And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

by Randy Shilts

Don’t offend the gays and don’t inflame the homophobes. These were the twin horns on which the handling of this epidemic would be torn from the first day of the epidemic. Inspired by the best intentions, such arguments paved the road toward the destination good intentions inevitably lead.

Larry passed the hat for Friedman-Kien’s NYU research and collected $6,635. That was just about all the private money that was to be raised to fight the new epidemic for the rest of the year.

We could win this fight, but nobody is willing to make the effort or even acknowledge that there is a battle out there to be won.

When he was young, Conant had sometimes wondered what it might have been like to be a bright, resourceful Jewish man on the day after Krystalnacht, to see clearly the wholesale death that lay so soon ahead, even if the rest of the world didn’t seem to care. Why didn’t they run away? Now, for the first time, Conant understood.

Politics knows only two principles: loyalty and revenge.

When Mathilde Krim said she could provide such a document, the mayor seemed to soften. “Okay, Mathilde, I’ll make you the head of my task force on AIDS,” he said. Krim left the office feeling she had accomplished something, at last. She never heard from Mayor Koch again. Later compilation of AIDS diagnoses showed that during the month of July 1983, the city’s AIDS caseload topped 1,000 patients. By July 30, 1,003 New Yorkers were stricken with the deadly ailment, more than had existed in the entire nation just a few months before.

I came here today in the hope that my epitaph would not read that I died of red tape.”

Thus, too, they came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in the company of a memory that serves no purpose.

Prejudice makes prisoners of both the hated and the hater. That truth would surface less than two years later, when Dan White put his car in his closed garage and turned on the motor, killing himself. Even outside Soledad, he lived as a prisoner and died as one.

Like a good soldier, Dritz had left the department her plump notebooks jammed with observations on the first years of the AIDS epidemic. The information was amassed on health department time, Dritz figured, so it belonged to the department. And in the summer of 1984, the San Francisco Department of Public Health took the politically correct action of feeding the notebooks into a paper shredder.

Later, everybody agreed the baths should have been closed sooner; they agreed health education should have been more direct and more timely. And everybody also agreed blood banks should have tested blood sooner, and that a search for the AIDS virus should have been started sooner, and that scientists should have laid aside their petty intrigues. Everybody subsequently agreed that the news media should have offered better coverage of the epidemic much earlier, and that the federal government should have done much, much more. By the time everyone agreed to all this, however, it was too late. Instead, people died. Tens of thousands of them.

At that time, the pair thought that once people realized how serious the threat was, they would be cast as villains for not being more strident in their warnings. Now, both Gottlieb and Conant found themselves undone, not because people believed they hadn’t cared enough, but because they cared too much.

When they talked for the last time, only days before Paul died, Larry apologized for their fights, and Paul just said, “Keep fighting.”

In years past, Cleve and the other citizens of Castro Street had looked ahead to a time when they had rooted out prejudice against gay people altogether and healed the lives that the prejudice had scarred. They might be old men by then, but they would be able to entertain each other with reminiscences of the old days when they had all believed they could change the world, and know that to a certain extent, they had. Many of those people were dead now, and Cleve accepted that most of his friends would be dead before they reached anything near old age.

It could have been any day in the history of the AIDS epidemic and it could have been any city, because such little dramas were, ultimately, what all the numbers behind the AIDS statistics were about: promising people, who could have contributed much, dying young and dying unnecessarily. As it was, however, the day was January 5, 1986, the city was San Francisco, the person was William James Kraus, and the number he would soon be assigned in the statistics was that of the 887th San Franciscan to die in the AIDS epidemic.

“Now I can see,” the nurse said softly. “He’s dead, but that really isn’t him, is it?” The nurse regarded Bill’s motionless form, not morbidly but with a genuine fascination, as if she just then were reaching some conclusion about life, about death. “Oh, I know that’s him,” she said, a little flustered. “But that’s not him,” she said. “He’s not really dead.”