And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition (80 page)

Although the meeting was short on definitive policy recommendations, it left Paul Popham troubled. The growing rift between AIDS groups and the federal government troubled the Republican streak in Popham’s personality. At one point, he would have considered rhetoric about quarantine camps to be so much paranoia from fringe radicals, but his old-fashioned trust in the government had been profoundly shaken by the AIDS epidemic.

By now, it was clear to him that the government would do as little as possible to research AIDS as long as only homosexuals were dying. This thought bothered him. Before AIDS, Paul had never believed that gays really were all that oppressed; now he was worrying about wholesale employment discrimination and quarantine camps. Paul had spent a lifetime believing in his nation, and he had fought in Vietnam to protect it. One of his greatest disappointments in the AIDS epidemic was that he felt robbed of his faith in the United States.

Paul had another reason for concern with the antibody test. In 1982, he had enrolled in one of the first prospective studies of gay men. Blood drawn for the past three years had been ferreted away in the freezers of St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. A few weeks before, Dr. Michael Lange had sat down with Paul to tell him that he had been infected with this new virus since the study began, probably longer. In fact, 50 percent of the sixty men participating in the study were antibody positive, and they were now the first gay men in the United States to be given the disquieting news that they were carrying the AIDS virus.

The news didn’t surprise Paul. After all, his old boyfriend, Jack Nau, was one of the first dozen AIDS cases diagnosed in New York City. It also explained why his lymph nodes had been swollen for so long.

The confidentiality issue dominated AIDS concerns in the summer of 1984. The particulars often demonstrated the complexity of the question, even as it defined the shape of things to come in the AIDS epidemic.

In late July, Jim Curran caused an uproar when he sent a memo to all state and territorial epidemiologists asking whether authorities should start keeping a registry of everyone whose blood donations proved to be infected with HTLV-III once the blood test was available. Already, authorities throughout the nation kept a similar registry of people infected with hepatitis B and syphilis. Adding HTLV-III to the list would help avoid situations like that of the California man who had donated blood to eleven different centers even though he suffered from immune problems stemming from his AIDS infection. Gays worried that such a list would amount to little more than a registry of homosexual men and pointed out that the list could be put to nefarious use in the twenty-five states where gay sexual acts remained illegal.

In San Francisco, where health officials anxiously kept track of gay concerns, confidentiality-obsessed health department staffers saw a unique opportunity to advance their privacy agenda with the departure of Selma Dritz. Like a good soldier, Dritz had left the department her plump notebooks jammed with observations on the first years of the AIDS epidemic. The information was amassed on health department time, Dritz figured, so it belonged to the department. And in the summer of 1984, the San Francisco Department of Public Health took the politically correct action of feeding the notebooks into a paper shredder.

The same day that the antibody test conference convened in New York City, the
San Francisco Chronicle
published the contents of the May 25 Brandt memo that had asked $50 million more for the war on AIDS. When questioned, a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget said the budget agency had never heard of the request. Brandt’s plea, it turned out, had never moved off Secretary Heckler’s desk in two months.

The next day, Representative Ed Roybal of Los Angeles walked into an executive session of the subcommittee in charge of appropriations to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and threw the Brandt memo on the table. The committee immediately approved $8.3 million in additional AIDS research money to be spent in the remaining two months of fiscal year 1984. Senator Alan Cranston put together a Senate bill seeking the full amount of Brandt’s request. And the wide circulation of Brandt’s memo on Capitol Hill ensured that Republicans would not toe the administration line that government doctors had all the funds they needed to fight AIDS.

On August 8, Secretary Heckler responded to Dr. Brandt’s memo and rebuffed his request for new funds for AIDS research. Instead, she gave him authorization to redirect the funds from other projects within the NIH and CDC.

Between the time that Brandt wrote his memo and the date that Heckler answered it, 600 Americans died of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and another 1,200 were diagnosed with the disease.

