by Randy Shilts
Gary reached to the table near his bed and handed Lu a small brass figure of a magician, holding a crystal ball in one hand and a book in another. Gary knew that Lu had loved it.
“I want to give you this while I’m still alive,” he said. “You should have it.”
Lu felt that a flame had been passed. Their relationship, Lu knew, was completed.
The Next Afternoon, February 20
“It used to be us and them,” Gary said. “And now I’m one of them.”
“Who are they?” Matt asked.
“People with AIDS,” Gary said. “People dying of AIDS. I’m dying of AIDS. I used to see a corpse or something. That’s bullshit. What’s going on?”
Gary was delirious. Matt could see that pain racked his body, even though he was being dosed with 50 milligrams of morphine per hour, up from 30 the previous morning. Every breath was labored and achingly brief.
“I’m leaving my body,” Gary told Matt between breaths.
“Maybe you are,” Matt said. “And I want you to know that as much as I want you here with me, I want you safe and peaceful. And it’s okay if you go.”
Gary slept into the afternoon, awaking briefly to talk to Lu and Matt.
“Dying consciously and naturally is very hard, harder than I thought, the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he said. “Death is right around the corner. I know it is. I couldn’t do it without the two of you. I’d give up. The things they say about death, they sound trite. But they’re all true. I see the stairs.”
At dusk, he awoke again.
“I want to leave,” he said. “I want to go.”
Gary struggled to get up from the bed. His face and voice were expression-less now. There was only supplication for escape. Lu and Matt tried to dissuade him, because he obviously did not have the strength to rise. But he insisted. The two friends and three nurses pulled him upright, so he could sit on the edge of his bed. After they held him there for a moment, Gary stopped pleading and allowed himself to be lain back down.
Three hours later, he awoke again and once more begged that he be allowed to leave his bed. Lu, Matt, and a nurse helped Gary up. He was so weak he could not lift his head. Somehow, he managed three steps with his arms wrapped around Matt’s neck. He fell into a deep sleep as soon as his head was again settled onto his pillow.
Gary’s lungs filled with fluids all night. Matt took the chore of putting a tube down his throat to drain them. Gary lapsed into a coma. His breaths were short but no longer labored. Lu recalled an old hypnosis trick and took hold of Gary’s hand.
“If you can hear me, lift your index finger,” she said.
Gary did nothing.
Lu repeated the command, and Gary’s finger moved.
Late into the night, Matt and Lu whispered phrases of love into their friend’s ears. Long after midnight, Lu again asked Gary to move his finger but got no response.
The Next Morning, February 21
A cool white fog had enveloped the Castro District by the time Matt and Lu awoke early the next morning. Matt felt Gary’s forehead and noted that his skin was cold to the touch and no longer pliable. As the morning progressed, Gary’s inhalations became less regular. There were longer breaks between breaths. At about 8:40 A.M., Gary let out a series of brief gasps, and then his breathing stopped.
Lu and Matt sat with Gary’s body for five minutes and talked to him one last time. Lu told him again how much she loved him and would miss him and what an enormous void his passing would create in her life.
The color had drained completely from Gary’s face when Matt returned with the nurse. Matt gathered up Gary’s belongings in a shopping bag. Lu told the nurse she was Gary’s aunt and gave instructions for the disposition of his remains.
The sun had broken through the fog by the time Lu and Matt left the hospital. Lu was numb with fatigue when she let herself back into her home. Something very important had happened in her life, she knew, and so it automatically occurred to her that she should call Gary and tell him about it. She always called Gary when something important happened. Then she remembered that she could never call Gary again and the emptiness opened up for her and she wept.
As soon as the phone rang in Rick Walsh’s ranch house, he knew it was Matt. Rick was shattered at the news, and Angie sat down to explain to their four-year-old daughter what had happened.
“Gary was one of your dad’s favorite people,” she said. “But he has gone far away now. He is dead.”
“Why?” the little girl asked.
