And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition (67 page)

Despite all their evidence, the Parisian doctors found that the American scientific establishment was reluctant to take their work seriously. Their research papers were subjected to lengthy delays. In rejecting one paper, an American reviewer took a nationalistic tact when he dismissed LAV as “the French virus.” Behind the scenes, Robert Gallo at the NCI continued to spread the word that LAV was nothing more than a laboratory contaminant. Repeatedly, Pasteur researchers heard from their American counterparts that, yes, the Pasteur work was interesting, but they would wait to see what Gallo came up with. Willy Rozenbaum, returning to his tropical disease ward after such conversations, continued to see new patients parading by with their grisly array of diseases, and wanted to shout: “People are dying. We are losing time.” But there was no one to hear him.

The disheartened doctors often ended their fourteen-hour days commiserating at a Left Bank cabaret, the Paradise Latin, where they pondered what more they could do to make people believe them. The researchers’ spouses joked that they would form an anti-SIDA committee to get the researchers’ minds off the relentless frustration of having the answer but being ignored.

In November, Francoise Barre, the Pasteur researcher who had discovered LAV the previous January, ran into Bob Gallo at the international airport outside Tokyo. Both were bound for the same scientific conference, so they shared a cab into Tokyo. During the ride, Gallo confided that at last he had discovered the retrovirus that caused AIDS. It might even prove to be similar to LAV, he said.

Back in Paris, the Pasteur researchers had no doubt that whatever AIDS virus Gallo had discovered would indeed prove to be LAV. Perhaps, finally, they would gain their long-denied recognition.

Dr. Jay Levy, researcher at the University of California at San Francisco, had done a sabbatical with Dr. Jean-Claude Chermann at the Pasteur and had maintained his links to the institute over the years. When Levy visited Paris in September, he was impressed by the Pasteur’s research, although he turned down an offer to take LAV back to San Francisco with him. He intended to find the AIDS retrovirus himself and did not want skeptics to later charge that his own research was tainted by lab contamination. Within a month of his return, Levy had cultured six isolates of a retrovirus from the blood of local AIDS patients. He decided against speeding the research into publication until he could accumulate more definitive proof that his agent was indeed the cause of AIDS and not an opportunistic infection.

It was November 1983, and science at last was closing in on the viral culprit that bred international death. Unfortunately, the scientific intrigue that would surround the discovery had only begun.

November 7

M
ATT
K
RIEGER’S
J
OURNAL

For the third time in some four weeks, Gary is in the hospital. This time with pneumonia. Not
Pneumocystis
pneumonia, just regular pneumonia.

Pneumonia, Kaposi’s sarcoma, severe psoriasis, herpes, an anal fissure, a bad tooth that needs a root canal (but can’t be treated because of risk of infection and the fact that he couldn’t withstand the procedure). Probably more infections that I can’t think of.

He’s been extremely weak, especially the last three or four days. Too weak to walk, to eat his food, to shower, even to squeeze a tube of toothpaste or push the button on the shaving cream can.

I stayed with him three of the last four nights…. During these times, his conversations go to his inability to withstand the pain. “This is no way to live. I’ve lost my fighting spirit. I don’t know how much longer I can make it.” And that’s so understandable to me now, even though I can never even vaguely comprehend the severity of his pain.

To my surprise and pleasure and at his suggestion, I slept on his bed two of the three nights. We sleep on far opposite sides of his big platform bed. Still I have sexual feelings for him. Although I haven’t felt very sexual in a while….

[This morning] it was the talk with the nurse just before I left that first disturbed me. She told me of Larry, a guy with AIDS on the floor. Larry and Gary never met but exchanged greetings through their doctor. Everyone said Larry was friendly, wonderful, terrific, fun, and caring. Now he’s crazy, senile, and psychotic, they say. He thinks he’s being raped. Thinks he’s dead. Thinks he’s at home. Outbursts of anger at people he loves. Doesn’t recognize people. He’s given up and he’s mentally gone. He’ll be dead very soon.

What must this do to Gary to hear this? It must be horrible.

