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

by Randy Shilts

It was November 1, 1980, the beginning of a month in which single frames of tragedy in this and that corner of the world would begin to flicker fast enough to reveal the movement of something new and horrible rising slowly from the earth’s biological landscape.

“Dachau was opened in 1933,” Larry read in the museum. He stood there stunned. He had had no idea the camp had opened so early, just months after Adolf Hitler assumed power in Germany. World War II started for the United States in 1941, Larry thought. “Where the fuck was everybody for eight years?” he wanted to shout. “They were killing Jews, Catholics, and gays for eight years and nobody did a thing.” In an instant, his fury turned to ice. He knew exactly how the Nazis could kill for eight years without anyone doing anything. Nobody cared. That was what was happening with AIDS. People were dying, and nobody cared.

The most recent innovation Morrison instituted concerned visiting privileges in a patient’s final days. Normally, the ailing man’s biological family was given all prerogatives in deciding who saw a patient in the critical care unit. However, an unseemly conflict had arisen recently when one patient’s mother marched into her dying son’s room and ordered out his longtime lover. “I’m his mother and I don’t want any faggots in this room,” she announced brusquely. “And I don’t want any of those nurses who are faggots. They did this to him.” The patient broke down crying but was unable to speak because he was on a ventilator. A few days later, he died without seeing his lover again. Morrison announced the new 5B policy: that all patients designate their significant others who would have visiting privileges. As far as Morrison was concerned, the definition of the American family had changed. It should be the right of patients themselves to define their families, not the right of the hospital.

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. Even the past, of which they thought incessantly, had a savor only of regret. For they would have wished to add to it all that they regretted having left undone…. And thus there was always something missing in their lives. Hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and cheated of the future, we were much like those whose men’s justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars. —ALBERT CAMUS, The Plague

In Hawaii, Cleve Jones wanted to put his fist through the television set as he watched the grotesque spectacle of news choppers vying for exclusive footage of the world’s newest celebrity AIDS patient. The television stations could afford helicopters to record fifteen seconds of Rock Hudson on a stretcher, but they had never afforded the time to note the passing of the thousands who had gone before him. Cleve recalled the line of pale, anxious faces stretching down the stairs from the one-room office of the KS Foundation on Castro Street in the summer of 1982. All those boys were dead now, and they had died unlamented and unremarked by the media. This is what it took, Cleve thought, some famous closet case to collapse in a hotel lobby.