Compare and Contrast Rent and The Band Played On. 2-3 page response. This is a very broad question. You can take any angle you want on this question. The main goal is to analyze/examine the two works in relation to each other in some way. For example, the response could compare and contrast themes, characters, main ideas, etc. In addition, consider Sarah Schulman’s criticism of Rent and AIDS activism as you compare and contrast the two texts.
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PART I. BEHOLD, A PALE HORSE
1. The Feast of the Hearts
PART II. BEFORE/1980
2. Glory Days
3. Beaches of the Dispossessed
4. Foreshadowing
5. Freeze Frames
PART III. PAVING THE ROAD/1981
6. Critical Mass
7. Good Intentions
8. The Prettiest One
9. Ambush Poppers
10. Golf Courses of Science
11. Bad Moon Rising
PART IV. THE GATHERING DARKNESS/1982
12. Enemy Time
13. Patient Zero
14. Bicentennial Memories
15. Nightsweats
16. Too Much Blood
17. Entropy
18. Running on Empty
19. Forced Feeding
20. Dirty Secrets
21. Dancing in the Dark
PART V. BATTLE LINES/JANUARY–JUNE 1983
22. Let It Bleed
23. Midnight Confessions
24. Denial
25. Anger
26. The Big Enchilada
27. Turning Points
28. Only the Good
29. Priorities
30. Meanwhile
31. AIDSpeak Spoken Here
32. Star Quality
PART VI. RITUALS/JULY–DECEMBER 1983
33. Marathons
34. Just Another Day
35. Politics
36. Science
37. Public Health
38. Journalism
39. People
PART VII. LIGHTS & TUNNELS/1984
40. Prisoners
41. Bargaining
42. The Feast of the Hearts, Part II
43. Squeeze Play
44. Traitors
45. Political Science
46. Downbound Train
47. Republicans and Democrats
48. Embarrassed
49. Depression
50. The War
PART VIII. THE BUTCHER’S BILL/1985
51. Heterosexuals
52. Exiles
53. Reckoning
54. Exposed
55. Awakening
56. Acceptance
57. Endgame
PART IX. EPILOGUE/AFTER
58. Reunion
59. The Feast of the Hearts, Part III
NOTES ON SOURCES
INDEX
Also by Randy Shilts
Copyright
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would not have been able to write this book if I had not been a reporter at
the San Francisco Chronicle, the only daily newspaper in the United States
that did not need a movie star to come down with AIDS before it
considered the epidemic a legitimate news story deserving thorough
coverage. Because of the Chronicle’s enlightened stance, I have had free
rein to cover this epidemic since 1982; since 1983, I have spent virtually all
my time reporting on AIDS. My reporting provided the core of this book.
While this newspaper’s commitment is a credit to all levels of Chronicle
management, I particularly want to thank my city editor, Alan Mutter, who
believed in the value of this story long before it was fashionable. I’m also
grateful to the following Chronicle colleagues for their guidance and
assistance: Katy Butler, David Perlman, Jerry Burns, Keith Power, and
Kathy Finberg. The Chronicle’s library staff, especially Charlie Malarkey,
also helped immensely.
My newspaper reporting would never have been transformed into a book
if it were not for the faith of my editor at St. Martin’s Press, Michael
Denneny. He believed in this project when most in publishing doubted that
the epidemic would ever prove serious enough to warrant a major book. I’m
also grateful to the confidence of my agent, Fred Hill.
A number of other people helped me edit the manuscript. Without the
constant encouragement, hand-holding, and insightful editing of Doris
Ober, I could never have made it to the end of what became a very long
tome. I’m also grateful to Katie Leishman and Rex Adkins for devoting
their extraordinary editing talents to the manuscript.
The research phase of the book required much travel and would not have
been tolerable without hosts such as Poul Birch Eriksen in Copenhagen,
Mark Pinney in New York City, and Bob Canning and Steve Sansweet in
Los Angeles. I’m also thankful to Frank Robinson, who kept voluminous
files on the epidemic and generously shared them all with me. Among the
other people who charitably opened their files to me were Tim
Westmoreland, Dan Turner, David Nimmons, Jeff Richardson, Lawrence
Schulman, Tom Murray of The Sentinel, Don Michaels of the Washington
Blade, Terry Biern of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, and
Jim Kepner of the AIDS History Project at the International Gay and
Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles. Steve Unger and Fred Hoffman provided
expert computer assistance. I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the
help I got from the media relations staffs of San Francisco General
Hospital, Pasteur Institute, National Cancer Institute, National Institute for
Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and especially Chuck Fallis at the Centers
for Disease Control. They made my job much easier.
I remain indebted to my brothers Reed Shilts, Russell Dennis Shilts III,
and Gary Shilts for their support during the long writing process. I’m also
blessed by some terrific friends who stuck by me during the insanity of this
project: Janie Krohn, Bill Reiner, David Israels, Bill Cagle, Will Pretty, and
Rich Shortell. Thanks also to the friends of Bill W. who sustained me with
their experience, strength, and hope.
Ultimately, a reporter is only as good as his sources. The people to
whom I remain most grateful are the hundreds who shared their time with
me both during my newspaper reporting and during the book research.
Many were scientists and doctors who carved large blocks of time out of
hectic schedules. My deep background and off-the-record sources were also
invaluable; you know who you are, and I thank you.
The people for whom I will always bear special reverence are those who
were suffering from AIDS and who gave some of their last hours for
interviews, sometimes while they were on their deathbeds laboring for
breath. When I’d ask why they’d take the time for this, most hoped that
something they said would save someone else from suffering. If there is an
act that better defines heroism, I have not seen it.
DRAMATIS
PERSONAE
DR. FRANCOISE BARRE, a researcher with the Pasteur Institute, the first to
isolate the AIDS virus.
DR. BOB BIGGAR, a researcher with the Environmental Epidemiology
branch of the National Cancer Institute.
FRANCES BORCHELT, a San Francisco grandmother.
DR. EDWARD BRANDT, Assistant Secretary for Health of the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services.
JOE BREWER, a gay psychotherapist in San Francisco’s Castro Street
neighborhood.
HARRY BRITT, the only openly gay member of San Francisco’s board of
supervisors, the local equivalent of a city council.
U.S. REPRESENTATIVE PHILIP BURTON, a staunch liberal who represented
San Francisco in Congress.
U.S. REPRESENTATIVE SALA BURTON succeeded her husband in Congress.
MICHAEL CALLEN, a rock singer who organized the People With AIDS
Coalition in New York City.
LU CHAIKIN, a lesbian psychotherapist in San Francisco’s Castro Street
neighborhood.
DR. JEAN-CLAUDE CHERMANN, part of the Pasteur Institute team that first
isolated the AIDS virus.
DR. MARCUS CONANT, a dermatologist affiliated with the University of
California at San Francisco.
DR. JAMES CURRAN, an epidemiologist and director of AIDS research
efforts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
WILLIAM DARROW, a sociologist and epidemiologist involved with AIDS
research at the Centers for Disease Control.
DR. WALTER DOWDLE, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases.
DR. SELMA DRITZ, assistant director of the Bureau of Communicable
Disease Control at the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
GAETAN DUGAS, a French-Canadian airline steward for Air Canada, one of
the first North Americans diagnosed with AIDS.
DR. MYRON “MAX” ESSEX, a retrovirologist with Harvard University
School of Public Health.
SANDRA FORD, a drug technician at the Centers for Disease Control.
DR. WILLIAM FOEGE, director of the Centers for Disease Control during the
first years of the AIDS epidemic.
DR. DONALD FRANCIS, a retrovirologist who directed laboratory efforts for
AIDS research at the Centers for Disease Control.
DR. ROBERT GALLO, a retrovirologist with the National Cancer Institute in
Bethesda.
DR. MICHAEL GOTTLIEB, an immunologist with the University of
California at Los Angeles.
ENRIQUE “KICO” GOVANTES, a gay San Francisco artist, lover of Bill
Kraus.
DR. JAMES GROUNDWATER, a dermatologist who treated San Francisco’s
first reported AIDS case.
DR. MARY GUINAN, an epidemiologist involved with early AIDS research
at the Centers for Disease Control.
MARGARET HECKLER, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services from early 1983 through the end of 1985.
KEN HORNE, the first reported AIDS case in San Francisco.
DR. HAROLD JAFFE, an epidemiologist with the AIDS program at the
Centers for Disease Control.
CLEVE JONES, a San Francisco gay activist, organizer of the Kaposi’s
Sarcoma Research and Education Foundation.
LARRY KRAMER, novelist, playwright, and film producer, organizer of Gay
Men’s Health Crisis in New York City.
BILL KRAUS, prominent San Francisco gay leader, aide to U.S. Reps. Philip
and Sala Burton.
MATTHEW KRIEGER, a San Francisco graphic designer, lover of Gary
Walsh.
DR. MATHILDE KRIM, socially prominent cancer researcher, organized the
AIDS Medical Foundation.
DR. DALE LAWRENCE, conducted early studies of AIDS in hemophiliacs
and blood transfusion recipients for the Centers for Disease Control.
MICHAEL MALETTA, hair dresser who was one of San Francisco’s early
AIDS cases.
DR. JAMES MASON, director of the Centers for Disease Control since late
1983, served as acting Assistant Secretary for Health in 1985.
RODGER MCFARLANE, executive director of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in
New York City.
DR. DONNA MILDVAN, AIDS researcher at Beth Israel Medical Center in
Manhattan.
DR. LUC MONTAGNIER, head of the Pasteur Institute team that first isolated
the AIDS virus.
JACK NAU, one of New York City’s early AIDS cases, a former lover of
Paul Popham.
ENNO POERSCH, a graphic designer drawn into AIDS organizing because of
the death of his lover, Nick, in early 1981.
PAUL POPHAM, Wall Street businessman, president of Gay Men’s Health
Crisis.
DR. GRETHE RASK, Danish surgeon in Zaire, first westerner documented to
have died of AIDS.
DR. WILLY ROZENBAUM, leading AIDS clinician in Paris.
DR. ARYE RUBINSTEIN, immunologist in the Bronx, among the first to
detect AIDS in infants.
DR. DAVID SENCER, health commissioner of New York City.
DR. MERVYN SILVERMAN, director of the San Francisco Department of
Public Health.
DR. PAUL VOLBERDING, director of the San Francisco General Hospital
AIDS Clinic.
GARY WALSH, a San Francisco gay psychotherapist, early organizer of
AIDS sufferers.
U.S. REPRESENTATIVE HENRY WAXMAN of Los Angeles, chair of House
Subcommittee on Health and the Environment.
DR. JOEL WEISMAN, a prominent gay physician in Los Angeles, among the
first to detect the AIDS epidemic.
RICK WELLIKOFF, a Brooklyn schoolteacher who was among the nation’s
first AIDS cases, close friend of Paul Popham.
TIM WESTMORELAND, counsel to the House Subcommittee on Health and
the Environment.
