And the Band Played On

by Randy Shilts

  Bill eased back into his bed. In the morning, he would return to his job as a nurse in the AIDS Ward and the nightmare would begin again.

  October 4

  Bill Kraus took the wheel of the convertible and sped along the back roads of the hill country north of San Francisco, past the geysers and vineyards of Napa County, and the redwoods and lighthouses of Sonoma County. Beatles, Supremes, and Jefferson Airplane songs blared from the car stereo.

  “I look in the mirror and it’s like looking twenty years in the past,” Bill said.

  The music and the general aimlessness of the day reminded Bill’s friend Dennis Seely of the past as well, when he met Bill in 1974 and they both were unemployed hippies hanging out on Castro Street. Dennis had known Bill before he had become involved in gay politics; in fact, it was Dennis who had introduced Bill to Harvey Milk. Now, when Bill needed a friend who predated his life as a gay political celebrity, he turned to Dennis Seely. They were wasting time before Bill called Marc Conant for the results of his biopsy.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen when they tell me,” Bill said.

  Dennis didn’t believe that Bill really had AIDS. After all, Bill had scaled back his life-style before anyone he knew. For most of 1984, Bill had calculated that he would be home free once December came, because that marked two years of completely safe sex. The second anniversary was only six weeks away. It would be a cruel cosmic joke for Bill to get AIDS now, Dennis thought.

  “How could you have it?” Dennis said. “You hardly ever got fucked—unless there’s something you haven’t told me.”

  “I only have six weeks left to go,” said Bill. “It’s so unfair. I’m the one who stopped having sex and got called all that shit for being ‘anti-sexual.’ I was the sexual fascist, and now I’m the one getting it.”

  Back at Dennis’s apartment, Bill didn’t want to phone Conant. Dennis cajoled him into making the call. Conant would tell Bill he was fine, and then Bill would leave and Dennis could take a nap. But Conant’s nurse told Bill he had to come in, because Conant wanted to check his bandages. Bill started to cry.

  “They don’t need to check my bandages. It was only a small biopsy,” Bill said. “I’ve got it.”

  “Stop being melodramatic,” said Dennis.

  When they got to Conant’s waiting room, Bill took a Valium. A nurse asked Bill if he wanted a cup of coffee.

  “Did you see the way she looked at me?” Bill asked, crying again.

  “She looked at you like you wanted a cup of coffee,” Dennis said.

  “I’ve got it,” Bill said. “I know it.”

  They went into Conant’s office together. Inside, Conant put his hand on Bill’s shoulder.

  “I asked them to check it again, because I didn’t want to believe it,” he said. “You’ve got Kaposi’s.”

  Dennis started to cry. Bill froze, one tear forming in the corner of his eye.

  “I guess you and Kico will get my house,” Bill said to Dennis.

  “I’m not sharing the house with Kico,” Dennis said, trying to joke even as he wept. “He’s so irresponsible, he’ll never pay his share of the expenses.”

  “You’ll have to share it with him,” Bill persisted, “because I’m going to leave it to both of you…”

  “Wait a minute,” Conant interjected. “You don’t have to talk about who’s getting the house yet. There are things you can do, Bill. With the position you’re in, working for Sala, you can pressure for more funding. You can make your position an activist one. The bad news is that this is a life-threatening disease. But there are people who have lived three years. There are a lot of things that can happen.”

  Bill wasn’t paying attention.

  “Then I am to die,” he said. Conant paused.

  “We’re all going to die,” he said finally, his voice turning grim. “If something doesn’t break, we’re all doomed.”

  William James Kraus was the 728th San Franciscan diagnosed with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

  By the time Bill Kraus got home, his closest friends had assembled at the two-flat Victorian he recently had purchased with Ron Huberman, Milk Club vice-president. His old friend Gwenn Craig was there. Bill’s friends immediately laid plans to tap their lists of campaign contributors and raise enough money so Bill would not be wanting for anything during his ordeal. They stayed up late into the night, drinking and reminiscing around Bill’s kitchen table.

  “I wish I didn’t have to get sick before I saw how many people really like me,” Bill observed.

  Kico Govantes came late and felt as though he had walked in on a funeral. Except, of course, that the person everyone was mourning was right there.

  Bill wept and Kico held him, realizing their roles were now reversed. In years past, he had always needed Bill; now Bill needed him.

  The next morning, Bill woke up enveloped in dread. Every physical movement required tremendous exertion. He had not felt this way since his father died.

  Was it true? he wondered briefly. Had yesterday really happened?

  He realized that it had happened and that he would spend this day, and all the days he lived, knowing that he might die at any time. A microscopic junta had seized control of his body; he was under its command.

  “You don’t have to die.”

  Bill Kraus’s old friend Sharon Johnson saw Bill becoming more and more morose in the days after his diagnosis. Long ago, Sharon had sensed that Bill had a martyr complex. Like Bill, Sharon had been raised a devout Catholic, and she knew one thing about martyrs: They died. He’d kill himself with his grief, Sharon thought, so she took Bill to a psychic healer she knew, Jocelynn Nielsen.

