And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition (87 page)

The efficient social services department at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation easily found Silvana Strangis a slot in a methadone program and quickly obtained food stamps and general assistance funds, so she would not have to turn tricks to pay rent. Silvana seemed repentant and ready for a new life. “Nobody should have to see the kind of life I’ve lived in the Tenderloin,” she said tearfully. “At least now I’m beginning to see an end to all this.”

The end of Silvana’s story, however, was no new life and was emblematic of the complicated problems that intravenous drug users presented in the AIDS epidemic. These people weren’t optimistic gay men who would spend their last days doing white-light meditations with their Shanti Project volunteer; they were addicts.

With a terminal diagnosis, Tony Ford had little incentive to quit drugs, and he provided little encouragement to Silvana. Within weeks, Silvana disappeared from her drug rehabilitation program. Two months later, she was arrested for petty theft, the first of five more arrests for prostitution and drug-related charges in the next year.

Tony Ford survived four bouts with
Pneumocystis
before he died of kidney failure on June 20, 1985.

Silvana Strangis died on January 24, 1986, during the eleventh day of her first bout with cryptococcosis. Her remains were interred in the middle-class San Francisco suburb where her story had started, back when she was the beloved daughter of an Italian family and a New Age was dawning.

January 20, 1985

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ASTRO
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RANCISCO

The crowd surged up and down Castro Street, blowing horns, waving banners, and chanting the ubiquitous mantra: “We’re number one. We’re number one.”

All day, the bars of Castro Street, like bars across the United States, were packed with fans awaiting the last touchdown. In Washington, President Reagan, freshly sworn in for his second term, was plopped at a TV set to watch the Super Bowl face-off between the San Francisco 49ers and the Miami Dolphins. Castro Street was vaguely comforted by the connection it briefly shared with the rest of the world; it was an increasingly rare feeling, now that gay people were suffering the full weight of a situation about which most heterosexuals were oblivious.

When the final pass was thrown and the 49ers had won their second Super Bowl in three years, San Francisco was engulfed in the wildest celebration since the day World War II ended. In no neighborhood was this abandon more pronounced than in the Castro, where people were grateful for any cause to celebrate. Police quickly closed Castro Street to traffic, surrendering the thoroughfare to the swelling throng, waving their red and gold banners. They climbed streetlights and even formed a cancan line atop a trolley car that was trapped amid the crowd.

From the doorway of Bear Hollow, Cleve Jones cheered the crowd on. He didn’t care a whit about football, but large crowds gathered for any reason excited him. Cleve also was thrilled that twenty-one-year-old Todd Coleman had taken an inordinate interest in him. Todd had fine brown hair, beautiful eyes, and delicate features that Cleve found alluring. He also was a bona-fide fan who seemed to know everything about Cleve’s life, a quality that Cleve found downright irresistible.

Cleve had met Todd in the Bear Hollow during Super Bowl halftime. Cleve pressed the young man for his phone number, but Todd was evasive, so Cleve stuck with him. When Todd and a group of friends left for a night of carousing, Cleve tagged along. Within a few hours, the pair retreated to Cleve’s apartment a block off Castro Street, where they spent the night.

A few days later, Cleve was back in Bear Hollow sipping vodka tonics when he saw Todd come into the bar with a group of friends.

“See that cutie over there,” Cleve said to an acquaintance, adding with a note of triumph: “I went out with him.”

“Yeah, he’s got AIDS,” Cleve’s friend said.

“What?”

Cleve’s friend said Todd was living at the Shanti Project residence for homeless AIDS patients.

Suddenly, the pieces fit together. Cleve understood why Coleman was evasive about his phone number and why he seemed to know everything about Cleve’s work in organizing the AIDS Foundation.

Cleve was stunned, and he later confronted Todd. The young man admitted he had AIDS. He explained that he had always admired Cleve and had followed his career for years, reading everything he could find on the young activist. As soon as he saw Cleve on Super Bowl Sunday, he’d known what he wanted to do. Cleve hadn’t seduced him; he had seduced Cleve.

“Why are you behaving this way?” Cleve demanded. “You have a responsibility to your partners to let them know that you have AIDS. Even more important, you have a responsibility to protect yourself.”

“They say at the Shanti Project that it’s important for me to have sex,” Todd said.

Cleve felt the tide of despair begin to shift again in his stomach. Everybody, it seemed, was going crazy.

For months, Cleve’s spirits had been sinking. Hardly a day went by that some crony or boyfriend was not diagnosed. His own health had teetered on the brink of AIDS for a year now. He had contemplated an escape to Hawaii for months. The incident with Todd Coleman cemented his determination to leave San Francisco. Everybody was either dying or going crazy, and he’d die or go crazy too if he stayed.

Cleve periodically called his mother in Arizona to empty his heart; he called her during January, too, to tell her about the death of his old boyfriend, Felix Velarde-Munoz. Gently, Marion Jones began talking about the young men with whom she had graduated from high school over forty years before, during the darkest hours of World War II. “All the boys I knew went off to war and most of them didn’t come back,” she said. “The ones who did survive were damaged. That must be what it’s like for you.”

Cleve agreed. That was what it was like.

Other thinkers in the gay community believed the homosexual plight was less like being in a war than like living with terrorism. At any time, without any coherent reason, the virus could emerge from its victims’ blood and violently seize their lives. There was a terrifying amorality to the epidemic that went far beyond the articulated ideologies that clashed in war.

Gay men who had lived with terrorism in countries like Israel argued that AIDS was an even more insidious enemy. They said that people living in a country stricken by terrorism have a camaraderie, a sense that they need to stick together to survive.