DR. DAN WILLIAM, a prominent gay physician in New York City.
THE BUREAUCRACY
In the government of the United States, health agencies are part of the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Most of the key health
and scientific research agencies fall under the umbrella of the U.S. Public
Health Service (PHS), which is directed by the Assistant Secretary for
Health of the Department of Health and Human Services. The National
Institutes of Health (NIH), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are among the agencies that comprise
the PHS.
The National Institutes of Health is comprised of various separate
institutes that conduct most of the government’s laboratory research into
health matters. Two of the largest institutes at the NIH are also the two that
were most involved in AIDS research, the National Cancer Institute (NCI)
and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
The Centers for Disease Control is comprised of different centers that
handle various public health problems. The largest is the Center for
Infectious Diseases, under which AIDS research has been handled through
most of the epidemic. The Kaposi Sarcoma–Opportunistic Infections Task
Force (KSOI Task Force), which changed its name to the AIDS Task Force,
and later to the AIDS Activities Office, was part of the CID.
The Kaposi’s Sarcoma Research and Education Foundation (KS
Foundation) was organized in San Francisco in early 1982. In 1983, it split
into the National Kaposi’s Sarcoma/AIDS Research and Education
Foundation (National KS Foundation), which dissolved in 1984, and the
San Francisco Kaposi’s Sarcoma/AIDS Research Foundation. The latter
group subsequently changed its name to the San Francisco AIDS
Foundation.
The AIDS Medical Foundation was organized in New York City in 1983.
In 1985, it merged with the National AIDS Research Foundation to become
the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR).
AND
THE BAND
PLAYED ON
PROLOGUE
By October 2, 1985, the morning Rock Hudson died, the word was familiar
to almost every household in the Western world.
AIDS.
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome had seemed a comfortably
distant threat to most of those who had heard of it before, the misfortune of
people who fit into rather distinct classes of outcasts and social pariahs. But
suddenly, in the summer of 1985, when a movie star was diagnosed with the
disease and the newspapers couldn’t stop talking about it, the AIDS
epidemic became palpable and the threat loomed everywhere.
Suddenly there were children with AIDS who wanted to go to school,
laborers with AIDS who wanted to work, and researchers who wanted
funding, and there was a threat to the nation’s public health that could no
longer be ignored. Most significantly, there were the first glimmers of
awareness that the future would always contain this strange new word.
AIDS would become a part of American culture and indelibly change the
course of our lives.
The implications would not be fleshed out for another few years, but on
that October day in 1985 the first awareness existed just the same. Rock
Hudson riveted America’s attention upon this deadly new threat for the first
time, and his diagnosis became a demarcation that would separate the
history of America before AIDS from the history that came after.
The timing of this awareness, however, reflected the unalterable tragedy
at the heart of the AIDS epidemic: By the time America paid attention to
the disease, it was too late to do anything about it. The virus was already
pandemic in the nation, having spread to every corner of the North
American continent. The tide of death that would later sweep America
could, perhaps, be slowed, but it could not be stopped.
The AIDS epidemic, of course, did not arise full grown from the
biological landscape; the problem had been festering throughout the decade.
The death tolls of the late 1980s are not startling new developments but an
unfolding of events predicted for many years. There had been a time when
much of this suffering could have been prevented, but by 1985 that time had
passed. Indeed, on the day the world learned that Rock Hudson was
stricken, some 12,000 Americans were already dead or dying of AIDS and
hundreds of thousands more were infected with the virus that caused the
disease. But few had paid any attention to this; nobody, it seemed, had
cared about them.
The bitter truth was that AIDS did not just happen to America—it was
allowed to happen by an array of institutions, all of which failed to perform
their appropriate tasks to safeguard the public health. This failure of the
system leaves a legacy of unnecessary suffering that will haunt the Western
world for decades to come.
There was no excuse, in this country and in this time, for the spread of a
deadly new epidemic. For this was a time in which the United States
boasted the world’s most sophisticated medicine and the world’s most
extensive public health system, geared to eliminate such pestilence from our
national life. When the virus appeared, the world’s richest nation housed the
most lavishly financed scientific research establishments—both inside the
vast governmental health bureaucracy and in other institutions—to
investigate new diseases and quickly bring them under control. And making
sure that government researchers and public health agencies did their jobs
were the world’s most unfettered and aggressive media, the public’s
watchdogs. Beyond that, the group most affected by the epidemic, the gay
community, had by then built a substantial political infrastructure,
particularly in cities where the disease struck first and most virulently.
Leaders were in place to monitor the gay community’s health and survival
interests.
But from 1980, when the first isolated gay men began falling ill from
strange and exotic ailments, nearly five years passed before all these
institutions—medicine, public health, the federal and private scientific
research establishments, the mass media, and the gay community’s
leadership—mobilized the way they should in a time of threat. The story of
these first five years of AIDS in America is a drama of national failure,
played out against a backdrop of needless death.
People died while Reagan administration officials ignored pleas from
government scientists and did not allocate adequate funding for AIDS
research until the epidemic had already spread throughout the country.
People died while scientists did not at first devote appropriate attention
to the epidemic because they perceived little prestige to be gained in
studying a homosexual affliction. Even after this denial faded, people died
while some scientists, most notably those in the employ of the United States
government, competed rather than collaborated in international research
efforts, and so diverted attention and energy away from the central struggle
against the disease itself.
People died while public health authorities and the political leaders who
guided them refused to take the tough measures necessary to curb the
epidemic’s spread, opting for political expediency over the public health.
And people died while gay community leaders played politics with the
disease, putting political dogma ahead of the preservation of human life.
People died and nobody paid attention because the mass media did not
like covering stories about homosexuals and was especially skittish about
stories that involved gay sexuality. Newspapers and television largely
avoided discussion of the disease until the death toll was too high to ignore
and the casualties were no longer just the outcasts. Without the media to
fulfill its role as public guardian, everyone else was left to deal—and not
deal—with AIDS as they saw fit.
In those early years, the federal government viewed AIDS as a budget
problem, local public health officials saw it as a political problem, gay
leaders considered AIDS a public relations problem, and the news media
regarded it as a homosexual problem that wouldn’t interest anybody else.
Consequently, few confronted AIDS for what it was, a profoundly
threatening medical crisis.
Fighting against this institutional indifference were a handful of heroes
from disparate callings. Isolated teams of scientists in research centers in
America and Europe risked their reputations and often their jobs to pioneer
early research on AIDS. There were doctors and nurses who went far
beyond the call of duty to care for its victims. Some public health officials
struggled valiantly to have the epidemic addressed in earnest. A handful of
gay leaders withstood vilification to argue forcefully for a sane community
response to the epidemic and to lobby for the funds that provided the first
breakthroughs in research. And there were many victims of the epidemic
who fought rejection, fear, isolation, and their own deadly prognoses to
make people understand and to make people care.
Because of their efforts, the story of politics‚ people, and the AIDS
epidemic is, ultimately, a tale of courage as well as cowardice, compassion
as well as bigotry, inspiration as well as venality, and redemption as well as
despair.
It is a tale that bears telling, so that it will never happen again, to any
people, anywhere.
PART I
BEHOLD‚ A PALE HORSE
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was
Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over
the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with
death, and with the beasts of the earth.
—REVELATION 6:8
1 THE FEAST OF THE HEARTS
July 4, 1976
NEW YORK HARBOR
Tall sails scraped the deep purple night as rockets burst, flared, and
flourished red, white, and blue over the stoic Statue of Liberty. The whole
world was watching, it seemed; the whole world was there. Ships from
fifty-five nations had poured sailors into Manhattan to join the throngs,
counted in the millions, who watched the greatest pyrotechnic extravaganza
ever mounted, all for America’s 200th birthday party. Deep into the
morning, bars all over the city were crammed with sailors. New York City
had hosted the greatest party ever known, everybody agreed later. The
guests had come from all over the world.
This was the part the epidemiologists would later note, when they stayed
up late at night and the conversation drifted toward where it had started and
when. They would remember that glorious night in New York Harbor, all
those sailors, and recall: From all over the world they came to New York.
Christmas Eve, 1976
KINSHASA, ZAIRE
The hot African sky turned black and sultry; it wasn’t like Christmas at all.
The unrelenting mugginess of the equatorial capital made Dr. Ib
Bygbjerg even lonelier for Denmark. In the kitchen, Dr. Grethe Rask,
determined to assuage her young colleague’s homesickness, began
preparing an approximation of the dinner with which Danes traditionally
begin their Christmas observance, the celebration known through centuries
of custom as the Feast of the Hearts.
The preparations brought back memories of the woman’s childhood in
Thisted, the ancient Jutland port nestled on the Lim Fiord not far from the
North Sea. As the main course, Grethe Rask knew, there needed to be
something that flies. In Jutland that would mean goose or duck; in Zaire,
chicken would have to suffice. As she began preparing the fowl, Grethe
again felt the familiar fatigue wash over her. She had spent the last two
years haunted by weariness, and by now, she knew she couldn’t fight it.
Grethe collapsed on her bed. She had been among the Danish doctors
who came to replace the Belgian physicians who were no longer welcome
in this new nation eager to forget its recent colonial incarnation as the
Belgian Congo. Grethe had first gone there in 1964, returning to Europe for
training in stomach surgery and tropical diseases. She had spent the last
four years in Zaire but, despite all this time in Africa, she remained
unmistakably from the Danish stock who proudly announce themselves as
north of the fjord. To be north of the Lim Fiord was to be direct and
decisive, independent and plainspoken. The Jutlanders born south of the
stretch of water that divides the Danish peninsula tend toward weakness, as
anyone north of the fjord might explain. Far from the kings in Copenhagen,
these hardy northern people had nurtured their collective heritage for
centuries. Grethe Rask from Thisted mirrored this.
It explained why she was here in Zaire, 5,000 miles from where she
might forge a lucrative career as a surgeon in the sprawling modern
hospitals of Copenhagen. Such a cosmopolitan career meant people looking
over her shoulder, giving orders. Grethe preferred the work she had done at
a primitive hospital in the remote village of Abumombazi in the north of
Zaire. She alone was in charge there.
The hospital conditions in Abumombazi were not as deplorable as in
other parts of the country. A prominent Zairian general came from the
region. He had had the clout to attract a white doctor to the village, and
there, with Belgian nuns, Grethe worked with what she could beg and
borrow. This was Central Africa, after all, and even a favored clinic would
never have such basics as sterile rubber gloves or disposable needles. You
just used needles again and again until they wore out; once gloves had worn
through, you risked dipping your hands in your patient’s blood because that
was what needed to be done. The lack of rudimentary supplies meant that a
surgeon’s work had risks that doctors in the developed world could not
imagine, particularly because the undeveloped part, specifically Central
Africa, seemed to sire new diseases with nightmarish regularity. Earlier that
year, not far from Abumombazi, in a village along the Ebola River on the
Zaire-Sudan border, a virulent outbreak of a horrifying new disease had
demonstrated the dangers of primitive medicine and new viruses. A trader
from the village of Enzara, suffering from fevers and profuse,
uncontrollable bleeding, had come to the teaching hospital for nurses in
Maridi. The man apparently had picked up the disease sexually. Within
days, however, 40 percent of the student nurses in Maridi were stricken
with the fever, transmitted by contact with the patient’s infected blood
either through standard care procedures or through accidental needle-sticks.