“I don’t know,” Angie Walsh said. “I don’t know.”
The little girl looked toward her father, and for the first time, she saw him cry.
After he composed himself, Rick called his grandparents in Sioux City to tell them that Gary, their youngest son, had died. Gary’s parents had anxiously awaited the call, but once told, they didn’t talk with Rick long; it wasn’t their way.
Rick had told only his closest friends that his uncle had AIDS. The next day, he felt estranged from the people in his everyday life. He didn’t feel he could share his sadness without going into a complicated explanation. You couldn’t go around telling people that your uncle had just died of that gay disease.
Gary Francis Walsh died 997 days after the first MMWR report on the mysterious cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia among Los Angeles gay men. About an hour after Gary’s death, the Centers for Disease Control released its weekly update on the number of people stricken by AIDS since that first report. As of February 21, 1984, some 3,515 Americans had been diagnosed with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, of whom 1,506 had died. The thirty-nine-year-old psychotherapist was the 164th San Franciscan to die in the epidemic.
A year before, Gary Walsh had been among the thirty-five AIDS sufferers to sign a letter asking that Bay Area Reporter editor Paul Lorch be fired. Lorch pulled out the letter when he heard that Gary had died and drew a line through Gary’s name.
February 24
Gary had wanted Beatles’ songs for his memorial service, so the 300 mourners who went to the chapel at the community center where the Shanti Project held its services were treated to the strains of “Let It Be” as they entered. By now, AIDS funerals had taken on the cast of social events for many in the gay community. Among those who gathered for the service were aspiring gay political personages who may not have known Gary but understood that this was a correct event to attend. However, most in the crowd were people whose lives Gary had touched—his old boyfriends and psychotherapy clients, friends, and the other AIDS sufferers to whom he had lent so much support.
Given the times, AIDS services had taken a high-tech twist, and so Gary was able to appear in full-color at his own funeral in a videotape of an interview he had given three months before. People were warmed by Gary’s talk of visions of people who promised to help him to “the other side.” It was a strange paradox to see people smiling at the mystic visions of a man who had achieved acclaim for putting one over on Jerry Falwell.
Rick and Angie Walsh weren’t sure what to make of the practiced rituals of AIDS death. Still, Rick wept openly when Lu Chaikin concluded the service with her eulogy.
“How do you describe a star whose too-brief journey lit up so many lives?” Lu asked. “And now I say to my sweet, dearest friend—go well and be at peace. And as we had so often promised, we will always be with each other, with love.”
Everybody sang “Amazing Grace,” and as the people left, Matt played Gary’s favorite song, “All You Need Is Love.”
43
SQUEEZE PLAY
February 26, 1984
CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL, ATLANTA
The vial with two ounces of LAV arrived at the Atlanta airport shortly after midnight. Given the fact that the last batch of LAV, packed in dry ice in Paris and shipped to Atlanta through the mail, had been dead on arrival, Dr. Cy Cabradilla from the CDC molecular virology lab took no chances this time, clearing the virus’s passage through New York quarantine
authorities himself and personally waiting for the plane from JFK airport to arrive. As soon as he got the virus back to his CDC lab, Cabradilla started tests to make sure it had survived. By the next morning, he had isolated the virus and begun growing it in lymphocytes extracted from the umbilical cords of newborn infants. With this virus, the CDC could make its own antibody tests, which would allow researchers to trace LAV in the blood and tissue samples they had been collecting in the two and a half years of AIDS work.
By the end of the week, excitement had spread through the cluster of brick buildings on Clifton Road. The virus was growing rapidly. Soon, lab staffers were to test stored specimens. One after another, the blood revealed the presence of LAV antibodies. The positive antibody tests came from all the AIDS risk groups, including gay men, Haitians, drug abusers, hemophiliacs, addicts’ female sexual partners and their babies. Fresh blood samples from AIDS patients were flown in from Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the results were the same. These people were infected with LAV. The French had discovered the cause of AIDS.
