And the Band Played On

by Randy Shilts

  Gaetan had survived his fourth bout with Pneumocystis and appeared to be on his way to recovery. He spent much of late March on the telephone with friends in Vancouver, talking about how much he hated cold and dreary Quebec City and how he wanted to return to Vancouver. As always, Gaetan had managed to nurture a torrid love affair in his last months in Vancouver, with a handsome male model. By the end of March, he persuaded the model to fly to Quebec and accompany him back to British Columbia.

  The model was on the plane east when Gaetan died in Quebec City. It was March 30, a month past Gaetan’s thirty-first birthday, and it had been nearly four years since he first had gone to see the doctor in Toronto about the purple spot near his ear. In the end, it wasn’t an AIDS disease that killed Gaetan—his kidneys, strained by the years of infection, simply gave out.

  Whether Gaetan Dugas actually was the person who brought AIDS to North America remains a question of debate and is ultimately unanswerable. The fact that the first cases in both New York City and Los Angeles could be linked to Gaetan, who himself was one of the first half-dozen or so patients on the continent, gives weight to that theory. Gaetan traveled frequently to France, the western nation where the disease was most widespread before 1980. In any event, there’s no doubt that Gaetan played a key role in spreading the new virus from one end of the United States to the other. The bathhouse controversy, peaking so dramatically in San Francisco on the morning of his death, was also linked directly to Gaetan’s own exploits in those sex palaces and his recalcitrance in changing his ways. At one time, Gaetan had been what every man wanted from gay life; by the time he died, he had become what every man feared.

  44

  TRAITORS

  March 30, 1984

  SAN FRANCISCO

  Marc Conant got the first indication that the plans to close the bathhouses were unraveling when a frazzled Merv Silverman called him at home at about midnight. Silverman had just returned from the community meeting organized by opponents of bathhouse closure. He had spent hours being pulled over the coals for his decision to close the facilities. Earlier, Conant had said he would attend the meeting, but over dinner he had changed his mind. It was clear that the forum, a congregation of closure opponents, would present all the old arguments that had stalled action for over a year.

  “You let me down,” said Silverman. “Where were you?”

  “Merv, there are just some meetings it’s better not to attend,” said Conant.

  Conant was surprised that Silverman had only now discovered that opposition to bathhouse closure persisted in the community. Was Silverman going to wait until every gay leader backed him?

  Two leaders of the Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights who had enclosed Bill Kraus’s letter of support for closure had told the health director that they were withdrawing their names. At one point in the forum, Silverman looked forward to some support when a gay leader sought recognition to speak. This leader had gone to Silverman’s office two weeks before, after visiting a friend who was near death from AIDS, and begged Silverman to close the baths. Tonight, however, this same leader denounced the plan for closure. It was just what Silverman wanted to avoid—a confrontation that pitted gays against the health department. He wanted them all on the same side, fighting this damned disease, not in opposition, fighting each other.

  Meanwhile, dozens of the gay leaders who had signed on as supporters of closure were calling Dick Pabich, begging that their names be taken off the list. It wasn’t that they harbored any newfound affection for bathhouses, of course. They had heard that Silverman had wavered in the public forum earlier in the evening. They thought they had put their names on the line to support a decision Silverman earnestly wanted to make. Instead, they were the ones coming out as the heavies, and they could only imagine what the gay press would do to them for calling for the closure of the gay community’s biggest advertisers. Most had political careers to think about, and nobody wanted to end up being branded a sexual fascist like Bill Kraus.

  One of the last to call Dick Pabich was Cleve Jones. The ugliness that had emerged in the community made Cleve want to sit down and have a drink. He hadn’t been feeling well for some time. He was coming down with staph infections and bizarre skin rashes on his legs. He felt so tired all the time that he slipped out of the office every afternoon and went home for a nap. His lymph nodes had been swollen for months. He couldn’t stand all the screaming and hatred; he wanted out of the whole controversy. When Cleve called Pabich, he said that his boss, Assemblyman Art Agnos, had demanded that he not add his name to the list.

