by Randy Shilts
With Willie Brown, they knew they had an effective champion. He was generally regarded as the second most powerful official in the state, after conservative Republican Governor George Deukmejian. His sponsorship of the appropriation virtually assured its passage. Within days of the meeting, Brown introduced the measure into the legislature and started speeding it through committees as emergency legislation. The cavalry was at hand.
Days after the Los Angeles meeting, Marc Conant got a taste of the problems that lay ahead when he received a call from a prominent UCLA retrovirologist. The scientist had not tempted fate by attending the meeting but, instead, had sent an assistant, who observed the proceedings and secured a modest sum for the researcher’s lab. Now that a proposal was actually going to the legislature, however, the doctor wanted a bigger piece of the action. He was particularly peeved that his laboratory was to receive less money than Dr. Jay Levy for retrovirology research.
“I’m going to sabotage the whole thing if I don’t get as much as Jay Levy,” said the eminent scientist.
Conant knew the man carried a lot of weight with university administrators. The active opposition might doom the proposal. Still, Conant was irritated that the professor would demand a certain sum of money even though he had no proposal for how he would spend it. Until this point, there had been little evidence that the man had harbored much interest in AIDS.
“We’re talking about science, not whether you have parity,” Conant argued.
The researcher repeated his threat, and Conant ultimately figured out an agreeable allotment of funds. It was only the beginning of the problems AIDS research would face in the UC system that year. Later, the University of California boasted of doing more than any other university system in the nation on the AIDS epidemic. And the claims were truthful; that was precisely the problem.
Saturday, April 30
MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, NEW YORK CITY
All day Paul Popham worried, although not about whether the circus would succeed; that already was assured. All 17,000 seats had sold out a week ago, the first time a charity benefit sold out Madison Square Garden in advance. Aside from gay parades, the night was shaping up as the biggest gay event of all time and had put $250,000 into the treasury of Gay Men’s Health Crisis. This was terrific, but Paul was still anxious about whether his face would be on television and his name in the newspapers as president of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. The title said it: gay. Paul really didn’t want it to get back to work. Not that he was ashamed, he’d tell you. He just felt it would create problems. How would people react? He didn’t feel anybody had an obligation to come out openly as gay and had argued endlessly about it with Larry Kramer. Now, Larry was gone and Paul had only himself to argue with.
By the 6:30 P.M. press conference before the circus, Paul could see that his fears were unfounded. He should have known. 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.
The entire spectrum of Manhattan gay life was at the Madison Square Garden circus. Wealthy and perfectly coiffed men sauntered to their seats with leather queens and drag queens and lesbians in fashionable attire. Enno Poersch had designed a program for the event that listed the impressive accomplishments the Gay Men’s Health Crisis had made in its twenty months of existence. The group had distributed a quarter-million copies of its “health recommendations” brochure and put hundreds of volunteers to work as “Buddies,” doing chores and providing a sympathetic ear to AIDS-stricken men. Over 100 volunteers had been trained for work on the group’s crisis line. In San Francisco, the various services of education, counseling, and support were being handled by different groups with diverse emphases, but New York did not have such luxuries. GMHC was doing it all and had become the largest gay organization in the country.
The program also contained the official proclamation of “Aid AIDS Week” by Mayor Koch. Most poignantly, on page after page, were memorial notices of the people who had died. These were the names and faces behind the numbers the CDC released every week.
“I think the most impressive thing I’ve seen over the last year and a half is how affectionate men have grown,” Paul Popham wrote in the program’s introduction. “We are finding out who we are, what we can do under pressure. And that we’re not alone. We’re not alone now; we’re very much together. We’ll get through this somehow. And although we’re paying a terrible price, we’re finding in ourselves much greater strength than we dreamed we had.”
As he watched Leonard Bernstein conduct the circus symphony in the national anthem, Larry Kramer felt torn between pride at the event’s success and the sadness of being strangely on the outside. The days after his departure from GMHC were filled with such bitterness he sometimes thought he could not contain it. He was genuinely surprised when Paul Popham, ever the gentleman, asked him to stand and be recognized as a GMHC founder. The resignation was intemperate, Larry could see, though the idea was forming that he had not resigned but been forced out. If they really cared, they would not have let him resign; they had forced him out. Ultimately, however, they would let him back on the board, Larry thought; of course they would.
Enno Poersch would remember the circus as the time Bob, Rick Wellikoff’s lover, was diagnosed with AIDS, adding still another member of the Ocean Walk household on Fire Island to the list of the epidemic’s casualties. The diagnosis was almost simultaneous with the death of Wes, who also had spent the summer of 1980 in that ill-fated house with Nick and Rick and Paul Popham’s dead boyfriend Jack Nau. Of the household, only Enno, Paul, and one other were not dead or dying.