March
WASHINGTON, D.C.
“We know we have the cause of AIDS for sure,” said Bob Gallo.
Jim Curran had flown to Washington from Atlanta with the codes on 200 blood samples of AIDS cases and controls that the Centers for Disease Control had sent Gallo in January. Sitting with Gallo in a French restaurant, Curran compared the code numbers for the various samples to the HTLV-III antibody tests Gallo had performed on the blood. Gallo’s lab work was right on target; Curran could see that Gallo had isolated the long-sought AIDS virus. Curran also figured that the retrovirus was the same virus isolated by the French a year earlier. Curran was relieved both research groups had discovered the same virus separately, convinced that the dual studies would hasten the acceptance of the discovery in the scientific world. Gallo was evasive when Curran asked him when the National Cancer Institute would release its conclusions.
Gallo was reticent to provide much information, both because of the tensions between the CDC and the NCI, and because the question of how to announce the HTLV-III discovery had become so entwined with election-year politicking that it was out of Gallo’s hands. The NCI director, Dr. Vincent Devita, had wanted to go public with the information, but was overruled by Assistant Secretary for Health Edward Brandt, who had been informed of the discovery in February. Rather than be heralded as an accomplishment of the National Cancer Institute or the National Institutes of Health, credit for the breakthrough was to go to the Reagan administration. The announcement would counter liberal criticism that the government had dragged its feet on AIDS research. With Democratic presidential hopefuls becoming more critical of federal AIDS funding, the administration was eager to eliminate AIDS as a possible issue in the November presidential election. Brandt ordered that any announcement would be made by Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler when she determined it was wisest to proceed.
That time was rapidly approaching. Gallo had submitted six papers to the medical journal Science, all nailing down HTLV-III as the cause of AIDS. Already, the researcher had isolated the virus in forty-eight patients, many more independent isolates than the French had obtained for their LAV. By the time Gallo met with Curran, Heckler had also been briefed on HTLV-III. Now, it was up to her to make the discovery public.
Bob Gallo had politics of his own to consider. Like a number of NCI researchers, he was worried that this concrete evidence of the infectious cause of AIDS would put the syndrome firmly under the aegis of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the NCI would lose its central role in AIDS research. Gallo also continued to be obsessed with whether the Pasteur Institute would get credit for the discovery of the AIDS virus. He was suspicious of Curran, aware that the CDC had embarked on cooperative studies with the French after Jean-Claude Chermann had addressed the CDC in February. To keep his advantage, therefore, Gallo told the CDC as little as possible about NCI studies. When discussing the virus with Curran, he made no reference to the six Science papers or the forty-eight isolates.
SAN FRANCISCO CLUB BATHS
Larry Littlejohn pulled a towel around his waist and began his informal inspection of the city’s largest gay bathhouse. Although he had once enjoyed weekly bathhouse romps, he hadn’t stepped into the tubs for a year. The sprawling sex palaces reminded Littlejohn of how far the city’s sex industry had come since he had moved to San Francisco in 1962. His first home in San Francisco had been the Embarcadero YMCA, a precursor to the modern bathhouse. After Littlejohn helped organize the city’s pioneering gay group, the Society of Individual Rights, in 1964, he had opened one of the city’s first private sex clubs. He took some credit as one of the businessmen who introduced a whole generation of gay San Franciscans to the joys of orgy sex.
In the years since then, Larry Littlejohn had served two terms as president of the Society of Individual Rights and was widely recognized as one of the city’s first gay activists. He had at one time or another walked into every sex club and bathhouse in San Francisco, developing a personal preference for the more leather-oriented establishments. AIDS was a distant concern until he read Larry Kramer’s “1,112 and Counting.” A cursory examination of the evidence led him to believe that AIDS was a sexually transmitted disease, which drew him to one quick conclusion: The bathhouses couldn’t go on as they were without killing thousands of gay San Franciscans.