Frightened African health officials swallowed their pride and called the
World Health Organization, who came with a staff from the American
Centers for Disease Control. By the time the young American doctors
arrived, thirty-nine nurses and two doctors were dead. The CDC doctors
worked quickly, isolating all patients with fevers. Natives were infuriated
when the Americans banned the traditional burials of the victims since the
ritual bathing of the bodies was clearly spreading the disease further. Within
weeks, however, the epidemic was under control. In the end, the Ebola
Fever virus, as it came to be known, killed 53 percent of the people it
infected, seizing 153 lives before it disappeared as suddenly and
mysteriously as it had arisen. Sex and blood were two horribly efficient
ways to spread a new virus, and years later, a tenuous relief would fill the
voices of doctors who talked of how fortunate it was for humankind that
this new killer had awakened in this most remote corner of the world and
had been stamped out so quickly. A site just a bit closer to regional
crossroads could have unleashed a horrible plague. With modern roads and
jet travel, no corner of the earth was very remote anymore; never again
could diseases linger undetected for centuries among a distant people
without finding some route to fan out across the planet.
The battle between humans and disease was nowhere more bitterly
fought than here in the fetid equatorial climate, where heat and humidity
fuel the generation of new life forms. One historian has suggested that
humans, who first evolved in Africa eons ago, migrated north to Asia and
Europe simply to get to climates that were less hospitable to the deadly
microbes the tropics so efficiently bred.
Here, on the frontiers of the world’s harshest medical realities, Grethe
Rask tended the sick. In her three years in Abumombazi, she had bullied
and cajoled people for the resources to build her jungle hospital, and she
was loved to the point of idolization by the local people. Then, she returned
to the Danish Red Cross Hospital, the largest medical institution in the
bustling city of Kinshasa, where she assumed the duties of chief surgeon.
Here she met Ib Bygbjerg, who had returned from another rural outpost in
the south. Bygbjerg’s thick dark hair and small compact frame belied his
Danish ancestry, the legacy, he figured, of some Spanish sailor who made
his way to Denmark centuries ago. Grethe Rask had the features one would
expect of a woman from Thisted, high cheekbones and blond hair worn
short in a cut that some delicately called mannish.
To Bygbjerg’s eye, on that Christmas Eve, there were troubling things to
note about Grethe’s appearance. She was thin, losing weight from a
mysterious diarrhea. She had been suffering from the vague yet persistent
malaise for two years now, since her time in the impoverished northern
villages. In 1975, the problem had receded briefly after drug treatments, but
for the past year, nothing had seemed to help. The surgeon’s weight
dropped further, draining and weakening her with each passing day.
Even more alarming was the disarray in the forty-six-year-old woman’s
lymphatic system, the glands that play the central role in the body’s never-
ending fight to make itself immune from disease. All of Grethe’s lymph
glands were swollen and had been for nearly two years. Normally, a lymph
node might swell here or there to fight this or that infection, revealing a
small lump on the neck, under an arm, or perhaps, in the groin. There didn’t
seem to be any reason for her glands to swell; there was no precise infection
anywhere, much less anything that would cause such a universal
enlargement of the lymph nodes all over her body.
And the fatigue. It was the most disconcerting aspect of the surgeon’s
malaise. Of course, in the best of times, this no-nonsense woman from north
of the fjord did not grasp the concept of relaxation. Just that day, for
example, she had not been scheduled to work, but she put in a full shift,
anyway; she was always working, and in this part of the world nobody
could argue because there was always so much to be done. But the
weariness, Bygbjerg could tell, was not bred by overwork. Grethe had
always been remarkably healthy, throughout her arduous career. No, the
fatigue was something darker; it had become a constant companion that
weighted her every move, mocking the doctor’s industry like the ubiquitous
cackling of the hyena on the savannah.
Though she was neither sentimental nor particularly Christian, Grethe
Rask had wanted to cheer her young colleague; instead, she lay motionless,
paralyzed again. Two hours later, Grethe stirred and began, halfheartedly, to
finish dinner. Bygbjerg was surprised that she was so sick then that she
could not muster the strength to stay awake for something as special as the
Feast of the Hearts.
November 1977
HJARDEMAAL, DENMARK
A cold Arctic wind blistered over the barren heath outside a whitewashed
cottage that sat alone, two miles from the nearest neighbors in the desolate
region of Denmark north of the Lim Fiord. Sweeping west, from the North
Sea over the sand dunes and low, bowed pines, the gusts made a whoosh-
whooshing sound. Inside the little house, under a neat red-tiled roof, Grethe
Rask gasped her short, sparse breaths from an oxygen bottle.
“I’d better go home to die,” Grethe had told Ib Bygbjerg matter-of-factly.
The only thing her doctors could agree on was the woman’s terminal
prognosis. All else was mystery. Also newly returned from Africa,
Bygbjerg pondered the compounding mysteries of Grethe’s health. None of
it made sense. In early 1977, it appeared that she might be getting better; at
least the swelling in her lymph nodes had gone down, even as she became
more fatigued. But she had continued working, finally taking a brief
vacation in South Africa in early July.
Suddenly, she could not breathe. Terrified, Grethe flew to Copenhagen,
sustained on the flight by bottled oxygen. For months now, the top medical
specialists of Denmark had tested and studied the surgeon. None, however,
could fathom why the woman should, for no apparent reason, be dying.
There was also the curious array of health problems that suddenly appeared.
Her mouth became covered with yeast infections. Staph infections spread in
her blood. Serum tests showed that something had gone awry in her
immune system; her body lacked T-cells, the quarterbacks in the body’s
defensive line against disease. But biopsies showed she was not suffering
from a lymph cancer that might explain not only the T-cell deficiency but
her body’s apparent inability to stave off infection. The doctors could only
gravely tell her that she was suffering from progressive lung disease of
unknown cause. And, yes, in answer to her blunt questions, she would die.
Finally, tired of the poking and endless testing by the Copenhagen
doctors, Grethe Rask retreated to her cottage near Thisted. A local doctor
fitted out her bedroom with oxygen bottles. Grethe’s longtime female
companion, who was a nurse in a nearby hospital, tended her. Grethe lay in
the lonely whitewashed farmhouse and remembered her years in Africa
while the North Sea winds piled the first winter snows across Jutland.
In Copenhagen, Ib Bygbjerg, now at the State University Hospital,
fretted continually about his friend. Certainly, there must be an answer to
the mysteries of her medical charts. Maybe if they ran more tests…. It could
be some common tropical culprit they had overlooked, he argued. She
would be cured, and they would all chuckle over how easily the problem
had been solved when they sipped wine and ate goose on the Feast of the
Hearts. Bygbjerg pleaded with the doctors, and the doctors pleaded with
Grethe Rask, and reluctantly the wan surgeon returned to the old
Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen for one last chance.
Bygbjerg would never forgive himself for taking her away from the
cottage north of the fjord. The virulent microbes that were haunting her
body would not reveal themselves in the bombardment of tests she endured
in those last days. On December 12, 1977, just twelve days before the Feast
of the Hearts, Margrethe P. Rask died. She was forty-seven years old.
Later, Bygbjerg decided he would devote his life to studying tropical
medicine. Before he died, he wanted to know what microscopic marauder
had come from the African jungles to so ruthlessly rob the life of his best
friend, a woman who had been so intensely devoted to helping others.
An autopsy revealed that Grethe Rask’s lungs were filled with millions
of organisms known as Pneumocystis carinii; they had caused a rare
pneumonia that had slowly suffocated the woman. The diagnosis raised
more questions than answers: Nobody died of Pneumocystis. Intrigued,
Bygbjerg wanted to start doing research on the disease, but he was
dissuaded by wizened professors, who steered him toward work in malaria.
Don’t study Pneumocystis, they told him; it was so rare that there would be
no future in it.
PART II
BEFORE: 1980
All history resolves itself quite easily into the biography of a few stout and
earnest persons.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON,
“Self-Reliance”
2 GLORY DAYS
June 29, 1980
SAN FRANCISCO
The sun melted the morning fog to reveal a vista so clear, so crystalline that
you worried it might break if you stared too hard. The Transamerica
Pyramid towered over the downtown skyline, and the bridges loped toward
hills turning soft gold in the early summer heat. Rainbow flags fluttered in
the gentle breezes.
Seven men were beginning their day. Bill Kraus, fresh from his latest
political triumph in Washington, D.C., was impatient to get to the foot of
Market Street to take his place at the head of the largest parade in San
Francisco. There was much to celebrate.
In his apartment off Castro Street, in the heart of San Francisco’s gay
ghetto, Cleve Jones waited anxiously for his lover to get out of bed. This
was parade day, Cleve kept repeating. No man, even the delightful muffin
lolling lazily in the bed next to him, would make him late for this day of
days. Cleve loved the sight of homosexuals, thousands strong. It was he
who had led the gay mob that rioted at City Hall just a year ago, although
he had now refashioned himself into the utterly respectable aide to one of
California’s most powerful politicians. He wasn’t selling out, Cleve told
friends impishly; he was just adding a new chapter to his legend. “Meet me
at the parade,” he called to his sleepy partner as he finally dashed for the
door. “I can’t be late.”
A few blocks away, Dan William waited to meet David Ostrow. The two
doctors were in town for a gathering of gay physicians at San Francisco
State University. At home in New York City, gay parades drew only 30,000
or so; Dan William tried to imagine what a parade with hundreds of
thousands of gays would look like. From what he had heard, David Ostrow
was glad they didn’t have parades like San Francisco’s in Chicago; it would
never play.
On California Street, airline steward Gaetan Dugas examined his face
closely in the mirror. The scar, below his ear, was only slightly visible. His
face would soon be unblemished again. He had come all the way from
Toronto to enjoy this day, and for the moment he would put aside the
troubling news the doctors had delivered just a few weeks before.
In the Mission District, the Gay Freedom Day Parade was the event
twenty-two-year-old Kico Govantes had anticipated the entire five weeks
he’d been in San Francisco. The tentative steps Kico had taken in exploring
his homosexuality at a small Wisconsin college could now turn to proud
strides. Maybe among the thousands who had been streaming into the city
all week, Kico would find the lover he sought.
Before.
It was to be the word that would define the permanent demarcation in the
lives of millions of Americans, particularly those citizens of the United
States who were gay. There was life after the epidemic. And there were
fond recollections of the times before.
Before and after. The epidemic would cleave lives in two, the way a
great war or depression presents a commonly understood point of reference
around which an entire society defines itself.