  Bill Kraus was cynical, but he was also desperate. He had been with Nielsen only a few minutes when she began talking about his father’s death and the death of someone else very close, someone like a father, about fifteen months earlier. It had been Nielsen’s experience that people diagnosed with a terminal disease usually had undergone some kind of trauma fifteen months before the onset of symptoms.

  Bill was stunned. Obviously, she had no way of knowing about his father’s death a quarter-century earlier, and she had perfectly described his emotional reaction to the death of Phil Burton. Bill poured out his heart to Nielsen. He told her about how for months, he had imagined seeing his own memorial service. Everybody had gathered in an auditorium to talk about him, and he wasn’t there. The vision scared him.

  Nielsen asked Bill to meditate and tell her what pictures he saw. Bill went into a trance but was quickly fidgeting with fright.

  “I see snakes,” he said. “They are out to attack me. They want to kill me.”

  “You can be afraid of them or you can master them,” Nielsen said. “Make friends with the snakes. Don’t be afraid of them.”

  And then Nielsen told Bill, quite simply, “You don’t have to die.”

  He had created his own illness, she said. He could heal himself.

  Bill was ecstatic at the idea, and he religiously adopted the regimen of diet and meditation she outlined. He gave away all his black and gray clothes to Dennis Seely after Nielsen said he would be healthier if he wore only earth tones. Bill threw himself into the effort to save his own life with a gusto he normally reserved for a political campaign. He ordered all his friends to visualize him well. Nobody was ever to talk about death around him again.

  “I created this,” Bill told Kico Govantes. “And I can beat it.”

  October 9

  SAN FRANCISCO DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH

  Reporters jockeyed for position when Merv Silverman strode into the auditorium and sat before the scores of microphones. Six months before, he had walked into the same room before the same reporters for his now-famous “no comment” press conference on the baths; today, he spoke with unaccustomed decisiveness, comparing the baths to “Russian roulette parlors.” It might be legal to play Russian roulette at home, he said, but you can’t open a business and charge people $5 a head to come
in and play Russian roulette for profit.

  “Today I have ordered the closure of fourteen commercial establishments that promote and profit from the spread of AIDS—a sexually transmitted fatal disease,” Silverman said. “These businesses have been inspected on a number of occasions and demonstrate a blatant disregard for the health of their patrons and of the community. Where activities are proven to be dangerous to the public and continue to take place in commercial settings, the health department has a duty to intercede and halt the operation of such businesses. Make no mistake about it: These fourteen establishments are not fostering gay liberation. They are fostering disease and death.”

  Within an hour, health inspector Thomas Petty was taping public health notices on the door of The Slot bathhouse on Folsom Street: “The continued operation of the above designated business constitutes a hazard and menace to the public health,” the order read. When Petty found the manager, he explained, “I’ve been directed by the director of public health to order you to cease operations as of noon today.” A few blocks away at the San Francisco Club Baths, an announcement over the public address system told patrons to turn in their towels.

  Indignant gay organizations held press conferences throughout the city that afternoon to protest the action. The San Francisco AIDS Foundation called bathhouses “leaders in AIDS education.” The gay Golden Gate Business Association said the closure was an intrusion on private enterprise. The Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom, a gay lawyers group with several prominent members on retainer to bathhouse owners, said gays across the country would lose their civil rights because of Silverman’s move. The Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights maintained that closure would lead to more cases of AIDS, not fewer. In the end, the only gay group to support Silverman was the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club.

  Later that afternoon, the owners of six of the bathhouses defied Silverman’s order and reopened their doors. Their attorneys hoped that the courts would let them remain open until a full hearing could be held on the merits of closure. The lawyers, however, overestimated the tolerance of the judicial system when it came to violating a public health order. The courts quickly issued a temporary restraining order shutting down the baths, although judges deferred to the First Amendment and reopened a handful of closed pornographic theaters as long as the businesses shut down their orgy rooms and glory holes.

  Ironically, in the weeks after bathhouse closure in San Francisco, there was little evidence that very many gays cared much about it. Three weeks of planning for a Castro Street rally protesting the closure brought out only 300 demonstrators. The expected gay outcry that had so paralyzed the health department and intimidated politicians never happened.

  The closure of bathhouses in San Francisco engendered a flurry of activity in other cities. In Los Angeles, Mayor Tom Bradley and County Supervisor Ed Edelman convened a task force on the subject of bathhouse closure. Both politicians were largely beholden to the gay community for political support, so neither endeavored to create a committee that was much more than window dressing. The group’s chair was Dr. Neil Schram, a former president of the American Association of Physicians for Human Rights. For two years, Schram had championed the cause of bathhouses. Few were surprised when his task force ultimately concluded that the bathhouses should stay open.

  When articulating her county’s stance, Dr. Shirley Fanin, deputy director of Los Angeles County’s Bureau of Communicable Disease Control, used an argument that was increasingly popular among health officials in both New York and Los Angeles. “The die is probably already cast,” said Fanin. “It’s likely that most of the people who can be exposed through bathhouses have already been exposed.” New York State AIDS Institute Director Mel Rosen said closing the baths was like “closing the barn door after the horses are already out.”