Through 1983, Larry Littlejohn wrote various letters to San Francisco Public Health Director Mervyn Silverman, the board of supervisors, and the AIDS organizations, pointing out what he considered to be a rather logical argument for stopping bathhouse sex. He assumed somebody would act. After all, lives were at stake. A city health department that would yank a restaurant license for cockroach infestation certainly would pull a bathhouse license for fostering a far more lethal activity. Yet, by the first months of 1984, it was clear that nobody would do anything. Most recently, Dr. Silverman had written Littlejohn that bathhouses were valuable sites for AIDS education. That was what had brought Littlejohn to the city’s largest bathhouse in early March. He wanted to see what kind of education patrons got.
Littlejohn walked out of the locker room and down the hall; he saw none of the safe-sex posters Silverman had ordered posted nine months before. At the dimly lit end of another hall, he did find a poster—in the least conspicuous place possible. The active orgy rooms and the squealing behind the closed doors of private cubicles at the Club Baths that night also implied to Littlejohn that patrons were not perusing safe-sex guidelines before exchanging bodily fluids.
Silverman obviously did not want to take responsibility for protecting the public health, Littlejohn thought. And gay politicos were still talking about whether it was permissible to talk about bathhouse closure. The day after his bathhouse inspection, therefore, Littlejohn called a friend who had been instrumental in placing initiatives on the San Francisco ballot. Littlejohn knew what Mayor Dianne Feinstein had learned a year ago. In San Francisco, you can put just about anything on the city ballot. In his apartment just one block from the Club Baths, Littlejohn drew up an initiative that would ban sexual activity from the city’s bathhouses. He knew that such an initiative would force every politician in the city of San Francisco to take a stand on bathhouse sex. And it would force Silverman to explain to the city’s electorate exactly why bathhouses were such wonderful sites for AIDS education, if such an explanation could be seriously made. The debate had gone on long enough, Littlejohn decided: It was time to call the question.
That same week, another question was being called at the Irwin Memorial Blood Bank in San Francisco. The woman who had inadvertently raised the issue was Mary Richards Johnstone, a wealthy matron from the affluent suburb of Belvedere.
During heart surgery in December 1982, Mary Johnstone had received twenty units of Irwin blood. Eight days after the operation, she was struck by a mysterious lung virus. She barely survived that ordeal, but in the succeeding months she w
as plagued continuously with exhausting fevers and strange ailments like oral candidiasis. The doctors couldn’t explain what was wrong with her.
Only in February 1984, while leafing through her medical files, did Mary Johnstone see the October 19, 1983, letter from one physician to another at the University of California Medical Center, where she had her surgery. “We have discovered that one of her blood donors is an AIDS patient,” the letter said. The doctors had concealed this from Mary Johnstone, however, and if she had not happened across the correspondence, there is no indication she would ever have been informed. Later, the fifty-five-year-old housewife kept her sense of humor when her doctor concluded that she was suffering from the syndrome. “Here I’ve got AIDS,” she said, “and I didn’t even have any fun getting it.”
In Los Angeles, meanwhile, a thirty-eight-year-old nurse who had received a blood transfusion during a hysterectomy was ailing from Pneumocystis. Her condition had been watched anxiously by Los Angeles health officials ever since one of the donors for her November 1982 transfusion answered affirmatively to Question 44 of the questionnaire given to all local AIDS patients: “Have you been a blood or plasma donor in the last five years?”
Within two weeks of the transfusion, the nurse was suffering from lymphadenopathy. Blood tests showed that her T-4 lymphocytes were beginning to disappear.
The two cases marked the first time two adults were proven to have AIDS after being transfused with the blood of diagnosed AIDS patients. In all the other suspected transfusion AIDS cases tracked by the Centers for Disease Control, the donors had fit into the high-risk groups for AIDS but had not actually been diagnosed with CDC-defined AIDS. The first transfusion AIDS case, detected at the University of California at San Francisco in December 1982, was an infant, raising questions about congenital immune deficiency.