Before would encompass thousands of memories laden with nuance and
nostalgia. Before meant innocence and excess, idealism and hubris. More
than anything, this was the time before death. To be sure, Death was already
elbowing its way through the crowds on that sunny morning, like a rude
tourist angling for the lead spot in the parade. It was still an invisible
presence, though, palpable only to twenty, or perhaps thirty, gay men who
were suffering from a vague malaise. This handful ensured that the future
and the past met on that single day.
People like Bill Kraus and Cleve Jones, Dan William and David Ostrow
had lived through a recent past that had offered triumphs beyond their
hopes; the future would present challenges beyond anything they could
possibly fear. For them, and millions more, including many who considered
themselves quite separate from such lives in San Francisco, this year would
provide the last clear memories of the time before. Nothing would ever be
the same again.
Bill Kraus looked up Market Street toward the Castro District, unable to
find an end to the colorful crowd that had converged on downtown San
Francisco for the Gay Freedom Day Parade. Bill ran his hands through his
thick, curly brown hair and decided again that never was there a better place
and time to be homosexual than here in this beautiful city on this splendid
day when all gay people, no matter how diverse, became expressions of the
same thought: We don’t need to hide anymore.
Standing at the front of the parade, behind the banner announcing the
gay and lesbian delegates to the 1980 Democratic National Convention, Bill
Kraus retraced the steps that had brought him to this day and this parade.
Primarily, he recalled the hiding and that nameless fear of being what he
was, a homosexual. For years he had hidden the truth from others and, even
worse, from himself. It was hard now to fathom the fear and self-hatred of
those years without hope. The entire epoch seemed some kind of dream, a
memory that had no real part in his waking life today.
At times, he wondered what he had been thinking all those years. Of
what had he been so afraid? It wasn’t just being Catholic. The edification of
thirteen years of Cincinnati parochial schools dissipated within months of
his arrival at Ohio State in 1968. There, he grew his hair long and answered
the call of the Bob Dylan songs he played incessantly on his beat-up stereo.
“The first one now will later be last‚” Dylan said. The times, they were a-
changing. The message never rang true to him, not in the years of anti-
Vietnam War marches or social activism, not until Bill had moved to
Berkeley just a decade ago and discovered Castro Street and the promise of
a new age.
There, with a middle-aged camera shop owner named Harvey Milk, Bill
had learned the nuts and bolts of ward politics. He had learned how to walk
precincts, study election maps, and forge coalitions. He had seen how
everyone had power, how everyone could make a difference if only they
believed and acted as if they could. This became the central tenet of his
political catechism: “We can make a difference.” Bill now repeated it in
every speech, and on this Gay Freedom Day he felt it more strongly than
ever. Everything in the last three years—Harvey Milk’s election as
supervisor and the first openly gay elected official in the nation, the
political assassinations, and the consolidation of power after that—had
conspired to convince Bill that it was true. Castro Street couldn’t even get
its gutters swept a few years back; today, gays were the most important
single voting bloc in the city, comprising at least one in four registered
voters. Bill Kraus had become president of the city’s most powerful grass-
roots organization, the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club.
The organizational power that he helped build had kept a gay seat on the
board of supervisors after Harvey Milk’s assassination in 1978 for a one-
time Methodist minister and Milk crony named Harry Britt. Bill Kraus had
replaced Britt as president of the Milk Club and now worked as his aide in
City Hall. He had also managed Britt’s reelection campaign in 1979,
securing his reputation as the city’s leading gay tactician.
The city’s gay community was acquiring a legendary quality in political
circles with influence far beyond the 70,000-odd votes it could boast in a
city of 650,000. For the past three months, emissaries for presidential
candidates had scoured the Castro neighborhood for votes. As other cities
followed San Francisco’s blueprint for political success, a national political
force was coalescing. Bill Kraus and Harry Britt were leaving in two weeks
for New York to be Ted Kennedy delegates to the Democratic National
Convention. With seventy delegates, the convention’s gay caucus was larger
than the delegations of twenty states. This year, they would make a
difference.
The gay parade had grown so mammoth in recent years that a good chunk
of downtown San Francisco was needed just to get the scores of floats,
contingents, and marching bands in proper order. While the parade
assembled, Gwenn Craig smiled as she watched the young men mill near
Bill Kraus, all thinking of some excuse to approach the famous young
activist. Friends had teased Bill about his thirty-third birthday just days
before; he was “l’age du Christ,” somebody had joked. Bill was scarcely the
scruffy malcontent with whom Gwenn had spent so many leisurely
afternoons in Castro Street cafes. His once-shaggy hair was now neatly cut,
and his thick glasses were replaced by contacts, eliminating an owlish stare
and revealing startling blue eyes. His body was superbly toned. He carried
himself with increasing confidence, much like the body politic whose ideals
he was articulating.
Bill Kraus was even beginning to cut his own national reputation. Just
two weeks earlier, he had delivered an impassioned plea for a gay rights
plank to the Democratic Platform Committee, which was hammering
together a party agenda to present at the Democratic National Convention in
July. Bill had delivered the address as a gay rights manifesto, articulating
the goals of the nascent political force. Gay papers across the country had
written up the performance for the issues being distributed on the gay pride
weekend.
The gay rights plank, Bill Kraus said, “does not ask you to give us
special privileges. It does not ask anyone to like us. It does not even ask that
the Democratic party give us many of the legal protections which are
considered the right of all other Americans.
“Fellow members of the Platform Committee, what this amendment asks
in a time when we hear much from prominent members of the Democratic
party about human rights is that the Democratic party recognize that we, the
gay people of this country, are also human.”
The San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Marching Band blared the opening
notes of “California Here I Come,” and the parade started its two-mile trek
down Market Street toward City Hall. More than 30,000 people, grouped in
240 contingents, marched in the parade past 200,000 spectators. The parade
was the best show in town, revealing the amazing diversity of gay life.
Clusters of gay Catholics and Episcopalians, Mormons and atheists,
organized for years in the city, marched proudly beneath their banners.
Career-designated contingents of gays included lawyers and labor officials,
dentists and doctors, accountants and the ubiquitous gay phone-company
employees. There were lesbian moms, gay dads, and homosexual teenagers
with their heterosexual parents. Gay blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and
American Indians marched beneath banners proclaiming their dual pride.
The campy Gays Against Brunch formed their own marching unit. A group
of drag queens, dressed as nuns and calling themselves the Sisters of
Perpetual Indulgence, had picked the day for their debut.
Gay tourists streamed to this homophile mecca from all over the world
for the high holy day of homosexual life. Floats came from Phoenix and
Denver; gay cowboys from the Reno Gay Rodeo pranced their horses down
Market Street, waving the flags of Nevada and California, as well as the
rainbow flag that had become the standard of California gays.
Although the parade route was only two miles, it would take four hours
for the full parade to pass. Within an hour, the first contingents arrived at
the broad Civic Center Plaza, where a stage had been erected in front of the
ornate facade of City Hall.
Radical gay liberationists frowned at the carnival rides that had been
introduced to the rally site. Parade organizers had decided that the event had
grown “too political” in recent years, so the chest-pounding rhetoric that
marked most rallies was given a backseat to the festive feeling of a state
fair.
“We feel it definitely isn’t a time for celebration,” complained Alberta
Maged to a newspaper reporter. She had marched with a coalition of radical
groups including the Lavender Left, the Stonewall Brigade, and the aptly
named Commie Queers. “You can’t celebrate when you’re still being
oppressed. We have the illusion of freedom in San Francisco that makes it
easy to exist, but the right-wing movement is growing quickly. It’s right to
be proud to be gay, but it isn’t enough if you’re still being attacked.”
Many hard-line radicals, remembering the days when gay liberation was
not nearly as fashionable, agreed. The event, after all, commemorated the
riot in which Greenwich Village drag queens attacked police engaged in the
routine harassment of a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. From the
Stonewall riot, on the last weekend of June 1969, the gay liberation
movement was born, peopled by angry women and men who realized that
their fights against war and injustice had a more personal side. This was the
gay liberation movement—named after the then-voguish liberation groups
sweeping the country—that had taken such delight in frightening staid
America in the early 1970s.
By 1980, however, the movement had become a victim of its own
success. Particularly in San Francisco, the taboos against homosexuality
ebbed easily in the midst of the overall sexual revolution. The promise of
freedom had fueled the greatest exodus of immigrants to San Francisco
since the Gold Rush. Between 1969 and 1973, at least 9,000 gay men
moved to San Francisco, followed by 20,000 between 1974 and 1978. By
1980, about 5,000 homosexual men were moving to the Golden Gate every
year. The immigration now made for a city in which two in five adult males
were openly gay. To be sure, these gay immigrants composed one of the
most solidly liberal voting blocs in America, but this was largely because
liberals were the candidates who promised to leave gays alone. It was
enough to be left alone. Restructuring an entire society’s concept of sex
roles could come later; maybe it would happen by itself.
To the veterans of confrontational politics, the 1980 parade was a turning
point because it demonstrated how respectable their dream had become.
Success was spoiling gay liberation, it seemed. Governor Edmund G.
Brown, Jr., had issued a proclamation honoring Gay Freedom Week
throughout the state, and state legislators and city officials crowded the
speaker’s dais at the gay rally. For their part, gays were eager to show that
they were deserving of respectability. The local blood bank, for example,
had long ago learned that it was good business to send their mobile
collection vans to such events with large gay crowds. These were civic-
minded people. In 1980, they gave between 5 and 7 percent of the donated
blood in San Francisco, bank officials estimated.
The Ferris-wheel gondola rocked gently as it stopped with Cleve Jones at
the apex, staring down on the 200,000 milling in front of the majestic City
Hall rotunda. This was the gay community Cleve loved. Tens of thousands,
together, showing their power. Marches and loud, angry speeches, an
occasional upraised fist and drama, such drama. This was what being gay in
San Francisco meant to Cleve Jones.
“This is my private party.” He grinned. “Just me and a few thousand of
my closest friends.”
From the time he was a fourteen-year-old sophomore at Scottsdale High
School, Cleve Jones knew that this is where he wanted to be, at gay rights
marches in San Francisco. He had suffered through adolescent years in
which he was the class sissy and the locker room punching bag. But, as
soon as he could, he had hitchhiked to San Francisco and marched in the
1973 gay parade. For the rest of his life, he would know that he had arrived
at the right place at the right time.
San Francisco in the 1970s represented one of those occasions when the
forces of social change collide with a series of dramatic events to produce
moments that are later called historic. From the day Cleve walked into
Harvey Milk’s camera shop to volunteer for campaign work, his life was
woven into that history and drama. Political strategists like Bill Kraus
recalled the 1970s in terms of votes cast and elections won; Cleve Jones,
the romantic, framed the era as a grand story, the movement of a dream
through time.