  Neither Dick Pabich nor Bill Kraus believed this. Bill swore he would never forgive Cleve for deserting him at this most crucial juncture. But Cleve couldn’t focus on that. Two years of gay fratricide over AIDS had thoroughly exhausted him. As he slumped into his bed after calling Pabich, Cleve just wished it would all be over.

  The next morning, Merv Silverman, Marc Conant, and City Attorney George Agnost were huddling in Mayor Feinstein’s office before the scheduled news conference when Silverman dropped his bombshell. After the city attorney had assured the health director that he had the power to close the bathhouses, Silverman turned to the mayor.

  “I’m going to say that I’m not going to say anything,” he said.

  Feinstein looked like she was about to fall off her chair.

  “We don’t have compelling medical evidence,” he said.

  “Of course you do,” she said.

  “Are you ordering me to close them?” Silverman demanded. Silverman felt the mayor wanted the baths closed for the Democratic Convention. He would consider closing the bathhouses for public health, but he would never close them as part of a campaign to clean up the city. That, Silverman thought, would be a perversion of his public health powers.

  Feinstein retreated from Silverman’s challenge. She knew that the value of closure as a public health decision would be destroyed if word got out that she ordered Silverman to close the bathhouses. Her order would make closure a political decision.

  In any event, she also knew that under the city charter, she couldn’t order Silverman to do anything. He was accountable only to the man who acted as city manager.

  As the police chief helped Silverman into a bulletproof vest, Feinstein took Marc Conant into the small parlor adjoining her large office. Conant felt chills when he recognized the room as the place where Mayor George Moscone had been assassinated.

  “Please watch Merv,” Feinstein told Conant. “I’m worried about him.”

  Conant was worried too. He believed that the Mafia, who maintained strong links to bathhouses in other cities, was behind the quick change in the health director’s thinking.

  Silverman was filled with doubts, engendered anew by the previous night’s stormy confrontation with the gay community. Would the cause of public health be served if bathhouses became the central issue instead of the more fundamental concern about AIDS transmission? Moreover, given the fact that he could not point to a specific virus as the cause of AIDS, would closure stand up in court? Silverman wanted more time to ponder all these things. He did not want to be rushed.

  Silverman and Conant left City Hall to attend a meeting of gay community leaders preceding the news conference. On the way to the meeting, Conant could see that an only-in-San Francisco morning was taking shape. Protesters on the steps of the health building had stripped down and were wearing only towels. They held signs: “Today the Tubs, Tomorrow Your Bedroom,” “Out of the Tubs and Into the Shrubs,” “Out of the Baths, Into the Ovens.”

  Scores of television crews, reporters, and wire-service correspondents were assembling for the press conference. Every news organization in the United States—including all three television networks and every major daily—had dispatched reporters to cover the first decisive public health move against the AIDS epidemic, coming, of course, in exotic San Francisco, “the nation’s AIDS capital.”

  Marc Conant took Bill Kraus aside as the meeting was abou
t to begin and told Kraus that Silverman was backing away from closure.

  “He just doesn’t have the courage,” Kraus said.

  Kraus’s face turned red when Silverman said he had to delay making a decision on the bathhouses, that he needed more time to think.

  “When?” Kraus shouted. “We’ve been hearing this crap for years. When will you do something?”

  The normally taciturn Dick Pabich was dumbfounded.

  “I think it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Pabich shouted at Silverman. “You’re derelict in your duty. You’ve embarrassed everyone who has supported you. You’ve set the stage for a political disaster.”

  Dick Pabich and David Kessler, one of the gay doctors who had come to oppose closure, started a fierce argument on the issue. With the meeting disintegrating, Silverman raised his voice over the din.

  “Let’s put it to a vote,” he said. “Everybody in favor of closing the bathhouses, raise their hands.”

