And the Band Played On

by Randy Shilts

  The disputes over sexuality also gnawed at the board of directors of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Many board members were outraged at what they perceived as prudery on the part of Callen and Berkowitz. Although they were on the forefront of educating people about AIDS and had largely cut back on unsafe sex themselves, the GMHC board thought that issues like bathhouse closure presented profound civil rights questions. You might start by closing baths, but what would happen next? they asked.

  Meanwhile, Larry Kramer was growing more militant in his stance that GMHC needed to get down-and-dirty with the facts about AIDS and tell people that, if they wanted to survive, they should just stop having sex. He also was edging toward the position that bathhouses should be closed.

  GMHC board meetings often degenerated into heated battles with Larry Kramer on one side and everybody else on the other. Kramer was just continuing his vendetta against the gay fast lane that he had started with Faggots years ago, other board members thought. Some privately worried that the arguments might end up as the subject of some new literary effort by Kramer. Everybody knew that a number of his friends had formed the basis for characters in Faggots; some had never spoken to Kramer again. Worry that board members might end up in Faggots II did nothing to ease the growing tensions.

  December 13

  The New York Blood Center’s records on a suburban matron who contracted AIDS in August turned up a donor who was an intravenous drug user. Dr. Dale Lawrence interviewed him on the Monday morning after Friday’s announcement in San Francisco. Maybe he shouldn’t have donated blood, the man confided, but there was a blood drive at work and he didn’t want his boss to know that he once had been in a methadone program. No, he didn’t have any AIDS symptoms, but one of the guys with whom he had shared needles had come down with a strange blood disease, he said.

  Lawrence checked the other man’s name with the master list in Atlanta—he was a diagnosed AIDS case. They now had substantiated a second transfusion case. Other investigators were checking out more reports, and at the CDC’s prompting, the U.S. Public Health Service had called for a meeting with blood bankers and representatives of AIDS risk groups for the first Tuesday in January. CDC virologists were racing to do studies to determine whether there were any existing blood tests that might help screen out AIDS-infected donors. The agency hadn’t been able to do much to actually control the spread of AIDS among gays, officials knew; at least with the blood industry, which was firmly under federal regulations through the FDA, they had a chance to save lives if they moved fast.

  December 15

  CASTRO DISTRICT, SAN FRANCISCO

  Joe Brewer knew something was wrong as soon as Gary Walsh called and said they had to have lunch. For Christ’s sake, Joe thought, their respective offices were next door to each other. Why did they need lunch? Joe was busy enough, pulling together their trip to Yucatan for the weekend, having to tend to extra details because Gary just hadn’t had the energy to pull his end.

  “The doctor tells me I can’t go to Mexico,” said Gary sullenly, not looking at his friend.

  “Why?”

  “He’s sort of worried that I might get intestinal parasites,” said Gary, staring at the floor during a pause that seemed far too long. “He’s worried I might be pre-AIDS.”

  Joe Brewer knew Gary’s stolid, conservative doctor and knew that if he was “sort of” worried about something he actually was extremely worried. He would never do something as drastic as tell Gary to cancel a trip unless something was very wrong.

  “He’s afraid if something happens down there, away from good hospitals…” Gary let the sentence drift off.

  Gary was going to die.

  Even in his numb state, Joe knew that, and all the hints he had never fleshed out suddenly sprang into a life of their own. Of course, he should have seen it; now it was real. Gary had AIDS and he was going to die.

  That evening, at Gary’s comfortable apartment on Alpine Terrace, Gary finally told Joe about the skin problems he had suffered, the different salves he had to use. Gary opened his mouth to show his friend the white spots. Candidiasis, the doctor had said, more commonly known as thrush. Joe began to realize how sick Gary was, how sick he had been.

  Time was important now, Joe thought. They couldn’t waste it. Joe quickly began putting together an alternative plan. They could go to Key West. That was tropical and still near all the conveniences of modern medicine. Within an hour, Joe had booked the last open flight reservations to Key West and lucked into the last two available rooms at a popular gay guest house. They’d make a trip after all; life would not end.

  As Joe drove from Gary’s house, perched on the hills over the Castro District with the dark silhouettes of downtown skyscrapers in the distance, he realized their lives would never be the same. December 15, 1982, was his point of demarcation. From then on, he cast his life in terms of Before this event had happened and, now, After.

  December 17

  CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL, ATLANTA

  For the second consecutive week, the small, innocuous-looking Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report contained a bombshell in its gray pages with the report: “Unexplained Immunodeficiency and Opportunistic Infections in Infants—New York, New Jersey, California.” Even in the dry prose of the MMWR, each case read like a horror story.