Cleve remembered 1978, when he had walked in the front of the parade
dressed all in white, holding the upraised hand of a lesbian, who was also
dressed in white, in front of a banner that showed a rainbow arch fashioned
from barbed wire. Death-camp motifs had been de rigueur that year because
a state senator from Orange County, John Briggs, was campaigning
statewide for a ballot measure that would ban gays from teaching in
California public schools. The initiative brought an international spotlight
both to California, where the anti-gay campaigns started by Anita Bryant in
1977 were culminating, and to the 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade, where
gays made a defiant show of strength. They had come to the parade 375,000
strong, with Harvey Milk defying death threats to ride the long route in an
open convertible before mounting the stage to give his “hope speech,”
prodding the crowd to create the best future by coming out and announcing
their homosexuality.
Such public witnessing had always been a central article of faith of the
gay liberation movement, Cleve Jones knew. This, after all, would be the
only way their political cause could get anywhere because homosexuality
was a fundamentally invisible trait. The fact that gays could hide their
sexuality presented the gay movement with its greatest weakness and its
most profound potential strength. Invisible, gays would always be kicked
around, the reasoning went, because they would never assert their power.
On that day in 1978, never had the power been so palpable. Months later,
when California voters rejected the Briggs Initiative by a ratio of two to
one, it appeared to be a wonderful year.
However, three weeks after the election, Supervisor Dan White, San
Francisco’s only anti-gay politician, had taken his Smith and Wesson
revolver to City Hall and shot down Harvey Milk and the liberal mayor,
George Moscone. Cleve had helped organize a candlelight march to City
Hall that night for Harvey and George. Six months later, when a jury
decided that Dan White should go to jail for only six years for killing the
two men, Cleve had organized another march to City Hall—the one that
turned into a riot, a vivid affirmation that this generation of gay people
weren’t a bunch of sissies to be kicked around without a fight. This White
Night Riot left dozens of policemen injured and the front of City Hall
ravaged; gay leaders across the country grimaced at the televised coverage
of police cars set aflame by rampaging gay crowds.
By 1980, Cleve had helped fashion the story of Harvey and the 1970s,
the Dan White trial, and the White Night Riot into one of the new legends
of the fledgling gay movement, a story of assassinations and political
intrigue, homophobic zealots and rioting in the streets. From it all, Cleve
had emerged as the most prominent street activist in town, the most skillful
media manipulator since Harvey Milk. Reporters loved the ever-so-militant
pronouncements Cleve Jones was apt to make.
In recent months, Cleve had traded his blue jeans and sneakers for
Armani suits to work for the Speaker of the California Assembly. It was a
time when the outsiders who once marched angrily on the government were
becoming insiders learning how to use the power they had gained. Cleve
had spent most of the spring organizing Democratic Assembly campaigns.
He split his time between Sacramento and San Francisco, where he was
dating a wonderful Mexican-American lawyer named Felix Velarde-Munoz.
Both knew the key players in local politics, and both loved to talk politics
and liberation movements and make love and dance to the ubiquitous disco
music.
That’s what the summer of 1980 was to Cleve Jones. The gay
community was a burst of creative energy that emanated from San
Francisco and spread across America. Gays had staved off challenges that
ran from bigots’ ballot initiatives to political murder; now they could look
forward to greater victories.
Yet like many gay activists, Cleve was troubled by the amusement park
rides at Civic Center Plaza. He knew that the gay revolution was, at best,
half-completed. Its tenuous gains could be wiped away by some other
strongly organized force. He could understand that to a gay refugee from
Des Moines, the city represented freedom beyond anything imaginable. He
also knew, however, that freedom to go to a gay bar was not real freedom.
What was the right direction? Cleve asked himself. The gay movement
had shifted from one of self-exploration, in which people moved through
their own fears and self-alienation, to a movement of electoral politics,
focused outward. Voter registration tables had replaced consciousness-
raising groups as the symbol of liberation. Cleve sometimes wondered
whether the new men crowding the Castro had already gone through this
personal growth elsewhere or whether they had simply skipped it because
being gay in San Francisco was so easy now that you didn’t need to
plummet to your psychic depths to make a commitment to the life-style.
Too many questions. It was nothing to dwell on today. When Cleve
remembered the wonderful 1978 parade, and everything that had happened
since, he felt like celebrating too. From his promontory on the Ferris wheel,
he once more scanned the thousands stretched for miles around the City
Hall rotunda where gay people had once marched and rioted, and where
they now exerted so much power. The wheel jerked again, and slowly he
began to return to the crowd, turning full circle.
A new disease.
It was never a formal topic of discussion, but on that weekend, when gay
doctors from across the country gathered in San Francisco, it was discussed
occasionally in hallways and over dinners. What would happen if some new
disease insinuated itself into the bodies of just a few men in this
community? The notion terrified Dr. David Ostrow; it was an idea he tried
to put out of his mind as he wandered through the crowded rally site
between the whirling amusement park rides with two other doctors from the
convention, Manhattan’s Dan William and Robert Bolan of San Francisco.
Ostrow grimaced as a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence sashayed by. The
sight rankled his midwestern sensibilities. This was all too weird, he
thought. The media would play up the open display of sexuality and once
again drag queens and half-naked muscle boys would be presented as the
emblems of homosexual culture. People like Ostrow, who leaned toward
long, steady relationships, would never get the press. The bizarre, it
seemed, would always overshadow the positive things going on in the gay
community, like the doctors’ conference. Doctors weren’t flamboyant
enough to get in the headlines. They were barely mentioned in the gay
newspapers, counting themselves lucky to make it a page ahead of the latest
gossip about the hottest leather bar.
While strategists like Bill Kraus read the gay community’s future in
voter registration rolls, and street activists like Cleve Jones heard it in
ringing oratory, the gay doctors had spent that weekend reading the
community’s prognosis from its medical chart. Like many physicians,
Ostrow had been quite troubled when he left the medical conference, which
had adjourned in time for the parade.
The fight against venereal diseases was proving a Sisyphean task.
Ostrow was director of the Howard Brown Memorial Clinic, which
provided a sensitive alternative for gay men who wanted to avoid the sneers
of staffers at the Chicago Public Health clinics. The screening in Ostrow’s
clinic had revealed that one in ten patients had walked in the door with
hepatitis B. At least one-half of the gay men tested at the clinic showed
evidence of a past episode of hepatitis B. In San Francisco, two-thirds of
gay men had suffered the debilitating disease. It was now proven
statistically that a gay man had one chance in five of being infected with the
hepatitis B virus within twelve months of stepping off the bus into a typical
urban gay scene. Within five years, infection was a virtual certainty.
Another problem was enteric diseases, like amebiasis and giardiasis,
caused by organisms that lodged themselves in the intestinal tracts of gay
men with alarming frequency. At the New York Gay Men’s Health Project,
where Dan William was medical director, 30 percent of the patients suffered
from gastrointestinal parasites. In San Francisco, incidence of the “Gay
Bowel Syndrome,” as it was called in medical journals, had increased by
8,000 percent after 1973. Infection with these parasites was a likely effect
of anal intercourse, which was apt to put a man in contact with his partner’s
fecal matter, and was virtually a certainty through the then-popular practice
of rimming, which medical journals politely called oral-anal intercourse.
What was so troubling was that nobody in the gay community seemed to
care about these waves of infection. Ever since he had worked at the New
York City Department of Public Health, Dan William had delivered his
lecture about the dangers of undiagnosed venereal diseases and, in
particular, such practices as rimming. But he had his “regulars” who came
in with infection after infection, waiting for the magic bullet that could put
them back in the sack again. William began to feel like a parent as he
admonished the boys: “I have to tell you that you’re being very unhealthy.”
Promiscuity, however, was central to the raucous gay movement of the
1970s, and his advice was, as the Texans so charmingly put it, like pissing
in the wind. At best, he tried to counsel the Elizabeth Taylor approach to
sexuality and suggest serial monogamy, a series of affairs that may not last
forever but that at least left you with a vague awareness of which bed you
slept in most evenings.
The crowd cheered the parade again when the Bulldog Baths float came
rolling into Civic Center. The young musclemen, in black leather harnesses,
the best and the most beautiful, jumped from the cages in which they had
discoed down Market Street. That night they would be at the huge
Cellblock Party at the bathhouse, one of a panoply of celebrations
sponsored that day by San Francisco’s thriving sex industry.
This commercialization of gay sex was all part of the scene, an aspect of
the homosexual life-style in which the epidemics of venereal disease,
hepatitis, and enteric disorders thrived. The gay liberation movement of the
1970s had spawned a business of bathhouses and sex clubs. The hundreds
of such institutions were a $100-million industry across America and
Canada, and bathhouse owners were frequently gay political leaders as
well, helping support the usually financially starved gay groups. The
businesses serviced men who had long been repressed, gay activists told
themselves, and were perhaps now going to the extreme in exploring their
new freedom. It would all balance out later, so for now, sex was part and
parcel of political liberation. The popular bestseller The Joy of Gay Sex, for
example, called rimming the “prime taste treat in sex,” while a leftist
Toronto newspaper published a story on “rimming as a revolutionary act.”
It was interesting politics, David Ostrow thought. From a purely medical
standpoint, however, the bathhouses were a horrible breeding ground for
disease. People who went to bathhouses simply were more likely to be
infected with a disease—and infect others—than a typical homosexual on
the street. A Seattle study of gay men suffering from shigellosis, for
example, discovered that 69 percent culled their sexual partners from
bathhouses. A Denver study found that an average bathhouse patron having
his typical 2.7 sexual contacts a night risked a 33 percent chance of walking
out of the tubs with syphilis or gonorrhea, because about one in eight of
those wandering the hallways had asymptomatic cases of these diseases.
Doctors like David Ostrow and Dan William did not consider themselves
prudish, even if they were cut from a more staid mold than the people
whose pictures were in the newspaper coverage of the Gay Freedom Day
Parade. But they were uneasy about the health implication of the
commercialization of sex. In a 1980 interview with a New York City gay
magazine, Christopher Street, William noted, “One effect of gay liberation
is that sex has been institutionalized and franchised. Twenty years ago,
there may have been a thousand men on any one night having sex in New
York baths or parks. Now there are ten or twenty thousand—at the baths,
the back-room bars, bookstores, porno theaters, the Rambles, and a wide
range of other places as well. The plethora of opportunities poses a public
health problem that’s growing with every new bath in town.”
Such comments were politically incorrect in the extreme, and William
suffered criticism as a “monogamist.” Self-criticism was not the strong
point of a community that was only beginning to define itself affirmatively
after centuries of repression.
Altogether, this generation of gay men was blessed by good health.
Being a gay doctor was fun, William often told himself. Physical fitness
was a community ritual with tens of thousands of gay men crowding
Nautilus centers and weight rooms. He rarely had to go to a hospital
because none of his patients ever got very sick.
David Ostrow too was haunted by forebodings as he left the parade.