But the stricken in America’s gay community were exiles. Most heterosexuals cared about the epidemic only when it appeared that it might affect them. Rather than bring the nation more together, the epidemic had driven Americans further apart. To gays, who emigrated to mainstream society daily to work, the heterosexual life-style seemed surreal. Here people wondered whether they could afford a second color television set or if they should have a child. Gay life now consisted of more prosaic concerns, like whether your lover was going to die next week or if one day you would wake up and find a purple spot that foretold your own death.

Moreover, for homosexuals caught in this cruel new reality, there was no one to say, “Hang in there.” Instead, there was a prevailing sentiment that was sympathetic and at times compassionate but still detached and ultimately uncaring, as if to imply that, somehow, this whole mess is your own fault.

January 23

Bill Kraus’s older brother Mike had rented a limousine stocked with champagne and Edith Piaf tapes to drive Bill and his friends to San Francisco International Airport. With his new superstitious bent, Bill at first did not want to be sent off in a black car, fearing it looked like a hearse and was a bad omen. Nevertheless, he was coaxed into the backseat, and as he sipped champagne, he joked that if he were to be in exile, it might as well be Paris.

Bill’s friends knew he was cloaking his fears. He had no idea whether he would be accepted into the HPA-23 trials. Even more pressing, he still didn’t know whether the medication would work.

The Next Day

P
ARIS

Paris was in the grips of the coldest winter in a half-century when Bill and his friend Sharon Johnson arrived. The pair spent their first day finding an apartment. On the second day, they went to the World War I American military hospital on the outskirts of Paris to see Dr. Dominique Dormant about HPA-23.

Dormant already had heard about Bill Kraus’s case. It struck Sharon that the Frenchman thought Bill was much more important than he actually was, an illusion Bill was not going to shatter. Dormant described the comparative benefits of AIDS drugs on trial, such as isoprinosine, interferon, ribavirin, and HPA-23.

“This is not a cure,” he warned. It would only impede the virus, and Bill would probably have to stay on the drug indefinitely. The virus appeared to come back as soon as patients went off the medication, and that, most likely, would bring the demise of the patient.

“I want to try it,” Bill said. “I want to live.”

Dormant said Bill could take his first shot the next week.

In the United States, no issue frustrated AIDS clinicians and researchers in the early months of 1985 more than the lack of experimental treatments to offer AIDS patients. In no area of AIDS research was the paucity of funds having a more devastating impact.

Dr. Donna Mildvan at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York was receiving five calls a day, from lovers, friends, and relatives of AIDS patients, pleading for a treatment, any treatment, that might work. A day rarely went by without some mother sobbing, “Please, doctor, save my son.”

Officials at the National Cancer Institute assured everyone that they were screening every possible drug for experimental trials in AIDS patients. What they didn’t reveal was that this federal screening program consisted of Dr. Sam Broder and two technicians; a federal hiring freeze prevented the NCI from augmenting this program.

The lack of trained retrovirologists and money for retrovirology labs also proved an impenetrable barrier to drug testing. To determine whether an anti-viral drug was any good at halting viral replication, scientists needed to perform viral isolations on every patient. The cost of one such isolation was $700. Even the NCI, which had the largest budget of any medical research institution in the world, found the cost of extensive drug testing and viral isolations to be prohibitive. Even if the money did exist, there were few facilities capable of performing the isolations and few retrovirologists to do the work. In New York City, for example, there was only one laboratory capable of performing the LAV viral isolations.

The lack of such laboratories was a legacy of the cutbacks of the first years of the Reagan administration. In the early 1980s, when retrovirology grants dried up, scientists simply stopped learning how to be retrovirologists. There wasn’t any future in it. Now, research institutions across the nation were desperate for retrovirologists, but there were few to hire. It would take years to train scientists and establish laboratories, once funds were made available.

When the NIH held a meeting in Bethesda to discuss drug studies, Don Francis complained, “We don’t need more meetings. We need labs, and we need money.”

Neither, however, were forthcoming.

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UBLIN
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RANCISCO

“I feel like a leper,” Frances Borchelt told her husband and children when she returned from the hospital. “None of the family will come to see me. I don’t want to go out of the house.”

“Don’t be depressed, Mom,” Cathy Borchelt answered. “Get angry. We’re going to fight this.”

Frances didn’t feel angry. She felt tired and ill and alone. Although her psoriasis had receded while she was undergoing antibiotic treatment for
Pneumocystis,
it returned virulently when Frances got home. When Cathy helped her mother into her first shower after leaving the hospital, she was staggered at her mother’s appearance. Frances had shrunk to ninety-eight pounds. Her tailbone protruded from her baggy skin. Cathy thought she looked like the pictures of concentration camp victims she had seen in World War II books.

The family soon fell into the same confusion that gay men had faced about their own vulnerability to the syndrome. The doctors told them to take precautions, not to use the same dishes as Frances and to wear gloves when they washed her dishes and laundry. For all they knew, they might already have been infected with the virus. There was no testing yet to calm their fears.

Cathy started researching transfusion AIDS. Dr. Marcus Conant told her about the T-cell tests at Stanford University and the controversy about hepatitis core antibody testing. Conant also told her the family should hire a lawyer.

“Why didn’t anybody do anything?” Cathy asked friends.

By coincidence, a series of dramatic transfusion-AIDS stories seized public attention in San Francisco during the early months of 1985. One was a Roman Catholic nun, Sister Romana Marie Ryan, who had broken her hip while sliding into home base during a softball game. During a hip replacement operation in July 1983, the sixty-six-year-old sister was transfused with infected blood. When announcing the death, her priest said Ryan had spent her final days in “excruciating pain,” praying for the person who donated the blood to her and for all people who were suffering from AIDS.