May 1
WARD 86, SAN FRANCISCO GENERAL HOSPITAL
When Paul Volberding received the official notification of his $419,463 grant for AIDS research, he knew he was supposed to be happy. It was the largest single grant doled out by the National Cancer Institute for the epidemic. Michael Gottlieb at UCLA had received only $200,000, and for all practical purposes it was Gottlieb who had discovered the epidemic. At this point, no institute of the NIH had announced any intention of releasing any more money for AIDS.
Volberding was less cheered than depressed, however, when he saw the grant notice. The modest bequest underscored less what he could do than what he would not be able to do.
Jay Levy’s share of the grant, for example, was $80,000. Since only $13,000 went to supplies, Levy still would not have enough money to buy the ultracentrifuge that was essential to his future research. He’d have to wait on the state legislature. Similar stories came from every lab at UCSF doing AIDS studies.
Volberding was the first to admit that he was better off than any of his colleagues in AIDS research. Unlike most, he was free to comment when the television crews rolled in. Although hospital administrators had toyed with the idea of delaying the opening of the AIDS ward, the shower of media attention on the epidemic had moved up the planned opening to mid-July.
Paul Volberding knew he was in the best of all possible worlds as a clinician in the AIDS epidemic; from a more global perspective, this showed Paul how bad things were.
Early Evening, May 2
CASTRO STREET, SAN FRANCISCO
Most Americans believe that bad people do not die young.
There is something tragically romantic about untimely death. Ultimately, it was this emotional factor, more than any other, that shielded gays from the horrible backlash they so dreaded. This kinder side of the nation’s psyche would prevail over the demagogues who talked of God’s wrath. Moreover, gays themselves were by now in the business of romanticizing premature death. At the Shanti Project, where scores of gay men were signing up as grief counselors, the more experienced gurus of mourning talked of “going to the other side,” as though AIDS were a train ticket to some Xanadu of peace and serenity. Such sentimental
notions guaranteed success for the candlelight marches assembling all over the United States that night.
From the moment Gary Walsh walked down the hill into the small valley where the Castro neighborhood was nestled, he knew the procession was going to be a hit. Gay marches in San Francisco had become so routine as to usually have the ambience of cheerful cocktail parties. This was different. Some of the gathering thousands had brought snapshots of friends who had died and others carried signs: “In memory with love for Jim Daye. July 2, 1982.” Some read like gravestones:
Ken Home
Born July 20, 1943
Died November 30, 1981
The mood was somber. Gary felt uplifted. For all these months, he had felt so alone. But all these people cared.
Gary’s nephew Rick Walsh had driven up from the suburbs with his wife. Angie Walsh had never seen anything like this—men dressed as nuns and guys holding each others’ hands. Right in public. Angie gripped Rick’s hand tightly. Already in the copy center where Angie worked, some people were talking darkly about how AIDS might be God’s curse on homosexuals.
Matthew Krieger met Gary Walsh on the corner of Market and Castro streets and handed his former lover the flowers he had purchased. Thousands now milled around the intersection with their candles and signs. Matt had never felt so proud of Gary, of how he brought people together like this.
As the group stepped onto the broad swath of Market Street to make the familiar eleven-block walk to City Hall, television crews swarmed to record the dozen AIDS sufferers carrying the banner: “Fighting for Our Lives.” The media-minded Cleve Jones had taken the job of preserving clear camera lines for the front banner, of ushering to the side sundry politicians, would-be gay leaders, and camera-hungry drag queens who kept trying to edge their way into the media limelight. Cleve knew the picture he wanted to go out around the world; it was these flesh-and-blood human AIDS patients.
The march had turned into such a wonderful media opportunity that Cleve was embarrassed he had not thought of it himself. Events, of course, had conspired to assure the night’s success. Media tended to act as a machine of perpetual motion, fueling itself. The legitimacy lent by newsmagazines had created still more cover stories and more official interest, which gave fresh news pegs for still more coverage. The morning paper had carried a front-page story on changing gay life-styles. That day, the health department had announced it was expanding its AIDS screening in public health centers. That afternoon, Mayor Dianne Feinstein had welcomed a contingent of AIDS sufferers into her office, with hugs and eloquence, for her proclamation of AIDS Awareness Week. She also had pleaded for more congressional spending on the epidemic.
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.