  Kraus was stunned that Silverman was putting a crucial public health decision up to a show of hands. The room was split evenly between opponents and supporters. Silverman said he would tell the reporters he was delaying a decision.

  The health department’s auditorium was crowded with journalists, cameras, and the towel-clad demonstrators when Silverman arrived, nearly an hour late and escorted by plainclothes police officers.

  “I am not discussing the opening or closing of the bathhouses at this point,” Silverman said. He would delay that decision, he said, until he studied other “facets of this issue, some of which had basically nothing to do with medicine and some of which do.

  “There are many, many complex issues. I was unaware of a number of facets,” he said. “I apologize for moving so hastily. I want to make it clear this action—leaving the bathhouses open—is mine and not based on any pressure from any groups.”

  Silverman said he would announce his decision within a week.

  Perhaps the most telling sign of gay community sentiment occurred the next night when bathhouse supporters announced a Castro Street protest to demonstrate support for sex clubs. Only twenty-two people showed up, and they were outnumbered by reporters. Nevertheless, the political momentum within the gay community shifted away from bathhouse closure in the days that followed.

  “It’s obvious to me it’s not a medical decision being made; it’s a blatant political decision,” said Gerry Parker, president of the Stonewall Gay Democratic Club, one of the groups on record as opposing closure. “What makes a medical decision turn upside down within minutes?”

  The mood of gay leaders in other cities was summed up by the national gay newspaper, the Advocate, which editorialized that people who wanted to close baths were “like Chicken Little.” The paper did concede, however, that “at a time when the community in general is winning enormous sympathy from non-gay people because of its considerable suffering, gay leaders are reluctant to defend the rights of gay men to, say, be urinated on.”

  Nathan Fain, the writer who had so vehemently denounced Larry Kramer in New York, wrote in the Advocate that “there is no proof that even one of the 3,775 cases of AIDS tallied by the Centers for Disease Control had involved sexual transmission.” The gay-backed move to close baths in San Francisco, he wrote, showed that gay leaders were prepared “to make criminals of their own people.”

  The Northern California Bathhouse Owners Association announced they were seeking $100,000 from sex club owners nationally to mount a legal challenge against any actions that Silverman might later propose.

  Meanwhile, the city attorney backed off his original blanket endorsement of closure and advised Silverman that he would have a stronger case if he merely banned the sexual activities that were shown to spread AIDS.

  As the situation became more complicated, Mayor Feinstein made her first on-the-record statement about the baths. To the end, the mayor was not forthcoming on the issue, giving her views only when she was cornered in her limousine by the San Francisco Chronicle political editor who had followed her on an official visit to New York City. “My own opinion is that if this was a heterosexual problem, they would have been closed already,” she said. “The bottom-line question here is death. AIDS means only one thing, and that is that you die. And therefore, if you want to avoid it, the message has to go out. Not in a namby-pamby way.”

  April 3

  CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL, ATLANTA

  The AIDS Review Group that Dr. James Mason, CDC director, had appointed in December turned in its report on the adequacy of AIDS resources. The review group found that the diversion of resources was taking a toll on other CDC activities. Some 70 percent of the CDC’s AIDS staffers were people diverted from other programs and not funded by federal AIDS appropriations.

  “Opportunities have been lost and the overall CDC work has been impaired by this depletion in resources needed for the AIDS effort,” the report stated. The review group termed the CDC AIDS lab “not adequate” and suggested an “immediate and intense exploration of the possibility of accelerating the construction of a more suitable facility.” The group recommended that Mason seek $20 to $25 million more in AIDS funding for the CDC.

  April 4

  PARIS

  Negotiations among Robert Gallo from the National Cancer Institute, Don Francis from the Centers for Disease Control, and Jean-Claude Chermann from the Pasteur Institute quickly acquired the mood of delicate arms negotiations among parties who shared only mutual distrust.

