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gays were the most important single voting bloc in the city, comprising at least one in four registered voters.
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 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.
Thank God, gays weren’t after any money for social programs.
Gay men were being washed by tide after tide of increasingly serious infections.
There are so many opportunities for transmission that, if something new gets loose here, we’re going to have hell to pay.”
New studies were showing that 93 percent of gay men were infected with cytomegalovirus, a herpes virus that had been linked to cancer. The gay sexual revolution had also made the Epstein-Barr virus, a microbe also linked to cancers, pandemic among homosexual men.
Francis was already convinced. He quickly became the leading CDC proponent of the notion that a new virus that could be spread sexually was causing immune deficiencies in gay men.
Joe knew these were not gay issues but male issues. The trouble was that, by definition, you had a gay male subculture in which there was nothing to moderate the utterly male values that were being adulated more religiously than any macho heterosexual could imagine, right down to the cold, hard stares of the bathhouse attendants. Promiscuity was rampant because in an all-male subculture there was nobody to say “no”—no moderating role like that a woman plays in the heterosexual milieu.
Gary believed that promiscuity was a means to exorcise the guilt and self-alienation ingrained in all gay men by a heterosexual society clinging to the obsolete values of monogamy.
Some patients apparently were not gay, though they did admit to being heroin users.
She outlined the potential problems: Not only could gays be panicked but this could be manipulated to fuel an anti-gay backlash.
By March, ten women had contracted GRID, and Guinan’s research confirmed that nearly all of them had sex with somebody in a high-risk group: a bisexual man or, most typically, a drug addict. These cases and stories like that of the prison nurse led Mary to her repeated lectures about “semen depositors.” That was the key to understanding this epidemic, she said, not homosexuals.
Theories abounded, in part because it was strangely reassuring to think that something out there had brought this misfortune on homosexuals, not something in which gay men themselves could have had any part.
But bathhouses were biological cesspools for infection.
Larry was adamant that GMHC should tell homosexuals exactly what the doctors were telling board members in private meetings—to stop having sex.
that this so-called gay cancer was all over the Haitian refugee communities in their cities.
Gays were worried about public relations and hemophiliacs were skittish about being involved with anything having to do with homosexuals. The FDA was worried about turf and was largely unconvinced there was a disease at all, much less something that merited the kind of serious scrambling those CDC hotshots wanted.
Privately, Cleve favored setting up informational pickets outside bathhouses to let patrons know they might be risking their lives in the sex palaces. But even hints toward such action were met with fierce resistance by others who still viewed bathhouses as symbols of the sexual liberation gays had fought so long to gain.
As a political issue, the bathhouses were put to rest quickly. The idea of closing them was too shocking even for those involved in the fight against AIDS, most of whom had cut their political horns in civil rights causes.
William dared suggest that bathhouses should be required to post signs warning about the epidemic and promiscuous sex,
The central neighborhood of the city was, of course, the Castro Street District. One percent of the men there were diagnosed and nobody had told them?
He knew that virtually every gay man there had had hepatitis B and that most had engaged in the kind of sexual activities that put them at high risk for AIDS. Not one of them could in good conscience donate blood,
“I am sick of guys who moan that giving up careless sex until this thing blows over is worse than death,” Kramer wrote. “How can they value life so little and cocks and asses so much?”
this meant that perhaps 1 in 100 gay men in this area already had AIDS. A person having twenty sexual contacts a year had 1 chance in 10 of making it with an AIDS sufferer.
The politicos shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. By and large, they were unaccustomed to this kind of talk. They were much more familiar with discussions about discrimination and liberation, co-sexuality and heterosexist oppression.
When dealing with AIDS at all, most gay political leaders preferred framing the epidemic in familiar concepts. This is why condemning the federal government had become so popular.
Now, however, doctors were tossing the ball squarely into the gay leaders’ court, and most of the activists weren’t sure what they should do, or more accurately, what was the politically correct thing to do.
Hearing this, San Francisco Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver, a close, longtime ally of the gay community, made what she considered a logical suggestion: “If you’re saying that this can be spread through sexual contact, it makes sense to me to have the public health department get a court order to shut down the gay bathhouses. That would probably save lives.” A chorus of boos and hisses greeted Silver’s recommendation.
