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Randy Shilts
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January 8 - March 9, 2019
AIDS came to be seen as a San Francisco phenomenon because that’s where the action was.
April 26, 1983 SAN FRANCISCO CITY HALL
That comment made Harvey Milk hate Jim Foster, more for the personal rebuff than for the loftier philosophical differences. The Toklas Club never endorsed Harvey Milk for anything. By 1976, Milk had organized his own club, the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club, based on his own style of pragmatic power politics. The club’s clout grew with Milk’s election in 1977 and renamed itself the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club days after its mentor’s assassination in November 1978. Five years later, both Harvey Milk and Jim Foster were absent from the political scene, the latter nursing a lover stricken
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The Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club was one of the few major political organizations in the city to support recall, largely out of anger over the domestic partners’ ordinance. On the other side were leaders of the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club and such groups as the Coalition for Human Rights, who favored a low-key approach to the epidemic, fearing that panic could spread to heterosexuals who might resort to such unsavory actions as mass quarantines of gays. For them, the political survival of the gay community was at stake.
The straight media in New York didn’t cover AIDS or gays, and they weren’t about to cover some queer circus for AIDS, no matter how big it was or how worthy the cause. Paul was relieved that his secret was safe. He let himself fall into exultation at the scope of how far the gay community had come.
In a way, the television cameras and print journeymen had come to need events such as the candlelight march as much as the marchers needed the reporters. Much of modern news is shamelessly artificial, coming from press conferences hyped by press releases written by legions of public relations people; the march lent an authenticity to the epidemic, even if it truly was designed to generate media coverage. There was the fragrance of sincerity to it.
Bill Kraus was exuberant when he left Civic Center. The community was waking up to AIDS. Journalists finally were paying attention to the epidemic. Certainly deeper news investigations would force the Reagan administration to start funding research adequately, he thought. Everything was going to change now.
As Cleve had wanted, the unobstructed picture of Gary Walsh and the other AIDS sufferers holding the “Fighting for Our Lives” banner had flashed all over the world.
Marches in Houston, Chicago, Dallas, Boston, and other cities sparked some of the first local coverage of the epidemic.
27 percent of these people had Kaposi’s sarcoma, 51 percent had Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, 8 percent had both KS and PCP, while another 14 percent had different opportunistic infections, such as cryptococcosis, toxoplasmosis, or cryptosporidiosis.
About 44 percent of the country’s AIDS patients lived in New York City, largely in Manhattan.
In San Francisco, 169 people had contracted AIDS, including 47 who had died. Los Angeles, Miami, and Newark had the n...
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more recently detected cases tended not to be drawn from the promiscuous, drug-using fast lane that characterized previous cases. This made sense because the contagion was so much more widespread now; 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.
The CDC could not launch educational campaigns to warn gay men about this, however, because it did not have the money.
At one point, Don Francis ordered a basic textbook on retroviruses, only to have the requisition refused. The CDC could not afford even $150 for a textbook.
1984 will represent the third year in a row that we will be faced with major reallocation of resources to the AIDS program,” Brandt wrote. “Such long-term diversion of resources will have a detrimental effect on CDC’s important prevention programs.”
It was only later that the economic implications of his eager suggestions occurred to William. Of course the bathhouses would not want to emphasize that a sexually transmitted disease was loose, killing their patrons. It would destroy their business. William realized that he might have been around doctors too long. He couldn’t imagine anyone not wanting to act to save lives if they possibly could. The notion that some people might place personal profit above human life was utterly foreign to him.
transmission routes may have seemed mysterious in 1982, but by 1983 the mysteries were solved. All the ways to get AIDS were established by then, and scientists, at least at the CDC, understood precisely how AIDS was spread. Nevertheless, the report of routine household contact lent scientific credibility to ungrounded fears; the social damage would linger for years.
The fear inspired by this one story defined the context within which AIDS was discussed for the next crucial months.
The second epidemic had commenced—the epidemic of fear.
He was so angry that people weren’t taking AIDS more seriously. Maybe that anger, Matt thought, was keeping Gary alive.
how AIDS was spread, they argued. Nobody could prove it really was a virus. You were as likely to get this from somebody you pick up in a bar as at the baths. Nobody lies facedown in a bar with a can of Crisco and takes on all comers, thought Catherine Cusic as she watched the tide of denial wash over the meeting. These politicos are acting as though they don’t know what goes on in a bathhouse, she thought. Cusic was surprised at how quickly the rhetoric turned harsh. She figured that the bathhouses would be smart enough to cut a deal. Nobody would come out for closure if they took these steps
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“They should be shut down,” Bill Kraus said calmly to Catherine Cusic on the way out. “They don’t care that they might be killing people, they are so greedy. Every one of them should be shut down.”
