by Randy Shilts
21
DANCING IN THE DARK
December 9, 1982
SAN FRANCISCO CITY HALL
The reporters walked swiftly down the long, oak-paneled hallway leading into Mayor Diane Feinstein’s office. She had called the press conference today because once again the San Francisco Board of Supervisors had enacted a law that no other municipal governing body in the nation had even considered, and the mayor did not like it one bit. At issue was Supervisor Harry Britt’s “domestic partners’ ordinance,” more indelicately called the “live-in lovers’ law,” which recognized the legitimacy of unmarried relationships, most notably homosexual relationships. The law extended to domestic partners of city employees the same benefits as those granted to spouses of married employees. The ordinance also established a legal procedure through which unmarried couples could record their relationship with the city clerk’s office and gain some form of legal recognition for their partnership. Given the times, Britt had also drafted a clause that gave unmarried partners the same visitation rights as spouses in city hospitals and bereavement leave to attend a lover’s funeral. Mayor Feinstein had decided to veto the law.
“On a personal level, this legislation causes me deep personal anguish,” the mayor told the reporters. “I would like to be able to sign legislation that recognizes the needs of single persons, but such legislation must not divide our community.”
By “divide our community,” Feinstein was talking about the maelstrom that had enveloped the proposal in recent days. Just one day before, Roman Catholic Archbishop John Quinn made a rare foray into city politics by publicly prodding Feinstein to veto the law, saying that “to reduce the sacred covenant of marriage and family by inference or analogy to a ‘domestic partnership’ is offensive to reasonable persons and injurious to our legal, cultural, moral, and societal heritage.” The proposal, Quinn said, was a “radical repudiation of fundamental values and institutions.”
Virtually every other religious leader had also lined up against the measure. The Episcopal bishop noted that “marriage as an institution has been under such heavy pressure,” while the Board of Rabbis of northern California also urged a veto, with the group’s president saying he would “look askance upon any legislation that would attempt to equate nonmarried adults, heterosexual or gay, to what our society deems as a marriage between a man and a woman.” Speaking for the city’s black churches, the city’s most politically powerful black minister, the Reverend Amos Brown, cast the issue in racial terms when he insisted that, “We, as blacks, particularly, come out of the extended family. It’s the only way we’ve been able to make it.”
In her veto message, Feinstein talked about the bill being poorly drafted and not specific enough, but the real issue, everyone knew, was whether homosexual relationships would be granted the same legitimacy as heterosexual relationships. To Bill Kraus, who had begun engineering the ordinance’s passage before leaving Britt’s office to work for Congressman Phillip Burton, there was no other point to the measure. Its intent was to frame into law a basic tenet of the gay liberation movement—that homosexuality as a life-style is equal to and on a par with heterosexuality. The veto, of course, was simply a reaffirmation of the fact that, as far as church and state were concerned, gay people had not yet achieved that equality; moreover, the veto underscored that the notion that homosexuals and their relationships should be granted such recognition was still repugnant to this society. Gay relationships were meant to be dirty secrets, and nothing more.
A spontaneous demonstration of 500 people coalesced on Castro Street that evening and thundered down to City Hall, chanting “Dump Dianne.” Feinstein’s appointees on various city commissions toyed briefly with the idea of a mass resignation. The talk was short-lived. Feinstein’s appointees, by definition, came from the more moderate wing of gay Democrats and were not given to the dramatics popular among members of the Harvey Milk Club.
Condemnations of the veto continued to pour in from gay activists around the country. Much of the criticism descended into vicious ad hominem attacks on Feinstein, characterizing her as a nasty bigot. Some politicos whispered that she had vetoed the ordinance because she was trying to lure the 1984 Democratic National Convention to San Francisco, where she hoped to be installed as a vice-presidential candidate. All this, of course, missed the point that, of all the big-league Democrats in the United States, Feinstein was undoubtedly the most consistently pro-gay voice. Two lesbian friends had held a sort of marriage ceremony in Feinstein’s backyard, outraging conservative voters. As a supervisor, she had authored the nation’s first gay rights ordinance in 1972, long before any other prominent politician had learned to even utter the G-word. Feinstein also talked convincingly of tolerance and civil rights. Indeed, the very political power she had helped nurture in more uncertain days a decade ago was the very reason she was stuck dealing with a “live-in lovers’ law” in the first place; no other mayor had even to come close to touching such an issue.
“We have been through a lot over the last twelve years,” said Feinstein in an interview she granted once it was clear that the veto was probably the singly most controversial act in her career. “But San Francisco remains an open, tolerant city, and on the subject of gay rights, it is probably the most enlightened city anywhere.”
Few could deny she was telling the truth, but the statement said less about how good things were for gays than how bad. For all the acceptance gays had gained, homosexuality still was not accepted as equal in the city they called Mecca. A prevailing morality that viewed homosexuals as promiscuous hedonists incapable of deep, sustaining relationships ensured that it would be impossible for homosexuals to legitimize whatever relationships they could forge. Prejudice has a way of fostering the very object of its hate.