Not only was closing the bathhouses something that could not be done, it was something that could not even be discussed.
His integrity was above reproach and his credentials as a God-fearing Catholic Irishman could not be matched. Observers credited his interest in AIDS to a certain ethical posture derived from his serious commitment to Catholicism.
Anthony Fauci, who coordinated AIDS for the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also had sent a representative.
“Our government’s response to this disaster has been far too little,” wrote Francis. “Much of this is because the slope of the epidemic curve has been gradual, lasting years instead of days. We are not accustomed to dealing with outbreaks having long latent periods. But these situations require even greater speed because even after discovery of the cause, we will be so far behind and control will be even more difficult….
Paul Lorch decided to exact his own revenge. He took the letter demanding his termination and the list of all the people who signed it, and set it aside. One by one, as they died, he crossed their names off the list, getting the last laugh, so to speak.
a guy didn’t need 1,100 sexual contacts to run into somebody who carried the virus. In New York City and San Francisco, just a few partners could do the trick.
For this reason, Don Francis had called “commercialized gay sex” an “amplification system” for the disease. Virtually every study on sexually transmitted diseases had shown for years that gay men who went to bathhouses were far more likely than others to be infected with whatever venereal disease was going around, whether it was gonorrhea or syphilis, hepatitis B or AIDS. Bathhouses guaranteed the rapid spread of AIDS among gay men.
Common sense dictated that bathhouses be closed down. Common sense, however, rarely carried much weight in regard to AIDS policy. Indeed, the debates that simmered around the country over bathhouses in the next two years emerged as paradigms of how politics and public health could conspire to foster catastrophe.
From the start, Engleman had thought that the federal government’s guidelines requiring only the questioning of donors were inadequate. Nearly three months after they went into effect, he could see that some people in high-risk groups still were donating blood. Not everybody bothered to read the little pamphlets handed out at the desk for self-deferral. For some, it appeared that donating blood was an act that could overcome their personal fears about having AIDS. Thus, blood banks occasionally became the stages for gay men living out the psychodramas of denial.
The city of New York had yet to devote one penny to any AIDS education or services, despite being home to 45 percent of the nation’s AIDS victims.
“It has long been the defiant slogan of the gay rights movement that, so long as we don’t injure anyone, what we do is our own business,” he concluded. “If promiscuous homosexuals in the urban centers of New York and San Francisco are capable of transmitting death with a casual sexual contact, their slogan, to put it mildly, would no longer seem to apply.”
For the past decade, spokespeople of the gay rights movement had held endless press conferences to argue against the stereotype that gay men were sex fiends wholly preoccupied with getting their rocks off. With AIDSpeak, however, many of these same spokespeople were now arguing that bathhouses must stay open because gay men were such sex fiends that they would be screwing behind every bush if they didn’t have their sex clubs.
By the thousands, gay men continued to go to the baths, and by the thousands they would later die.
Dr. Art Ammann was cut out of the AIDS money entirely. Ammann was the doctor who had first alerted the nation to the threat of AIDS in the blood supply in December 1982. His actions probably resulted in the saving of many lives, but saving lives was not the criteria upon which university officials based their decisions.
Haitian authorities responded to a year of publicity about the links of AIDS to that impoverished nation by going to the country’s only gay bar in Port-au-Prince and jailing everyone.
Homosexual reporters, particularly in New York, tended to know their place and keep their mouths shut, if they wanted to survive in the news business.
American journalism was always better at defining others’ foible than its own.
“Self-exclusion has not worked well enough in the San Francisco area,” McDonough said, “and some individuals are giving blood who should not.”
While commercial blood companies, sensitive to the demands of hemophiliacs, supported testing, nonprofit blood banks, most notably the American Red Cross, continued to oppose it. As usual, the blood bankers argued cost, saying that testing would add $12 to the cost of a unit of blood and that they would have to recruit new donors to replace the 6 percent of donors whose blood would be rejected because of the testing.
Whether Gaetan Dugas actually was the person who brought AIDS to North America remains a question of debate and is ultimately unanswerable.
a new viral agent had appeared among San Francisco gay men in 1976 or 1977
