with an admitted victim of a fatal disease which has baffled science and methods of transmitting are still not fully known,” it read.

Andrew Small, the thirty-year-old “admitted victim,” was stunned. He knew he could have pleaded his health to get out of jury duty altogether, but he still felt such service was a civic responsibility. When word had spread among jurors, one woman’s husband demanded that she leave the jury. The others were upset as well. After the judge received the note, she called in the presiding Superior Court judge and Dr. Marcus Conant for consultation. Conant advised her that AIDS was not easily spread, and the judge was not inclined to let this crazy fear interfere with her courtroom. Andrew Small ended up resigning from the panel, however, deciding it was unfair to the litigants to have a splintered jury bickering over the hepatitis B model.

On the same day, the papers featured the story of two San Jose nurses who quit their jobs after refusing to treat an AIDS patient. “There really isn’t anyone who wants to go in the room,” said one nurse. Among AIDS groups in Manhattan, word spread that nurses were similarly refusing to treat some people with AIDS, although New York hospitals did not see the problem as serious enough to warrant dismissal.

Even in death, AIDS sufferers would not find respite from the fear and ostracism. The New York State Funeral Directors Association that week recommended that its 11,000 members refuse to embalm anyone who appeared to have succumbed to the epidemic.

Doctors harbored no protective antibodies to hysteria. At the AIDS clinic at San Francisco General Hospital, clinic director Dr. Paul Volberding noticed that colleagues were less likely to shake his hand. Many seemed standoffish around him. Television news crews were similarly nervous about any physical contact.

In San Antonio, paramedics demanded their own protective suits—consisting of a hospital gown, pullover hood, surgical mask, and shoe covers—for use when they neared a suspected AIDS patient. In a suburb of San Diego, authorities canceled a class in resuscitation techniques because nobody wanted to share the dummy used for demonstrations, fearing they might get AIDS. Haitian Americans suffered multiple indignities in the two cities where they were most concentrated, Miami and New York. Just trying on a pair of shoes in Florida sometimes became a traumatic experience, because salespeople declined to let anyone who looked Haitian near any merchandise. Haitian community leaders argued loudly that the Haitian category should be dropped from the CDC’s list of risk groups because they were the only nationality so singled out for treatment. In New York, some Haitians reportedly reassured anxious prospective employers that they hailed not from Haiti but from Martinique, another Francophonic Caribbean isle.

Sociologists hypothesized that AIDS hysteria was more profound than the anxiety surrounding other diseases because AIDS was first identified in the gay community, a group that already suffered social stigma and inspired fear among many heterosexuals. The epidemic gave new fuel to old prejudices. Scientists themselves promoted the fear further with all the “ifs” and “buts” with which they compulsively qualified any statement about the disease. The pusillanimous talk about bodily fluids only made it worse.

Where there are old anti-gay prejudices given new life, the Moral Majority cannot be far behind. Although the organization was still in the process of forging its final policy statement about the epidemic in the last weeks of June, its leaders were running trial balloons on the nascent rhetoric. “We feel the deepest sympathy for AIDS victims, but I’m upset that the government is not spending more money to protect the general public from the gay plague,” said Ronald Goodwin, executive vice-president of the group. “What I see is a commitment to spend our tax dollars on research to allow these diseased homosexuals to go back to their perverted practices without any standards of accountability.” Another Moral Majority spokesman was more aggressive: “If homosexuals are not stopped,” said the Reverend Greg Dixon, “they will in time infect the entire nation, and America will be destroyed.”