  In the end, the final act of the San Francisco bathhouse drama was anticlimactic, like the denouement of almost every subplot in the AIDS epidemic. Much legal wrangling followed Dr. Silverman’s order in the months ahead, but the truly significant act of the controversy had been completed when Silverman held his press conference that October morning. At last, a local public health official had said that AIDS was an extraordinary situation requiring extraordinary action. Political rhetoric bowed to biological reality; saving lives was more important than saving face.

  Supporters of the bathhouses said the closure order was politically motivated. This was true, if only because bathhouses had been allowed to stay open solely for political reasons. It was historically inevitable that the authorities would ultimately move to shut them down in all the cities hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic. Within a year of Silverman’s orders, baths also were closed in both New York and Los Angeles under pressures that were far more brazenly political than anything seen in San Francisco.

  What made the San Francisco closure so anticlimactic, however, was that it came so late. Most of the people still frequenting San Francisco bathhouses in late 1984 were already infected with the AIDS virus. The saved lives were most likely those of a few thousand uninformed gay tourists. In fact, by the time the baths were closed and a truly comprehensive education program was started in San Francisco, about two-thirds of the local gay men destined to be infected with LAV/HTLV-III already carried the virus. Any victories wrung from AIDS education or bathhouse closure would be Pyrrhic indeed.

  The health officials who made this point while defending their inaction in New York and Los Angeles were telling the truth—and also confessing their worst sin. They were acknowledging that, in truth, they could have closed the barn door before the horses galloped out. Instead they did nothing, letting infection run loose and defending further inaction by saying it was too late to do anything, because infection was already loose in the land.

  Later, everybody agreed the baths should have been closed sooner; they agreed health education should have been more direct and more timely. And everybody also agreed blood banks should have tested blood sooner, and that a search for the AIDS virus should have been started sooner, and that scientists should have laid aside their petty intrigues. Everybody subsequently agreed that the news media should have offered better coverage of the epidemic much earlier, and that the federal government should have done much, much more. By the time everyone agreed to all this, however, it was too late.

  Instead, people died. Tens of thousands of them.

  In no place in the Western world was this despondent future more palpable than on Castro Street in late 1984. As word of Bill Kraus’s illness spread, people thought less about what it meant to Bill than what it meant for everyone. Bill had changed his life-style before virtually anyone in the gay community. If Bill Kraus was vulnerable, then so was everyone. When told the news, many echoed the private fears of Marc Conant, who said, “We’re all going to die.”

  By claiming Bill Kraus, the epidemic also delivered early notice to gay San Franciscans of the truth that would panic millions worldwide in later years. Even those who reacted quickly to the epidemic might have moved too late. There was no denying or arguing or bargaining with this virus, gay people could see now. As the winter of 1984 approached and the full weight of the tragedy fell over the neighborhood, a depression settled among the cheerfully painted Victorian houses of gay San Francisco.

  Already, at least one in fifty of the gay men in the Castro District was diagnosed with AIDS; within a year, that figure was going to double, researchers warned. A door-to-door NIH survey of gay men in the area produced even more disquieting figures. Nearly 40 percent of gay men in the neighborhood were infected with HTLV-III. One in seven gay men already suffered from lymphadenopathy or ARC symptoms. The dire predictions of yesteryear were becoming the morose realities of today.

  For most gay men, the depression was made more frantic by the fact that there was nothing they could do to counter impending doom. By October, a survey of 500 gay men found that two-thirds had changed their sexual habits enough to effectively remove any risk of contracting the syndr
ome. Ironically, the men who were least likely to have changed their behaviors were better educated, upscale professionals in their thirties. With a certainty that would make John Calvin proud, this group appeared to link their success to a sense of immunity to AIDS. Moreover, their sexual patterns were entrenched during the candy shop era of gay sexuality in the Castro. Younger men, unfamiliar with lustier times, found little difficulty changing.

  With life-style changes already made, there was nothing else people could do to improve their future and few positive directions in which to channel the growing anxiety. Many turned to mysticism. Local health food stores did a booming business in tapes by such healers as Louise Hay, who guided listeners on meditations geared to visualizing good health. Thousands more allayed their anxieties by enlisting as volunteers in AIDS groups. But all this did not dispel the aura of gloom descending on the Castro, the sense that there was to be no escape. There was only the hope that the government’s huge scientific establishment could create some miracle and the dying would end.

  October 11

  THE CAPITOL, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  With Congress eager to return home for a last month of campaigning, House and Senate conferees did not need lengthy negotiations on a final spending bill for AIDS research. On the eve of the congressional recess, House leaders agreed to increase their appropriations for AIDS to $93 million to coincide with the funds the Senate allocated after the leak of Dr. Brandt’s memo. As it turned out, the Department of Health and Human Services had never forwarded any of Brandt’s requests to Capitol Hill for consideration, prompting Representative Henry Waxman to hold a hearing that was little more than an opportunity to rake HHS officials over the coals.