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,
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.
most of the nation’s gay newspapers received substantial advertising revenues from the bathhouses and sex businesses. This business and political clout assured that not only would few gay leaders support moving against the baths, but that the gay newspapers would unanimously support their advertisers.
Francisco’s Irwin Memorial Blood Bank, for example, officials figured they were losing between 7 and 15 percent of their blood for the lack of gay donors. If these people were donating in 1981 and 1982, this translates into a lot of blood potentially infected with AIDS years before anybody even knew the epidemic existed.
The booklet reflected GMHC’s dedication to nonpolitical service now that Larry Kramer was off the board of directors.
many New York City gay physicians refused to report AIDS cases for fear the CDC would hand out names right and left.
The numbers stricken with the deadly disease had precisely doubled over the last six months, and the CDC predicted that the numbers of dead and dying would double again in the last six months of 1983, and double again after that.
other stars, including many who had built their careers on their gay followings, were not inclined to get involved with a disease that was not … fashionable.
In fact, in the Castro, there was new talk: “I’m tired of gay cancer,” people said. The last few months of intense media scrutiny had been exhausting; people were beginning to wish it would go away. The lines at bathhouses, which had thinned during all the publicity about posting warnings, began to swell again.
“There were only two things keeping AIDS programs alive—inside pressure and pressure from the gay community,” he said. “That was it.”
The long-term implications of the lack of much official interest in AIDS also occurred to the researcher. Because the city had no outpatient clinics for AIDS patients, they were being needlessly hospitalized for problems that could be handled in a specialized ambulatory care facility. Lack of any home care or hospice beds also would exacerbate the problem of unnecessary institutionalization of AIDS patients,
Krim outlined a coordinated program of ambulatory care clinics, a home-care program, and a hospice, stressing the fiscal benefits of the plan. “We want to see a document with numbers and proof that what you say is correct,” Koch said. 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
With 160 cases diagnosed in western Europe, socialist leaders in the European Parliament called on health authorities to ban the importation of all U.S. blood products.
In San Francisco, Dr. Selma Dritz announced that AIDS was now the leading cause of death among single men in their thirties and forties.
July 26, 1983, was a warm and sunny Tuesday in most parts of the country. It was a day of scientific jealousies, academic intrigue, and funding shortages roundly ignored by reporters. Brushfires of hysteria flared, died away, and flared again. New computers spit out death tolls, doctors wondered when people would start caring, and thousands of Americans watched their lives slip away. In the history of the AIDS epidemic, it was just another day.
Between July and September, the nation’s major print media churned out 726 stories on AIDS, more than would appear in any other single quarter for another two years. In Washington, the Public Health Service issued
dispirited AIDS staffers at the CDC complained they spent more time in July 1983 controlling AIDS hysteria than controlling AIDS.
The Alert Citizens of Texas inflamed local fears with their brochure “The Gay Plague,” which provided detailed descriptions of bathhouses, rimming, and golden showers.
poll revealed that support of gay rights had grown in the past year, with 65 percent of Americans supporting equal job opportunities for gays. This represented a 6 percent increase in gay rights support since 1982.
Like most AIDS clinicians, Paul Volberding had been forced into the unfamiliar realm of politics to scare up more money and attention for the epidemic. In the board of directors meetings at the National KS/AIDS Foundation, Volberding often was the only heterosexual in the room. He had always seen the gay community as a monolithic bloc and was surprised at its various factions and political divisions. Rather than unite them, AIDS divided them further.
There was also the bravery of these men facing an early death. Routinely, they allowed Volberding or the other AIDS Clinic doctors to poke, prod, and puncture them in a vain attempt to find something that might offer a clue to the disease’s cause.
“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
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Virtually all the prestigious scientific journals were American, and few seemed interested in publishing French research.
The delay in accepting French research was not merely another episode of international rivalry, they felt, but a development that would cost science its most crucial weapon in fighting the epidemic: time. And they needed time to start testing anti-viral drugs for treating AIDS, to develop a widely available antibody test, to begin blood testing and serious control measures.
the rivalry between the NCI and the Pasteur Institute would not easily be resolved. The handful of French researchers, working with a fraction of the budget available to the Americans, would have to push on without much financial support or recognition.
“We are having problems in Florida because medical professionals are reluctant to provide care because they know so little about AIDS. We are seeing people take any opportunity within the law to avoid providing care.”
No action was taken until everyone agreed it was appropriate; this was called consensus. For months, that had meant not taking any action at all since nobody could agree on much. This was appropriate, however, given the fact that the rituals of AIDS, whether enacted in Washington or San Francisco, rarely demanded action, just rhetoric.