Between the bathhouses and the high levels of sexual activity, there would
be no stopping a new disease that got into this population. The likelihood
was remote, of course. Modern science had congratulated itself on the
eradication of infectious disease as a threat to humankind. But the specter
sometimes haunted Ostrow because he wondered where all the sexually
transmitted disease would end. It couldn’t continue indefinitely. He had
already noticed that some Chicago gay men were having immune problems.
Dan William was seeing strange inflammation of the lymph nodes among
his most promiscuous patients. The swelling was curious because it did not
seem to be in response to any particular infection but was generalized, all
over; maybe it was the effect of overloading the immune system with a
variety of venereal diseases.
Years later, Dan William would recall that it was during the days of early
1980 that he saw a man in his mid-forties recovering from a bad bout with
hepatitis B. He had strange purplish lesions on his arms and chest. William
referred him to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The man, it
turned out, was suffering from a rare skin cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma.
William had to look up Kaposi’s sarcoma in a medical textbook because he
had never heard of the ailment. Fortunately, the book said, the man had a
good prognosis. Elderly Jewish or Italian men got Kaposi’s sarcoma; twenty
years later they usually died of old age. The cancer itself, however,
appeared benign.
Mervyn Silverman watched the bare-breasted women in leather straps, with
rings through their nipples, walk by him, and he definitely had the feeling
that he was not in Kansas anymore. In his twenty years in public health, he
had traveled around the world and had lived in Bangkok and South
America. As he watched the passing parade of humanity at the Gay
Freedom Day Parade, he knew he had never lived in a more exciting place
than San Francisco, and he sensed that he would not want to live anywhere
else.
With his full head of prematurely gray hair, Silverman was easily
recognizable to many of the bystanders, who shook his hand and introduced
their lovers. Few City Hall officials were more popular than Silverman, the
director of the Department of Public Health, and few had gone out of their
way to show greater sensitivity to the gay community. Within weeks of his
appointment as health director by Mayor George Moscone in 1977, Mervyn
Silverman had understood that being public health director in San Francisco
was like nowhere else. Every community and interest group had their own
advisory board to the health department—there were thirty-four of them in
all—and it seemed that no decision went over his desk that was not rife
with political overtones. Already, a decision over the closing of a
neighborhood health center had prompted a picketing of Silverman’s
spacious Victorian home on Frederick Street in the Upper Ashbury
neighborhood.
Something about the political tension, however, excited Silverman. He
enjoyed the challenge, maintained cordial relations with the press, and
carved a singularly good reputation in every corner of the city. Silverman
was a popular official, and that was the way he liked it. He had avoided
hard feelings by making all decisions on the basis of consensus. He had
listened to all sides and forged the middle path. All public health policy was
basically political, he felt; as someone who relished public approbation, he
was a good politician. It was his strength as a public official.
“I am the prettiest one.”
It had been the standing joke. Gaetan Dugas would walk into a gay bar,
scan the crowd, and announce to his friends, “I am the prettiest one.”
Usually, his friends had to agree, he was right.
Gaetan was the man everyone wanted, the ideal for this community, at
this time and in this place. His sandy hair fell boyishly over his forehead.
His mouth easily curled into an inviting smile, and his laugh could flood
color into a room of black and white. He bought his clothes in the trendiest
shops of Paris and London. He vacationed in Mexico and on the Caribbean
beaches. Americans tumbled for his soft Quebeçois accent and his sensual
magnetism. There was no place that the twenty-eight-year-old airline
steward would rather have the boys fall for him than in San Francisco.
Fog streamed over the hills into the Castro, toward the 1980 Civic
Center rally. The first cool breezes of evening were thinning the throng
downtown, but throughout the city thousands of gay men crowded into
giant disco parties that had become a staple of the weekend-long
celebration. There was the Heatwave disco party for $25 a head in the
Japantown Center, the Muscle Beach party and the trendy Dreamland disco,
and Alive, a funkier dance fest a few blocks away.
The hottest and hunkiest, Gaetan knew, would be among the 4,000
streaming to the chic Gallería design center, where the party was just
starting when the steward and his friend arrived. Every corner of the lobby
and the five-story atrium was crammed with men pulsing to the synthesized
rhythms of disco music. Any redundance in the musical patterns was
quickly obviated by the cocaine and Quaaludes that were a staple of such
parties.
Gaetan easily made his way through the profusion of sweaty bodies with
his closest friend, another airline steward from Toronto. They had met in
1977, when they were based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Together, they had
ventured to San Francisco for the 1978 gay parade, and every year they
returned for the carnival. They decided that San Francisco would always be
their ultimate refuge. The last weekend of every June was now set aside for
nonstop partying at bars and baths.
Here, Gaetan could satisfy his voracious sexual appetite with the
beautiful California men he liked so much. He returned from every stroll
down Castro Street with a pocketful of matchbook covers and napkins that
were crowded with addresses and phone numbers. He recorded names of
his most passionate admirers in his fabric-covered address book. But lovers
were like suntans to him: They would be so wonderful, so sexy for a few
days, and then fade. At times, Gaetan would study his address book with
genuine curiosity, trying to recall who this or that person was.
As Gaetan neared the crowded dance floor at the Galleria, various men
shouted greetings, and he hugged them ebulliently like long-lost brothers.
“Who was that?” his friend would ask. “I don’t know‚” Gaetan laughed off-
handedly. “Somebody.”
Here, swaying and stomping to the music, Gaetan was completely in his
element. San Francisco was the hometown he never had. It helped him
forget the other, distant life, long ago, when he was the major sissy of his
working class neighborhood in Quebec City. Being gay then meant
constantly fighting taunts hurled by the other kids and being gripped by
guilt, by his own conscience. But that was then and this was San Francisco.
On June 29, 1980, Gaetan was the ugly duckling who had become the swan.
At the first opportunity on the dance floor, Gaetan stripped off his T-shirt
and fished out a bottle of poppers, nitrite inhalants, from his jeans pocket in
one swift, practiced move. Fine blond hair outlined the trim natural
proportions of his chest.
He felt strong and vital.
He didn’t feel like he had cancer at all.
That was what the doctor had said after cutting that bump from his face.
Gaetan had wanted the small purplish spot removed to satisfy his vanity;
the doctor had wanted it for a biopsy. Weeks later, the report came back
from New York City, and the Toronto specialist told Gaetan that he had
Kaposi’s sarcoma, a bizarre skin cancer that hardly anybody got. Maybe
that explained why his lymph nodes had been swollen for a year. Gaetan
hadn’t told friends until June, after the biopsy. He was terrified at first, but
he consoled himself with the knowledge that you can beat cancer. He had
created a life in which he could have everything and everyone he wanted.
He’d figure a way around this cancer too.
As he felt the poppers surge through him, Gaetan realized that his high
might last longer than this crowd. There were always the baths. He
reviewed his choices, as he had so many times before during his regular
visits to the city. The Club Baths was guaranteed to be crowded with those
Anglo-Saxon men who were so well built, vaguely wholesome, and, well,
so American. The fantasy rooms at the Hothouse were intriguing, as was
the Bulldog Baths’s promise of a Cellblock Party.
The summer was just beginning. The beaches of Fire Island and the pool
parties of Los Angeles all lay ahead. Later, when the researchers started
referring to Gaetan Dugas simply as Patient Zero, they would retrace the
airline steward’s travels during that summer, fingering through his fabric-
covered address book to try to fathom the bizarre coincidences and the
unique role the handsome young steward performed in the coming
epidemic.
On that day in 1980, Gaetan danced to forget under the pulsing colored
lights. Feeling whole again, he told himself that one day he would like to
move to San Francisco.
“It looks like that guy has his arm up the other guy’s ass.”
Kico Govantes thought maybe the man standing between the legs of the
guy in the sling was an amputee. Maybe he was just rubbing his stump next
to the guy’s butt.
“He does have an arm up his ass,” Kico’s friend said.
Kico was sickened. He had heard a lot about bathhouses since moving to
San Francisco five weeks before. The local gay papers were filled with ads
and catchy slogans for the businesses. The Handball Express motto was
“find your limits”; the Glory Holes pledged to be “the most unusual sex
place in the world”; the Jaguar sex club in the Castro hyped “your fantasy,
your pleasure”; while the coeducational Sutro Baths had a “Bisexual
Boogie” every weekend. The Cornholes’s advertising was more pointed,
featuring the unclad torso of a man lying on his stomach.
The handsome psychologist Kico had met at the gay parade had
promised to take him to the largest gay bathhouse in the world, the Bulldog
Baths. Decorated in San Quentin motif, the place was something of a
legend in sexual circles. The leather magazine Drummer had gushed that
the central “two-story prison is so incredibly real (real cells, real bars, real
toilets…) that when you see a guard standing on the second tier looking
down on you, you’re ready to kneel down.”
This is insane, thought Kico.
Kico had moved from Wisconsin to San Francisco with a clear sense of
what being gay meant. He figured gay people dated and courted; you
certainly never went to bed with someone you just met. Kico wouldn’t mind
if he had to date someone months before they consummated their
relationship and settled into some hip approximation of marriage. As the
scion of an aristocratic Cuban family that fled Havana when Kico was
three, the young man had led a relatively sheltered life. Suddenly, he was
very confused.
The Cellblock Party, just a few blocks from a rally where speakers were
so loftily discussing the finer points of gay love, was like some scene from
a Fellini film, intriguing and inviting to the eye, but altogether repulsive to
Kico. The scene was even more alienating because these guys were so
attractive, and they obviously found Kico attractive. He could sense that,
physically, he fit in with these people. With his trim body and handsome
swarthy features, he was what they wanted. Every floor was packed with
the firm bodies of men clad in towels. Attendants cheerfully passed out free
beer while disco music blared. The air felt thick and steamy, heavy with the
acrid smell of nitrite inhalants.
Kico turned to his companion. Certainly, a psychologist would see that
this was unhealthy, a corruption of the very gay love that this day was
supposed to celebrate. The shrink eyed him curiously, as if he were a naive
child. He seemed to enjoy guiding the twenty-two-year-old through the
labyrinthine hallways.
“That’s fist-fucking,” the psychologist said.
“Oh,” Kico said.
Knowing the words for the acts didn’t help him fathom the meaning of
what he was seeing. Where was the affection? he wondered. Where was the
interaction of mind and body that creates a meaningful sexual experience?
It was as if these people, who had been made so separate from society by
virtue of their sexuality, were now making their sexuality utterly separate
from themselves. Their bodies were tools through which they could
experience physical sensation. The complete focus on the physical aspect of
sex meant constantly devising new, more extreme sexual acts because the
experience relied on heightened sensory rather than emotional stimulation.
Kico thought it ironic that a community so entirely based on love should
create institutions so entirely devoid of intimacy. He left the bathhouse
feeling horrified and disillusioned. He walked through the empty Civic
Center Plaza where street sweepers were clearing the debris from the rally
and muscular carny men were dismantling the amusement park rides. The
fog had swept across the city on this day of interregnum. Kico was cold.