In December 1982, at a time when gay people more than ever needed to be encouraged into relationships, they were told their partnerships were valueless by institutions that later scratched their heads and wondered why gays didn’t settle into couples when it was so clear their lives were at stake.
December 10
Dr. Dale Lawrence was in Washington when he got the conference call from his boss, Bruce Evatt at the CDC’s Division of Host Factors, and Drs. Harold Jaffe and Walt Dowdle. Lawrence knew that the call must be important to warrant the involvement of Dowdle, chief of the Center for Infectious Diseases. Evatt told Lawrence to get back to New York and interview the donors from that Bellevue Hospital transfusion case in the summer.
Lawrence recalled the case, immediately. He also remembered the fierce resistance the New York Blood Center, the nation’s largest blood bank, had put up at the notion of letting Lawrence contact their blood donors.
“Why the sudden turnaround?” Lawrence asked.
The first transfusion case was being announced that afternoon, the callers explained. The San Francisco people planned a press conference to issue warnings. The CDC was rushing a report of the case into its MMWR for release that day. They needed a strong case to present to the blood bankers. Evatt had met with the Food and Drug Administration’s blood advisory committee, made up largely of blood industry people, the Saturday before in Bethesda to tell them about the UCSF baby. As they had done all summer, the FDA officials and blood bankers insisted they needed more proof to believe the threat of AIDS from transfusions. Lawrence knew that Bruce Evatt had a reputation for planning his chess moves far in advance. Evatt had been concerned since the first word about hemophiliac cases nearly a year before; now he was going to prove that it was all real.
That Afternoon
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO
The press conference, with Selma Dritz and Art Ammann flanking Dr. Herbert Perkins from Irwin Memorial Blood Bank, sent a collective shudder through the conference room on Parnassus Hill.
“The etiology of AIDS remains unknown, but its reported occurrence among homosexual men, intravenous drug abusers, and persons with hemophilia suggest it may be caused by an infectiou
s agent transmitted sexually or through exposure to blood or blood products,” the MMWR had reported carefully that morning. “If the infant’s illness described in this report is AIDS, its occurrence following receipt of blood products from a known AIDS case adds support to the infectious-agent hypothesis.”
This first public announcement that AIDS might be in the blood supply brought an angry reaction from blood bankers in the East. The CDC had, of course, meant the day’s MMWR to be a one-two punch to the blood industry, releasing not only the report on the first transfusion case but an update on five new cases of AIDS in hemophiliacs. In spite of that, Dr. Joseph Bove, who headed the FDA’s blood advisory committee and served as an officer of the American Association of Blood Banks, went on network television to say flatly that there still was no evidence that transfusions spread AIDS. Privately, some blood bankers thought the CDC was overstating the possibility of transfusion AIDS to get publicity and, therefore, more funding. The scientific community was aware of the severe problems health agencies were having in securing adequate funding under the Reagan administration. Some blood bankers, including some officials of the FDA, remained unconvinced that AIDS even existed.
The barrage of publicity given to the first transfusion AIDS case resulted in less notice of a report in that day’s Journal of the American Medical Association on evidence that strange brain disorders were appearing among AIDS patients. Often, neurological problems were the only early symptoms of AIDS, scientists had reported at a meeting of the American Neurological Association. Upon closer examination, three in four AIDS sufferers showed evidence of some brain damage. Doctors frequently missed the damage to the central nervous system, writing off the often-vague symptoms of dementia as related to stress or depression. Nevertheless, some patients were dying of brain disorders, their cerebral matter sometimes reduced to “a boggy mass.”
There was a doctor from New York University who had written an extensive study on the apparent infection of the central nervous system, but he refused to tell the reporter from the American Medical Association journal about his work because he had submitted his paper to a neurological journal, where it had been accepted for publication. The neurological journal might throw out the story if he publicly discussed his findings with the press, and that would hurt the doctor’s career in the publish-or-perish world of academic medicine. It was science as usual, and the Journal of the American Medical Association would just have to wait until the research was published in six months.
The Next Day
CASTRO STREET, SAN FRANCISCO
The petitioners appeared on the corner of 18th and Castro streets with the rush of morning shoppers. Their scruffy long hair and unkempt demeanor were antithetical to the gay men whose own casual appearance was so entirely studied, but the people with their petitions stood under a sign that brought smiles to the gay faces. “Dump Dianne,” it said, and gay men did not hesitate to sign petitions to recall Dianne Feinstein as mayor.
For six months, members of the local White Panther Party had tried to scrounge enough signatures to put the recall on the San Francisco ballot. Their principal agenda was fervent opposition to Feinstein’s support for a local ordinance to outlaw handguns in the city. Although enacted, the law had been thrown out by a federal appeals court. That didn’t stop the remnants of this sixties radical group, known for taking occasional potshots at police officers who tarried too long near their Haight-Ashbury commune. They wanted to recall Mayor Feinstein simply for suggesting that guns should be outlawed. Their efforts, of course, were dismissed by the professional politicians, so nobody really noticed their appearance on Castro Street two days after the veto of the domestic partners’ ordinance. However, they filled petition after petition with the responsibly registered voters of the neighborhood.