  There was, for example, the black-Hispanic baby, born in December 1980, who had grown slowly in his first nine months and then stopped growing altogether. At seventeen months, he suffered thrush, various staph infections, and severe calcification of his brain. His bone marrow was swimming with Mycobacterium avium-intracellular, a horrible bacterial infection normally seen in birds. The baby’s mother was a junkie who seemed healthy at the child’s birth but developed candidiasis and decreased T-cells in October 1981, only to die of Pneumocystis a month later. The infant, now orphaned, was itself hovering near death. There was another, Haitian baby, who in just thirty weeks of life had contracted Pneumocystis, cryptococcosis, severe cytomegalovirus and a panoply of other infections before lapsing into respiratory failure. Altogether, the CDC had reports of twenty-two babies who seemed to fit no existing category of inherited immune defect; all were children of people in high-risk groups for AIDS, either intravenous drug users or Haitians.

  The report was not cheerful reading, but the CDC staffers hoped it would pound another nail in the case they were still trying to prove to a reluctant scientific establishment—that a new infectious agent was making substantial inroads into diverse corners of American life and threatening unimaginable tragedy.

  As the Friday evening newscasts carried the first sketchy details of the startling new reports from Atlanta that day, Joe Brewer and Gary Walsh were on their way to San Francisco International Airport for the flight to Miami. Joe was incredulous that everything had worked out perfectly but, on the plane, Gary was moody, staring out the window as he watched the city twinkle below, like a chest of diamonds that had been tossed haphazardly on a black velvet blanket. San Francisco became very small and receded in the darkness, leaving Gary with the question he would ask again and again. “Why me? Why me?”

  With nonhomosexual victims of AIDS to report, a spate of media attention dutifully noted the new twists in the epidemic. AIDS made rare appearances in Time and Newsweek, as well as on television networks and wire services. In the entire last quarter of 1982, only thirty articles on AIDS had appeared in the nation’s leading news magazines and newspapers, and most of those were in the year’s final days, reporting on the babies and transfusion threat. In the third quarter of 1982, only fifteen stories had appeared in these eminent news organs.

  All this was about to change suddenly, of course, but the reporting that did exist had already set a pattern for how the disease would be reported: The focus was on the men in the white coats, who were sure to speak innocuously. The stories were carefully written not to inspire panic, which might inflame homophobes, or dwell too much on the seamier sex histories of the gay victims, whic
h might hurt the sensitivities of homosexuals. The pieces always ended on a note of optimism—a breakthrough or vaccine was just around the corner. Most importantly, the epidemic was only news when it was not killing homosexuals. In this sense, AIDS remained a fundamentally gay disease, newsworthy only by virtue of the fact that it sometimes hit people who weren’t gay, exceptions that tended to prove the rule.

  This is what all the talk of “GRID” and “gay cancer” had helped accomplish in the early months of 1982; AIDS was a gay disease in the popular imagination, no matter who else got it. It would be viewed as much as a gay phenomenon as a medical phenomenon, even by gays themselves, although they were the last to admit it. And the fact that it was so thoroughly identified as a gay disease by the end of 1982 would have everything to do with how the government, the scientific establishment, health officials, and the gay community itself would deal—and not deal—with this plague.

  December 29

  RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D. C.

  The new reports of babies and blood transfusions only heightened Tim Westmoreland’s apprehension about the epidemic ahead. Congress was in its Christmas recess, but Westmoreland was still riding the National Institutes of Health for more data on exactly what they were doing about AIDS. Two days before the end of the year, the Congressional Research Service sent over the report he had been seeking for months. The basic mortality statistics were startling enough, the service found, far worse than the 40-percent-dead figure that always made the papers. Of the handful of cases diagnosed in 1979, 85 percent were dead, about the same level of mortality as for cases reported in 1980. For cases reported in 1981, 60 percent already were dead, while one in four patients diagnosed between January and June of 1982 had died. Moreover, the rate of new cases reported had tripled in the pact twelve months and was expected to increase further.

  Westmoreland looked carefully at the dollars spent. In the first twelve months of the epidemic, June 1981 through May 1982, the CDC had spent $1 million on the outbreak, compared with $9 million on Legionnaire’s disease. In the past week, Congress had allocated $2.6 million earmarked for AIDS research at the CDC. Although the Reagan administration had said it didn’t need the money and opposed the supplemental appropriation, once passed, it became law. This would be the scenario for the next three years: Congress would have to discern for itself how much money government doctors needed to fight AIDS. The administration would resist but not put itself in the position of an on-the-record funding veto. The epidemic’s research would survive from continuing resolution to continuing resolution, a game that would ultimately achieve some funding for the doctors while disabling any attempt to plan ahead for studies that might be needed as the scourge continued to grow.

  It was the end of 1982, a year in which a movie about a lovable space alien, E. T., had topped all box office records, and two movies about people dressing in drag, Tootsie and Victor/Victoria, had been surprise smashes. The class movie of the year was a film about Mahatma Gandhi, exploring issues of prejudice and brotherhood, the power of love and the allure of hatred. Paul McCartney had topped the record charts with a perky duet with Stevie Wonder, “Ebony and Ivory,” a song about racial bias. Despite the cultural obsession with androgyny, homosexuality, and prejudice, 1982 marked the beginning of the time, commentators would later note, when America started feeling good about itself again. Old-fashioned red-white-and-blue patriotism was coming back into vogue. Certainly, nobody was paying much attention to an epidemic among people like homosexuals and Haitians, even though by the end of the year, the Centers for Disease Control reported that the number of documented AIDS cases in the United States had risen to nearly 900.

