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

by Randy Shilts

By the time America paid attention to the disease, it was too late to do anything about it.

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,

Leaders were in place to monitor the gay community’s health and survival interests.

nearly five years passed before all these institutions—medicine,

mobilized the way they should in a time of threat.

little prestige to be gained in studying a homosexual affliction.

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

gay community leaders played politics with the disease, putting political dogma ahead of the preservation of human life.

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.

bears telling, so that it will never happen again, to any people, anywhere.

guests had come from all over the world. This was the part the epidemiologists would later note,

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.

The doctors could only gravely tell her that she was suffering from progressive lung disease of unknown cause.

Bygbjerg decided he would devote his life to studying tropical medicine.

Bill Kraus

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.

“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.”

Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,

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.

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.

The promise of freedom had fueled the greatest exodus of immigrants to San Francisco since the Gold Rush.

liberals were the candidates who promised to leave gays alone. It was enough to be left alone.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cleve had traded his blue jeans and sneakers for Armani suits to work for the Speaker of the California Assembly.

organizing Democratic Assembly campaigns.

Ostrow was director of the Howard Brown Memorial Clinic,

What was so troubling was that nobody in the gay community seemed to care about these waves of infection.

Promiscuity, however, was central to the raucous gay movement of the 1970s,

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.

sex was part and parcel of political liberation.

Between the bathhouses and the high levels of sexual activity, there would be no stopping a new disease that got into this population.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

August 1980

All that people seemed to talk about were the latest intestinal parasites going around.

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

“open convention.”

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 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.

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.

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.

“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,”

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.