3 BEACHES OF THE DISPOSSESSED
August 1980
FIRE ISLAND, NEW YORK
Larry Kramer looked across the table toward Enno Poersch. Larry could tell
from the edge on Enno’s deep, broad voice that he was frantic with concern.
Enno recounted, again, the mysterious diarrhea, vague fatigue, and
stubborn rashes that had devastated his lover Nick. Endless tests by
countless doctors had found nothing, and the strict health-food regimen to
which Nick had adhered religiously for years wasn’t doing any good either.
Larry was a famous author who seemed to know everybody, Enno thought;
he should know something.
“Aren’t there hospitals where they specialize in treating bizarre
sicknesses?” Enno asked.
Larry remembered when he had met Nick on an all-gay cruise of the
Caribbean.
Witty, gregarious, and handsome in a compact Italian way, Nick was a
popular cruise staffer. Every day, Nick had sat away from the continuous
partying to write long love letters to Enno, and at each port, packets of
Enno’s romantic missives waited for Nick. They were the kind of lovey-
dovey letters that Larry had always wanted, and the pair’s love seemed to
have lost none of its luster in the eight years since they had met on a sunny
Fire Island beach.
As Enno talked about taking Nick from hospital to hospital, Larry
imagined Enno, a tall, broad-shouldered lumberjack of a man, cradling the
small, wiry Nick in his arms while he carried him up steep, steely stairways
to save his life. The image made Larry want to cry, but no, he didn’t know
anything about hospitals or doctors or what could be ailing Nick.
After Enno excused himself, Larry thought about how strange it was that
summer. All that people seemed to talk about were the latest intestinal
parasites going around. Dinner conversation often evolved into guys
swapping stories about which medications stomped out the stubborn little
creatures and whether Flagyl, the preferred antiparasite drug, was really
carcinogenic. It was like eavesdropping on a bunch of old ladies sharing
arthritis stories on shaded benches in Miami.
Later that night, Larry made his way toward the Ice Palace, where the
never-ending Fire Island summer party was in full swing. He walked
tentatively through the crowded doorway and saw the “Marlboro Man”
saunter languorously through the disco. Larry knew that, intellectually, he
could hold his own with anybody in New York, but the sight of Paul
Popham, so self-assured in his model-handsome good looks, always left
Larry in awe, the way you have to catch your breath after you see a movie
star.
At the Y, Larry had told Paul that he had such a naturally well-defined
body that he didn’t need to work out, and Paul responded with a shy aw-
shucks ingenuousness that reminded Larry of Gary Cooper or Jimmy
Stewart. At the Ice Palace, the thumping heart of Fire Island nightlife, Larry
wondered what it would be like to be Paul, to fit in so well and be accepted
in a way Larry, the outsider, had never experienced. No matter where he
was, Paul seemed to settle naturally among the beautiful people. On Fire
Island, he lived in the house with Enno, Nick, and a few other handsome
men who made the A-list of every major island party.
This was not Larry’s summer to fit in. He hadn’t even bothered to buy a
house share, slipping to the island for a weekend here or there. He kept a
decidedly low profile, but that didn’t prevent some nasty moments. The gay
man who owned the grocery store had glared at Larry when he was buying
an orange juice. “You’re trying to ruin the island,” the grocer glowered. “I
don’t understand why you come here.”
As the deejay turned up the volume on a Donna Summer song, Larry
watched an old friend, another writer, enter the Ice Palace, glance in his
direction, and purposefully walk the other way.
The antipathy, Larry Kramer knew, surrounded the book he had written
about gay life in New York and on this island. Everything, from its title,
Faggots, to its graphic descriptions of hedonism on the Greenwich Village-
Cherry Grove axis had stirred frenzy among both gay reviewers and the
people whose milieu Larry had set out to chronicle. Manhattan’s only gay
bookstore had banned the novel from its shelves while gay critics had
advised readers that its purchase represented an act inimical to the interests
of gay liberation.
Faggots had explored every dark corner of the subculture that gays had
fashioned in the heady days after gay liberation. There were scenes of drug-
induced euphoria at the discos, all-night orgies in posh Upper East Side co-
ops, and fist-fucking at The Toilet Bowl, one of the many Manhattan sleaze
bars where every form of exotic sexuality was explored with gritty
abandon. The story climaxed with a weekend of parties and dancing on Fire
Island, punctuated by cavorting in the Meat Rack, a stretch of woods that is
home to some of the most animated foliage since Birnam Wood marched to
Dunsinane.
Against this backdrop, lovers argued about fidelity and the plausibility of
having anything resembling a meaningful commitment in the midst of such
omnipresent carnality. When the book’s protagonist, a Jewish screenwriter-
movie producer not unlike Larry Kramer himself, sees his own hopes for
love fade, he delivers a tirade that raised many troubling questions.
“Why do faggots have to fuck so fucking much?” Larry had written. “It’s
as if we don’t have anything else to do … all we do is live in our Ghetto and
dance and drug and fuck … there’s a whole world out there! … as much
ours as theirs … I’m tired of being a New York City-Fire Island faggot, I’m
tired of using my body as a faceless thing to lure another faceless thing, I
want to love a Person! I want to go out and live in a world with that Person,
a Person who loves me, we shouldn’t have to be faithful!, we should want
to be faithful! … No relationship in the world could survive the shit we lay
on it.”
It all needs to change, Larry’s protagonist told an unfaithful lover at the
book’s climax, “before you fuck yourself to death.”
The book had proved a sensation, but ever since its publication, Larry
had been something of a persona non grata on the island, returning only
occasionally to visit friends and observe. It was already past 1:00 A.M. as he
watched Paul Popham squire his handsome boyfriend, Jack Nau, back to the
dance floor. The beautiful people, at last, were beginning to descend on the
Ice Palace. Life on this long spit of sand in the Atlantic, Larry knew, was a
regimen of sybaritic sameness.
Afternoons on the beaches were followed by light dinners, perhaps a
nap, and then some outrageous party, before adjournment to whatever was
the fashionable disco of the season. Of course, nobody got to the Ice Palace
before 2:00 A.M., so you’d need some drugs to stay up. Once properly
buzzed, it would be hard to get to sleep early, so you’d stop at the Meat
Rack after dancing, and then you’d eventually walk home as the sun was
rising over the sand. The unchanging ritual made Larry feel old. At forty-
five, he didn’t have the long nights in him anymore, and he wondered how
the other guys could subject themselves to weekends that were more of a
burnout than even the hectic pace of life in Manhattan.
At times, Larry Kramer compared the gay life of New York with San
Francisco; it was another penchant that irritated the Manhattan gay
intelligentsia. Larry had been in San Francisco the day Harvey Milk and
Mayor George Moscone were shot, and he had wept the night that 30,000
candles glimmered outside City Hall and speakers talked idealistically of
changing the world. He had been amazed to see the governor of California,
the entire state supreme court, and scores of other officials at Milk’s
memorial service. Gays in New York had never achieved such power and
respect, he thought, because they seemed more intent on building a better
disco than a better social order. Being gay in New York was something you
did on weekends, it seemed. During the week everybody went back to their
careers and played the game, carefully concealing their sexuality and acting
like everything was okay.
Of course, this was not to say that Larry was some crazy gay militant. In
fact, he didn’t have much use for the gay activist types in New York. The
radicals seemed ensconced in rhetoric that was as passé as Chairman Mao.
The more respectable gays, who talked earnestly of civil rights, seemed
more intent on defending the current gay life-style than on changing it to
something more meaningful. Rather than fight for the right to get married,
the gay movement was fighting for the prerogative of gays to bump like
bunnies.
The community seemed lost, and sometimes Larry felt lost. He had
created two hits in his life and those were now behind him. First, after years
in the movie business‚ Larry had written and produced a film based on a D.
H. Lawrence novel that everybody agreed could never be made into a
movie. Women in Love became one of the most acclaimed films of its year,
winning an Oscar nomination in screenwriting for Larry and an Academy
Award for one of its stars, Glenda Jackson. He had produced other films,
but his next big hit as an artist, albeit controversial, was Faggots. And now
he was fiddling with another novel and typing some screenwriting
assignments, but in truth, he felt something like the gay community itself, at
sixes and sevens and not really set in any particular direction.
Paul Popham had noticed Larry Kramer at the Ice Palace and thought,
briefly, that he ought to give Faggots another try. He had managed to read
only twenty or thirty pages before he got bored. He had a hard time seeing
why anybody would be so deadly serious about being homosexual. Yes,
Paul was gay, but it was no more an overwhelming trait than the fact he had
been a Green Beret or that he had grown up in Oregon. It just was, and he
didn’t see any reason to talk about it much. He never felt discriminated
against, never pondered suicide, nor wrestled with any guilt about being
homosexual. Being gay had, at worst, been only a mild inconvenience,
something he had to maneuver around.
None of Paul’s private life was anybody else’s damn business, he
thought. None of it had much to do with politics either. Like a lot of gays on
Wall Street, he voted his pocketbook as a registered Republican. This year,
he wasn’t crazy about the Reaganites, but Carter was a wimp. Come
November, Paul had every intention of voting for independent presidential
candidate John Anderson, a moderate Republican congressman from
Illinois.
Paul scanned the dance floor, taking in the cream of New York gay
society, the taut-bodied mustachioed men who were so beautiful you
worried they might break if you stared too hard. It all made Paul regret that
he hadn’t taken better advantage of his share in the beat-up old house on
Ocean Walk. Enno had been renting the place for years, and Paul had
moved in this year to take the room of his best friend Rick Wellikoff.
Rick had mentioned last September that he had some funny bumps
behind his ear. He hadn’t wanted to go to the doctor, but Paul talked him
into going to the famous dermatologists at New York University, where
Paul was being treated for persistent psoriasis. Both Paul and Rick were
stunned when the doctors said Rick had cancer, an unheard-of kind of
cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma. It was even stranger when the doctor
mentioned that there was another gay man with the same cancer at a nearby
hospital. Rick and the second patient, it turned out, even had some mutual
friends.
Rick hadn’t seemed too sick until lately, and even now it wasn’t that he
was terribly ill. He just felt dog-tired all the time. Paul thought that maybe
Rick’s job as a fifth-grade teacher in a rough Brooklyn neighborhood was
burning him out, but Rick insisted it was more than that. He quit his job and
stayed holed up with his lover in their brownstone on West 78th Street.
With a heavy load of work and the bedside visits with Rick, it was all Paul
could do to get away for a rare weekend of carefree nights at the Ice Palace
and days on friendly Fire Island sands.
Back at the house on Ocean Walk, Enno Poersch stared down at Nick’s
sleeping form. The idea had been for Nick to spend a relaxed summer at the
beach and regain his health. Enno had stayed in the city all summer
working on a major architectural drawing project. He wasn’t prepared for
how much Nick had changed.