  Gallo flatly refused to discuss the details of his upcoming publications on HTLV-III in front of Francis, so a game of musical chairs enveloped the meetings. Francis frequently had to leave the room while Gallo and Chermann conferred privately. The Pasteur scientists were astonished that one branch of the U.S. government should hold another in such low regard.

  Don Francis had brought to Europe electron micrographs that laid to rest any dispute about whether LAV and HTLV-III were different viruses. They were both extremely unusual human retroviruses; they were the same. Moreover, Dr. Kaly had run his comparisons of HTLV-III to HTLV-I and HTLV-II and found that the AIDS virus bore few similarities to the two previously discovered HTLV retroviruses; they were not related.

  Francis felt this was a prima facie case for the French naming the virus. At the end of the negotiations, however, the taxonomy issue remained unresolved. The three researchers ultimately were able to work out an agreement for a joint announcement by the CDC, NCI, and Pasteur. They agreed they would share preprints of articles they were about to publish on LAV and HTLV-III and orchestrate their first public declaration of the breakthrough.

  That night, they went to the bawdy Paradise Latin in the Latin Quarter and watched barebreasted women descend from the ceiling on swings. Both Gallo, with his roguish charm, and Chermann, with his movie-star good looks, were in their element in such informal settings. As Chermann and Gallo stood side by side in the pissoir, Gallo had a proposition.

  “We can do this together—just the Pasteur Institute and the NCI,” he said. “We don’t need the CDC.”

  Chermann dismissed the idea.

  The next morning, over croissants and tea with Don Francis, Gallo confided that he would probably get the lion’s share of the glory in the announcement because he had a lot of HTLV-III isolates. Gallo then put a different spin on the proposal he had made the night before to Chermann.

  “We don’t need the Pasteur Institute,” he suggested. “The CDC and the NCI can announce this ourselves.”

  In the first week of April, the number of AIDS cases in the United States surpassed 4,000. The first AIDS death in New Zealand was reported from New Plymouth on April 4. A few weeks earlier, British health authorities reported the first AIDS death in Scotland. The epidemic had spread to thirty-three countries worldwide.

  April 4

  SAN FRANCISCO

  At about the same time Don Francis was boarding his plane back to Atlanta, the new edition of the Bay Area Reporter with an editorial
by Paul Lorch called “Killing the Movement” was being delivered to Castro Street gay bars.

  “The gay liberation movement in San Francisco almost died last Friday morning at 11 A.M. No, that’s not quite it. The Gay Liberation Movement here and then everywhere else was almost killed off by 16 gay men and lesbians last Friday morning. This group, whose number changed by the hour as people got on and off what they hoped would be a roller coaster, signed a request or gave their names to give the green light to the annihilation of gay life.”

  These “collaborators,” Lorch wrote, were the people who supported bathhouse closure.

  “These 16 people would have killed the movement, glibly handing it over to the forces that have beaten us down since time immemorial…. The gay community should remember these names well, if not etch them into their anger and regret.”

  The “traitor’s list,” as it became known, quickly followed. In many ways, it was an honor roll of veterans of local gay politics. Number one was Supervisor Harry Britt. Number three was gay campaign strategist Dick Pabich, the aide who had discovered Harvey Milk’s body five years earlier. Number six was Dr. Marcus Conant, who first conceived the idea of San Francisco’s coordinated care model for AIDS patients. Science fiction author Frank Robinson, number nine, had written Harvey Milk’s campaign speeches, the speeches that gave the gay liberation movement its most idealistic articulation; Robinson made the traitor’s list because he was heard to speak for bathhouse closure in one public meeting. Milk Club vice-president Ron Huberman was traitor number eleven. Bill Kraus was number twelve. Larry Littlejohn, who had founded the pioneering group that had made all the later gay politicking possible, was listed as “traitor extraordinaire.”

  Hearing that he was going to be put on this list, Cleve Jones had gone to the gay paper and begged that his name not be included. Instead, he was listed merely as someone who “waffled” while others were killing the gay movement.