  The truth was that, at the end of 1982, there were 1,000 or 2,000 people, at most, in the United States who truly understood the dimensions of the crisis that was unfolding. For these people, it would be a restless New Year’s.

  December 31

  THE EVERGLADES, FLORIDA

  Gary Walsh and Joe Brewer had decided to leave Key West and check out the Everglades because neither had ever been there and it seemed like an adventure. Gary, however, begged out of the evening early, saying he was too tired to stay up until midnight. For the first time, Joe could see Gary’s weakness. The energy with which Gary was constantly able to hype himself was draining away.

  Gary climbed into his bed in their sticky room while Joe, feeling dismal, mixed himself a martini and stared out the window. Darkness had enveloped the end of the year and darkness would soon envelop his friend, and there “was nothing to be done. In the distance, the clamor of celebrants greeting the New Year echoed. Joe lifted his glass in the direction of where Gary now slept, growing more distant with each hour. “Happy New Year,” Joe whispered to himself.

  “Happy New Year, Joseph.”

  CASTRO DISTRICT, SAN FRANCISCO

  Cleve Jones clapped his hands enthusiastically when “KS Poster Boy” Bobbi Campbell made his entrance at Cleve’s New Year’s Eve party clad in a rhinestone tiara and a silver lame, floor-length gown. The nurse was now a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and had rechristened himself Sister Florence Nightmare. He looked ravishing, Cleve thought, even if his ever-present “I Will Survive” button clashed with the lame. Sister Boom-Boom, Sister Vicious Power Hungry Bitch, and Sister Missionary Position had already arrived and were dancing habit to holster with the gay police officers who were grinding away in the cleared-out living room.

  Everybody was there, Cleve beamed. Dozens of volunteers from the KS Foundation had come, along with an anybody-who’s-anybody list of gay politicos and a good sprinkling of the city’s heterosexually powerful. A San Francisco supervisor was snorting cocaine in Cleve’s bedroom. Supervisor Harry Britt had come with Bill Kraus, who was collecting accolades for his role in passing the first supplemental money for AIDS research.

  Bill Kraus was thoroughly single again, Cleve could tell, and, oh, how he could work the crowd. Yet, like Cleve, Bill seemed a little quiet. He told Cleve they’d have to talk, something about AIDS, in the next few days. Then, Bill disappeared into the throng.

  The specially made tapes reached a disco frenzy, and the house shook with the synthesized beat of the year’s top dance hit, Laura Branigan’s “Gloria.” When the party neared midnight, Cleve allowed himself some champagne. He hadn’t been drinking all night, aware that once he started drinking he was not likely to stop and he’d end up embarrassing himself in front of all these politicians. The smooth flow of champagne, however, made Cleve feel withdrawn. He wasn’t unhappy, just detached.

  He had carved himself a wonderful niche in nine years, he realized as he surveyed the crowd. His job as an aide to Assemblyman Art Agnos gave him a headstart on whatever political career he chose to pursue. Agnos was being a virtual saint by letting him spend all his time at the KS Foundation. All this gave Cleve a warm feeling, but it still did not make him feel like partying. There was something else that, for once, Cleve could see as bigger than himself and his own ambitions. The horror. He couldn’t escape the sense of impending doom.

  The clock struck midnight and it became 1983, but the friends, the midnight dancing, the wonderful music, and even the champagne couldn’t melt the stone in Cleve’s stomach on that New Year. He knew a dark secret. Something they didn’t know. When he looked at Bobbi Campbell, he saw more than the tiara flashing; Bobbi would die and so would thousands more. It had all been one big party and, now, it was about to end.

  PART V

  BATTLE LINES JANUARY–JUNE 1983

  In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away, and from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away….

  —ALBERT CAMUS,

  The Plague

 
22

  LET IT BLEED

  January 3, 1983

  PITIE-SALPETRIERE HOSPITAL, PARIS

  They would not need much of a lymph node, Dr. Willy Rozenbaum told the gay fashion designer who was suffering from mild lymphadenopathy, just a scrap the size of the top of your little finger, enough to try to culture, to find out what was causing SIDA, the French term for AIDS. Rozenbaum wasn’t performing the excision, but he wanted to be on hand to make sure nothing went wrong. Dr. Francoise Barre from the Pasteur Institute also sensed this was something important. She roused herself on the brisk morning the biopsy had been ordered, toting the supplies she needed to preserve the specimen for the trip across town to the institute in the Latin quarter.

  Barre peered over her oversized tortoiseshell glasses at the brief procedure and smiled at Rozenbaum’s agitation. He was always so excitable. Minutes later, she packed the small piece of lymph node on ice and rushed from the hospital. Back at the Pasteur Institute, Dr. Luc Montagnier put the tissue into a cell culture of T-lymphocytes and gave instructions to Barre to monitor its growth over the next weeks.