It was during these difficult weeks that Brandt decided he would retire from government service at the end of the year. He had been offered the post of chancellor at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, a respected medical school. Gay leaders, sympathetic to Brandt’s position as a sincere public servant, spread the word that the doctor was quitting in frustration over his inability to secure a commitment to AIDS research from the administration. But Brandt later said that the problems with AIDS funding had the opposite effect. “I couldn’t help but worry about what would happen if I weren’t there to fight for the money,” he said.

August 1984 was a month of death in San Francisco, as the mounting number of AIDS casualties included increasingly well-known people. Jon Sims, the former Kansas music teacher who organized the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Marching Band, died of brain infections, having spent the last weeks of his life blind and suffering from dementia. The city’s most prominent AIDS sufferer, Bobbi Campbell, died on August 15 of cryptosporidiosis. He was the “AIDS Poster Boy” who went public with his plight in 1981 and ended up on the cover of
Newsweek
two years later. By an eerie coincidence, in the last months of his life, Bobbi Campbell had made his home at 1040 Ashbury Street, in the same apartment that was left vacant nearly three years before by the death of the city’s first diagnosed AIDS patient, Ken Home.

Several weeks earlier, philosopher Michel Foucault also died from AIDS in Paris. To the end, however, Foucault hid his diagnosis from everyone, including his devoted lover. Even though the
New York Native
chastised
The New York Times
for not listing AIDS as a cause of death in its obituaries, the
Native
itself reported that Foucault died of an “infection that attacked his central nervous system.”

The reluctance of prominent people to publicly acknowledge their AIDS diagnoses left obituary columns strangely empty of actual flesh-and-blood people who were dying of the syndrome. Only the most knowledgeable of obituary readers could detect the presence of this epidemic in the death notices. A thirty-eight-year-old fashion designer dying of “cancer and pneumonia,” for example, was a sure giveaway, as was the man in his thirties who left no surviving widow after succumbing to a “lingering” or “lengthy” illness. How lingering can an illness be for somebody who is only thirty-two years old? Sometimes newspapers concealed AIDS as the cause of death because the news writers found it embarrassing; more frequently, because the family did. In fact, the lack of people dying of AIDS in obituary columns led gay journalist Larry Bush to wonder aloud: “What if they gave an epidemic and nobody died?”

August 18

D
ALLAS
, T
EXAS

Larry Bush was wading through a crowd of gay Republicans who had sponsored a party for the eve of the Republican National Convention when he recognized Terry Dolan across the room. Dolan was the New Right fund-raising genius whose National Conservative Political Action Committee had raised over $10 million for Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign.

Publicly, Dolan distanced himself from the gay rights movement. Privately, Bush knew, Dolan took advantage of the more comfortable gay life-style that the movement had created. Dolan regularly appeared in Washington gay bars, and he vacationed at the gay Russian River resort area north of San Francisco. Bush couldn’t resist goading Dolan about the Reagan administration’s miserable response to the AIDS epidemic.

“We’ve been able to stop a lot of negative things,” Dolan answered. “It’s a real horror show, some of the things that have been suggested.”

“Are we talking quarantine?” Bush asked, alluding to the rumors that the administration might seek to intern everyone harboring AIDS antibodies.

Dolan got nervous.

“I’m not at liberty to discuss any of the details,” he said.

“Are we talking tattoos?”

“I can’t talk about it,” Dolan said and then excused himself.

A few minutes later, Bush encountered the son of a prominent anti-feminist leader, a woman who had earned a national reputation for spearheading opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. One of the recent additions to the woman’s anti-ERA arguments was that equal rights for women would promote homosexual rights and therefore cause the spread of AIDS. Bush asked the anti-feminist leader’s son if his mother knew where he was at that moment.

“No.”

“Does she know you’re gay?” Bush asked.

“I’d never do anything to embarrass Mother,” he said.

“What about your mother’s publication linking the ERA to AIDS?” Bush asked. “That embarrasses us, doesn’t it?”

“Mother feels very strongly about the ERA,” he answered, uncomfortably.

“How do you feel about AIDS? About people dying of a disease while your mother makes political capital off it?” Bush asked.

The young man abruptly excused himself and left the party.