Nick looked emaciated and rarely had the strength to move off the deck
of the run-down, three-bedroom beach house. It was certainly peculiar that
such two good friends as Rick and Nick should both be sick, Enno thought
occasionally. At least Rick looked healthy enough to him. Recently, the
thought had pierced the thick layers of Enno’s Oregonian optimism that
Nick wasn’t doing as well. Enno felt as though he were breaking inside,
because he loved Nick so much.
Enno thought back to their Aspen skiing trip in January, five months ago.
People had said Nick’s fatigue was a typical reaction to the altitude, the thin
air. When they returned to Manhattan, Nick went to his Rolfing but came
home a couple of hours later with the flu. He felt better the next day and
went back to work, only to return again in a few hours, complaining of the
same vague malaise. That was the last time he had tried to go to work. All
the health foods Nick so carefully prepared and all the Rolfers and psychic
healers he had consulted weren’t helping.
Enno wondered again: Where could they get Nick fixed? Nick shifted
restlessly and shouted something, waking himself up. He dozed back to
sleep, the sheets only accenting how much weight he had lost. Tomorrow,
Enno knew, Nick would mention hearing somebody shout and that it had
woken him up. Maybe he’d blame Enno, and then he’d drift back into the
vacant daydreams that seemed to occupy so much of his days now. Enno
thought back to the warning Nick’s best friend had sternly delivered a few
months back.
“Nick is going to die if we don’t do something.”
“You’re being overdramatic,” Enno had said.
Saturday, August 9
NEW YORK CITY
“What do I call you?”
Senator Kennedy absently ran his hand through his graying hair while he
quizzed Bill Kraus.
“Is it just gay? Or lesbians and gays? Or gay men and gay women?”
With the Democratic National Convention scheduled to convene at
Madison Square Garden in just two days, the senator’s fight with President
Carter was coming down to the wire. The key issue was Kennedy’s move
for an “open convention.” If Kennedy could force a rules change to permit
delegates to vote their consciences and not the dictates of the party
primaries, he might be able to squeak to victory. It was his last chance. The
convention’s Gay and Lesbian Caucus cocktail party presented a friendly
audience since two-thirds of the gay delegates were already committed to
the senator. As a member of the Platform Committee, Bill Kraus was the
highest-ranking Kennedy delegate in the caucus, and he was going to
introduce the candidate. Kennedy was trying to pick his way through the
etiquette of eighties politics and get the salutation just right.
“Or is it lesbians and gay men?”
Bill rolled his eyes toward Gwenn Craig. Gwenn knew her friend was in
ecstasy, squiring Kennedy around the party and not-too-subtly gloating at
the New York delegates pledged to President Carter. Nobody from the
Carter campaign had bothered to attend the gay event.
Kennedy settled on lesbians and gay men and started delivering his
ringing endorsement of gay concerns, accompanied by a reminder that he
was the first major candidate to endorse these issues. Bill couldn’t believe
that New York activists were arguing that it was in gays’ interests to support
a president who had done nothing for gay rights over Kennedy, who
supported the entire gay agenda. It was typical New York gay shit, he had
confided to Gwenn.
The New York gay leaders seemed to view homosexual rights as
something of a driver’s license—they were privileges that were doled out
by the state. Bill Kraus saw the issue simply in terms of what gays
deserved. They were talking about rights, not privileges, for Christ’s sake.
Bill would later reflect that so much of what would happen in the coming
years could be understood in terms of what happened at that 1980
convention, where the split between the California and New York styles of
gay politics had so clearly emerged.
It had started a month before at the Democratic Platform Committee in
Washington, where Democrats drew up the statement of principles on
which they would run their campaign. Bill Kraus wanted to push for the full
set of gay demands. An executive order from the president could
immediately end discrimination against gays by all federal agencies “with
the stroke of a pen,” as Bill was fond of noting. He thought it was
disgusting that foreign gays could be excluded from even setting foot in this
country on the ground that they were “pathological” under a law passed
during the McCarthy era. He wanted a promise to change the immigration
laws, as well.
The proposals horrified the Carter camp, who were worried about the
increasingly contentious fundamentalists in the former Georgia governor’s
political base in the South. Kennedy promised enough delegates to take the
issue to the convention floor in the form of a minority plank if that’s what
gays wanted. Bill relished the thought of a floor debate on the issue. The
gay cause needed that kind of nationally televised attention if it was to be
taken seriously as a legitimate social issue, he thought.
The Carter camp would have preferred not mentioning gay rights at all,
but, in an attempt to avoid the floor fight, they held out the compromise of a
general plank opposing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
New York gays supported the president, saying gays would not even get so
much as this plank if they caused trouble. Bill Kraus didn’t want to
compromise and figured it was better to put the issue in front of 50 million
television viewers than to get some nebulous statement in a document that
nobody ever read anyway. With a compromise, they would get not only less
than they deserved, but far less than they were politically capable of
achieving. After the moderate position prevailed, Bill started talking openly
of how New Yorkers were committed to “a strategy of enduring
subservience.” He looked forward to getting to the convention, where the
greater strength of West Coast activists could take charge.
“The problem lies not in evil personalities or traitorous acts, but rather in
the political orientation which believes that an oppressed group gets what it
needs by being careful not to offend the powerful,” Bill reported to the Milk
Club after the platform compromise. “The problem lies in the desire to
protect the little that we have gotten by not risking a fight for what we
deserve. The problem lies in believing that what we have gotten is
somehow a favor given by politicians rather than the politicians’
recognition of what we have the political power to demand and to get.”
The New Yorkers, Bill thought, were still unable to build the kind of
power that was not dependent on the largess of the elite. It was because of
all the closet cases in Manhattan, the Californians told each other. Without
visibility and a concrete voting bloc, gays there would always be
dispossessed and beholden to the kindness of strangers. And it would be
their own fault. Begging for favors from party bosses was politics with a
small “p,” Bill thought. Playing Politics with a capital “p” meant using the
political system to establish the long-term social change you’re seeking.
For their part, New York gay leaders, led by lesbian Carter delegate
Virginia Apuzzo, thought the Californians were far too militant for
mainstream America. Not everybody could live like the out-of-the-closet
types who were always rioting in San Francisco. You had to play the game,
they thought, and that meant getting along in the real world. And Carter
certainly was better than the Republican alternative who had just been
nominated in Detroit, former California Governor Ronald Reagan.
Everybody applauded Senator Kennedy, who shook some hands before
bustling out to another party. The gay caucus event, high above the East
Side in the Olympic Tower, clearly was the “in” event for liberals that night.
Gloria Steinem held court in one corner while a number of congressmen
pressed Bill Kraus to be introduced. Nobody could get over how far gays
had come since the 1976 Democratic Convention, where the gay caucus
consisted of four delegates. Here, they had seventy-six delegates and
alternates, and they had already achieved the long-elusive goal of getting
their concerns written into the platform of the nation’s largest political
party. It was also clear that the center of the gay movement had shifted west
to California, where half the gay delegates lived. Politicos from the other
nineteen states represented in the gay caucus huddled around the San
Francisco delegates to hear stories about Harvey Milk and how gays had
engineered their political power. The gay cause now belonged to the more
aggressive activists like Bill Kraus, not the moderates from the East. The
next day, Bill was unanimously elected co-chair of the gay caucus.
Kennedy’s defeat for both the open convention and the nomination came
as a bitter disappointment to Bill and his allies. The Democrats were headed
for certain defeat with a loser like Carter at the head of the ticket, Bill
moaned to Gwenn Craig. Despite the large gay presence, the East Coast
media also mostly ignored the new political force at the convention. Bill
was still eager to get the gay cause on television and pushed the notion of
nominating a gay vice-presidential candidate; that way the nominating
speeches could make television. Because he wasn’t the constitutionally
required age of thirty-five, Bill couldn’t go for it himself. But the gay
delegates quickly fanned out throughout the convention and, at the eleventh
hour, gathered the necessary petition signatures for the vice-presidential
nomination of a black gay leader from Washington, Mel Boozer. On the
morning of the final day of the convention, Bill Kraus climbed onto the
podium to deliver the nominating speech.
“We are here,” he said. “We are here with strength. We are here with
pride. And I am happy to say we are here with friends. Many of you worked
with us to pass this party’s platform plank, which calls for the first time for
lesbians and gay men to receive the same protection against discrimination
which all other Americans enjoy.”
On the flight back to San Francisco, Bill Kraus and Gwenn Craig consoled
themselves with the thought that it would not be utter disaster for gays once
Reagan was elected. A Democratic Congress could probably hold back the
anti-gay legislation of the New Right. Although the other points on the
agenda they held dear would suffer from spending cuts, the gay cause was
essentially a battle for social legitimacy, not any specific spending
programs. And the most basic rights of being free from police harassment
and job discrimination were being won not on the federal level but in the
major urban areas where gay clout was concentrated. Ronald Reagan or
Jerry Falwell couldn’t take away their local political power. Thank God,
gays weren’t after any money for social programs.
Bill nursed a vodka and tonic and fumed about the wimpy New Yorkers.
If a situation ever arose in which gays needed more than reassurances of
liberal tolerance, he thought, the New Yorkers would get the shaft.
Late August
VIRGINIA BEACH, VIRGINIA
The psychic sat stoically listening to Nick recount his problems. Nick’s
steel-gray eyes betrayed his desperation. He had been sick all year now.
Would anything help?
Enno Poersch had wanted his younger lover to try the Mayo Clinic in
Minnesota, but Nick instead made the trip to the psychic healer in the
Shenandoah Valley. The psychic turned on the portable tape recorder and
lapsed into a trance. “You are suffering from toxoplasmosis,” the psychic
said, finally.
Nick didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.
The psychic spelled it out, but that didn’t help much. Toxoplasmosis, it
turned out, was some cat disease. Big help.
After his return to New York City, Nick stayed with a friend while Enno
closed up the house on Ocean Walk. Though Enno remained optimistic,
Nick deteriorated rapidly. Just rising from his bed required a herculean
effort of thought and strength. First, Nick would consciously take some
moments to make the decision to rise; there was no longer any spontaneous
physical movement. Once decided, he would set about each separate act
required in rising, from moving his legs, and his back, to each movement
required to put on his shoes and pants. By September, such a process of
rising and dressing consumed an hour. When Nick walked, every step
commanded more conscious effort, placing one foot in front of the other. At
times, Nick looked as though he would collapse from lack of support.
Most frightening to Enno were the bizarre changes in Nick’s body. His
frame seemed to be curling in upon itself. Nick became pigeon-toed while
his trunk hunched over, his shoulders turning toward each other as if he
were returning to some macabre and wasted fetal position.
Nick’s friend was right, Enno realized. Nick was dying. He replayed the
psychic’s tape, trying to scour some clue that might resurrect his friend. The
cassette again revealed only that strange word, spelled out slowly by the
psychic: “T-O-X-O-P-L-A-S-M-O-S-I-S.”
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