Candles flickered for a mile now, as the group neared City Hall, a ribbon of light and people in the twilight. The sight made Cleve Jones remember the year he had spent struggling to make gay people care about AIDS. He had done his job. The KS Foundation was changing its name to the AIDS Foundation, and it didn’t need him anymore. It was becoming a realm of process-minded bureaucrats, not rabble-rousers. Cleve knew he should feel inspired by the long procession, but it made him sad. More friends were being diagnosed. Just the word “diagnose” was a mark of how much Cleve’s life had changed. People now said so-and-so was “diagnosed” and you didn’t have to ask what with; for gay men, it had become a verb that needed no object. Beyond this, Cleve had spent a lot of time with all the Bobs, Davids, Kevins, and Jeffs who had stopped into the foundation’s office in the past year; it was hard to feel uplifted about anything. He was tired. Maybe he needed to leave town altogether, he thought.
Six thousand people stood in United Nations Plaza, near the dome of City Hall, listening to speeches by people with AIDS. Most of the speakers were losing weight so rapidly that their clothes fit loosely. Months ago, they had been strong and vital, but now they leaned heavily as they walked. They stood with painful stiff joints, staring out like scarecrow men.
Gary Walsh held the banner between Bobbi Campbell, the nurse who had proclaimed himself the “KS Poster Boy,” and Mark Feldman, an old boyfriend who was looking particularly gray and wasted that night.
“Our president doesn’t seem to know AIDS exists,” Mark Feldman told the crowd. “He is spending more money on the paints to put the American flag on his nuclear missiles than on spending on AIDS. That is sick.”
The concern was nearly tangible, Gary thought, as he looked across the crowd from the stage. He thought he could almost feel his lesions fading.
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. In New York, of course, the media, most notably The New York Times, was recalcitrant. Not an institution to get swept away by cheap sentiment, The Times relegated its coverage to a few buried paragraphs and did not make any reference to the fact that the outpouring of concern came largely from homosexuals. Instead, it called the crowd “mostly male” and left it at that.
It was four months since Gary Walsh had been diagnosed, when the nation’s AIDS caseload first exceeded 1,000 cases. According to figures released by the Centers for Disease Control on May 2, 1983, the day of the candlelight march, the number of new AIDS diagnoses in the United States had increased by 36 percent to 1,366 cases. About 38 percent of them, or 520, already were dead. This mortality rate belied the true prospective of death from AIDS. At least 75 percent of those who had the disease for two years were dead. Nearly half of the AIDS casualties were men between the ages of 30 and 39. Another 22 percent were men in their twenties. Of all the cases, 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 next highest numbers of AIDS cases.
Many mysteries remained with the epidemic. Gay men, who composed 71 percent of the AIDS victims, were virtually the only people who got Kaposi’s sarcoma, while the intravenous drug users rarely contracted anything but Pneumocystis. CDC speculators tended toward the idea that poppers might play a role in the development of KS, although there was no evidence for this because the CDC had not been able to conduct any further epidemiological studies due to lack of funds.
In fact, the CDC even had been forced to stop interviewing new AIDS cases because there weren’t enough staffers. They had been hearing from local public health agencies that 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.
Like Bill Kraus, many in the CDC AIDS Activities Office hoped all the media attention would ch
ange this. And like Bill, they would be disappointed.
“AIDS à l’Americaine,” Dr. Jacques Leibowitch thought when he watched the television coverage of the AIDS patients behind their banner in San Francisco. Parisian media was filled with talk of AIDS now too, largely because so much of the blood used in French transfusions came from the United States. It was so like Americans to expose themselves and march in big, dramatic parades. You’d never see anything like this in Paris, Leibowitch thought. This was distinctly American, like the Phil Donahue show, so naive and so distasteful.
Gary Walsh drifted through the first days after the candlelight march on a pink cloud of elation, but that faded as he found himself burdened by fatigue and depression. His friend Mark Feldman was back in the hospital with Pneumocystis, and people were saying he might not come out again. A week after the march, Marc Conant had found three new lesions on Gary. He was also losing weight.
On the rare occasions Gary felt up to making the short trek to Castro Street, strangers stopped him on the street to tell him how wonderful, brave, and courageous he was. Gary didn’t feel he was any more holy because he might die young. Having AIDS had not imbued him with any more wisdom than he had had before. Having AIDS was not beautiful; it was painful, miserable, and depressing. It was like being told you were going to die in a car accident at some point in the next year. Nobody told where or when you were going to die, just that you would perish. A mixture of anticipation and dread filled Gary’s spare moments. When he experienced a shortness of breath a day or so after seeing Dr. Conant, he wondered whether it was his mind playing tricks on him again.