Then, after I left Gary’s room, I ran into a nurse, Angelina. She confirmed the report about Larry. “And this one in here, with KS,” she said to me just outside a patient’s open door, “he’s going to die in two or three days. He’s been here two months. His face, it’s horrible. Do you want to see it?”

No thanks.

“I’m afraid for Gary,” she said. “Larry had the same terrible headaches just a few weeks ago.”

I went into the hospital with hope. I left with a sickness in my stomach.

What lies ahead? Gary will not go through that, I know…. When I left the hospital, I stopped by Gary’s apartment to pick up clothing and my tape recorder, which I had left there over the weekend. I ran into the man who delivers videotapes to Gary. He was there to pick up some tapes, which I got for him from the apartment.

“How’s Gary?” he asked.

“Not so good,” I said.

“My best friend died of AIDS in Los Angeles this morning,” he told me. “He got a respiratory infection three or four days ago and his whole system just went whammo.”

I feel surrounded by inevitable painful death.

Gary was awake in bed when another image appeared to him. This friend had been a writer and aspiring stand-up comedian before he died of leukemia in September. Gary was excited to see him.

“There is a passageway you have to go through,” he told Gary. “I’ll help you get through it. You’ll like it here.”

Gary asked him to come back again, and a few days later he did.

“I’m scared,” Gary said.

“I told you not to worry about it,” his friend said, seeming impatient at the interruption. “Now stop bothering me. I’ve got writing to do.”

The off-year municipal elections on November 8 produced a bonanza for a gay political movement that had worked long to broaden its political base nationally. Openly gay men were elected to the city councils of both Boston and Minneapolis, while a gay art dealer became mayor in Key West. Virtually all the major Democratic presidential contenders were now on the record in favor of gay civil rights. Within days of the election, Senators Alan Cranston, John Glenn, and Ernest Hollings, who were all announced presidential hopefuls, included their names among the fifteen solons seeking Senate AIDS hearings in the fall. Mayor Dianne Feinstein rolled up the largest margins in San Francisco history to win her second full term. The city got a collective chuckle from an obscure opponent named Brian Lantz, who was the northern California field organizer for an equally obscure extremist presidential candidate named Lyndon LaRouche. Among Lantz’s claims in the race was that the city should abandon pro-gay politics, because he could establish that homosexuality was a temporary condition that could be “cured” with proper treatment.

The disclosure in mid-November that Dr. Selma Dritz had sought a legal opinion on whether she could ban people with AIDS from the city’s gay bathhouses resurrected some gay leaders’ convictions that a general lock-down of the city’s homosexuals was imminent. Dritz had sought the city attorney’s opinion about the legality of forcing AIDS sufferers out of the baths after continuing reports that patients were routinely using the sex palaces. The stories came at a time when bathhouse patronage was soaring again. A deputy city attorney ruled that Dritz would be on shaky legal ground because scientists had yet to discover a viral agent behind the epidemic, thereby proving conclusively that AIDS was a communicable disease.

Dritz leaked the story to the
San Francisco Chronicle,
hoping at least to warn gay men of the risk in continued attendance at bathhouses. Meanwhile, at the state health department’s infectious disease headquarters in Berkeley, meetings were being organized to determine state policy on what to do about recalcitrant AIDS patients. Ultimately, state health authorities listed an array
of
options, beginning with community dissuasion of such behavior and ending with possible quarantine of obdurate individuals. Ritualistic denunciations from gay leaders and civil liberties lawyers followed such talk. More imaginative gay leaders insisted that the suggestions were preludes to the internment of the entire gay community. The civil rights of people who might contract the deadly syndrome from these patients was rarely considered in these arguments.

Dritz tried to keep the debate elevated to the level of policy discussion. She never publicly discussed the individual who had inspired her to explore her options in restricting bathhouse patrons.

In Vancouver, Gaetan Dugas’s health was beginning to fail. He had already defied all odds by surviving over three years after his June 1980 diagnosis with Kaposi’s sarcoma. As his energy faded, he confided to friends that he was growing tired of the fight.