The stranger stopped Gaetan Dugas as he walked casually past the window of Ail-American Boy, the quartermaster depot of the “Castro clone” look, where even the manikins had washboard stomachs. He grabbed the flight attendant’s arm and wouldn’t let go when Gaetan tried to jerk away.
“I know who you are and what you’re doing,” the man said. “You’d better leave town if you know what’s good for you.”
Volunteers at the Kaposi’s Sarcoma Foundation help line, who had long been apprised of Gaetan’s bathhouse escapades, were now hearing that a group of gay men had decided to drive the “Orange County connection” out of town for so purposefully spreading his disease.
Gaetan tore away from the menacing face and said something defiant before ambling back down Castro Street. These people are hysterical about AIDS, he told himself.
It was around then that he confided to Canadian friends that he was thinking of moving back to Vancouver.
December 12
Dana Van Gorder, Supervisor Harry Britt’s aide, called Bill Kraus in his congressional office with the news. Mark Feldman, whom Bill Kraus had dated some time ago, had been diagnosed with both Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Bill was stunned. It wasn’t that they were great friends as much as the fact that Mark was so much like Bill. He was successful, handsome, and politically involved to the point that he publicly announced his dual diagnosis with KS and PCP only days after he got the word from doctors. He wanted to raise peoples’ consciousness about the disease, he said. Like Bill Kraus, Mark Feldman was young, healthy, and strong. They even worked out at the same gym together, and now, Mark had suddenly started dropping weight and looking as though he were aging rapidly. Intellectually, Bill had always tried to banish the idea that the illness was some kind of metaphor, something that only the sleaze-balls who fist-fucked on Folsom Street contract. That idea, he knew, wasn’t politically correct. Still, the shock at Mark Feldman’s diagnosis educated him as to how much he had seen AIDS as the problem of other people. Sure, he had worked on it as an issue and had repeatedly instructed Phil Burton that it was the top-priority gay issue, but Bill had never seen it as an issue for himself, except in some dark corner of his imagination.
In the days that followed, Bill Kraus contemplated his own future and his own fear that some day a doctor might tell him he had this sentence to die. He did double-takes on this or that spot, found while he was scrubbing his shoulder in the shower; the fear was pervasive. Bill always remembered that day of early fear, December 12, 1982, because it was the last time he ever had a sexual encounter that involved the proverbial exchange of bodily fluids.
A number of San Francisco physicians would remember the end of 1982 as an invisible demarcation line for their patients. There weren’t any formal studies, but, in their evaluations of patients, doctors noted that gay men who had stopped getting inseminated by the end of 1982 tended to avoid infection with the AIDS virus; those who were infected tended to be those who carried on into 1983 and beyond. It was just a rule of thumb, of course, because later studies indicated that at least 20 percent of San Francisco’s gay men were probably infected with the AIDS virus before the end of 1982. The most recently infected would constitute the swelling caseloads and mortality statistics of 1986 and 1987. Such numbers meant that, by 1983, it would be very difficult to be at the receptive end of semen deposition and not get this virus.
In New York City, where the virus apparently arrived first and was probably more widespread, a fierce debate had already consumed the gay community in the final weeks of 1982, precisely on the issue of promiscuity and AIDS. Two people with AIDS, a rock singer named Michael Callen and one-time hustler Richard Berkowitz, had fired the first volley with an essay in the New York Native called “We Know Who We Are.”
The piece blasted all the fashionable talk about how the gay community was getting a bad public relations rap with the discussion about sexual activity and gay cancer. When Callen made media appearances to talk about his AIDS diagnosis, he was counseled by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis to say, “I don’t know,” if he were asked how he got the disease. Callen had no doubt how he got the disease. He had frequented every sex club and bathhouse
between the East River and the Pacific Ocean and had gathered enough venereal and parasitic diseases to make his medical chart look like that of some sixty-five-year-old Equatorial African living in squalor. He had spent much of 1982 going to support groups for other AIDS patients, many of whom were still attending their old pleasure parlors in the bowels of Greenwich Village.
The politically correct line, emerging from a handful of “AIDS activists,” maintained that talking about the gay community’s prodigious promiscuity was part of a “blame-the-victim mentality.” Michael Callen saw a fine line between blaming the victim and taking responsibility, and he thought it was time for some straight talk about the disease if gay men were to survive. Merely moderating sexual behavior, as most gay doctors and health officials counseled, was not enough, he and Berkowitz wrote in the Native, Strong measures needed to be taken; it was time to think about closing the bathhouses, they wrote. “If going to the baths is really a game of Russian roulette, then the advice must be to throw the gun away, not merely to play less often.”
Callen and Berkowitz were quickly denounced as “sexual Carrie Nations,” and the letters column of the Native was filled with angry rebuttals. Writer Charles Jurrist responded with his own Native piece, “In Defense of Promiscuity,” which highlighted the popular party line that a gay man was more likely to be killed in a car accident than by AIDS. An infectious agent might be hypothesized, Jurrist wrote, “…but that’s all it is—a theory. It is far from scientifically demonstrated. It therefore seems a little premature to be calling for an end to sexual freedom in the name of physical health.”