And the Band Played On

by Randy Shilts

  Brandt endorsed voluntary testing of high-risk groups, saying that the nation “must make progress at a faster rate” against the disease. He added that confidentiality guarantees should be in place as well because “numerous groups would create enormous pressure to report the names of people with the disease.”

  As for the past, Brandt conceded, “I don’t think we were as effective as we should have been in the early stages of this epidemic. There must be a mechanism for emergency procedures to deal with epidemics such as AIDS without sacrificing scientific standards. A continuing examination of our response capabilities is necessary…. Throwing money does not solve problems such as AIDS. Starving efforts don’t help the situation either.”

  As for the dark visions of the future, however, Brandt recommended calm, and he closed the session with a citation from his favorite book, the Bible.

  “This too shall pass.”

  April 21

  PUBLIC THEATER, NEW YORK CITY

  A thunderous ovation echoed through the theater. The people rose to their feet, applauding the cast returning to the stage to take their bows. Larry Kramer looked to his eighty-five-year-old mother. She had always wanted him to write for the stage, and Kramer had done that now. True, The Normal Heart was not your respectable Neil Simon fare, but a virtually unanimous chorus of reviewers had already proclaimed the play to be a masterpiece of political drama. Even before the previews were over, critics from every major news organization in New York City had scoured their thesauruses for superlatives to describe the play. NBC said it “beats with passion” Time magazine said it was “deeply affecting, tense and touching” the New York Daily News called it “an angry, unremitting and gripping piece of political theater.” One critic said Heart was to the AIDS epidemic what Arthur Miller’s The Crucible had been to the McCarthy era. New York Magazine critic John Simon, who had recently been overheard saying that he looked forward to when AIDS had killed all the homosexuals in New York theater, conceded in an interview that he left the play weeping.

  The formulation of AIDS public policy, whether local or federal, had never been animated by rational forces, and nothing proclaimed this truth like the impact The Normal Heart had demonstrated in recent weeks. With his drama, Larry Kramer had succeeded where the reasoned pleas of researchers and experts had failed, bringing the issue at last to the forefront of civic issues.

  Just hours before the first preview performance, as photocopied scripts of The Normal Heart circulated among the city’s news organizations, Mayor Ed Koch hurriedly called a press conference to announce “a comprehensive expansion of city services” for local AIDS patients. Koch shifted responsibility for AIDS from Health Commissioner Sencer to Deputy Mayor Victor Botnick and instituted the plans for coordinated care and long-term facilities that had been proposed years before by AIDS clinicians. Included in the new $6 million program were pledges of expanded home and hospice care, day-care programs for children with AIDS, and funds for ten interdisciplinary patient care teams at hospitals with large AIDS caseloads. The initiatives were a small fraction of what a city with one-third of the nation’s AIDS cases needed, but it was a start.

  In announcing the programs, Koch, who was up for reelection in six months, was characteristically combative. Rather than admit to any past shortcomings in AIDS funding, the mayor claimed the city was already spending $31 million on AIDS, or about 3,000 percent more than Koch’s own health commissioner had dubiously claimed in AIDS spending six weeks before. (It turned out that Koch was including in this expense the cost of every AIDS patient residing in a city hospital, expenses that could only be deferred if the city broke the law and evicted AIDS patients from every room. San Francisco and other cities kept no comparable statistics.) With braggadocio, Koch claimed that his new plan was so good that San Francisco might ultimately imitate New York’s response to AIDS. He dismissed suggestions that the city needed to do more to educate people, both straight and gay, about AIDS. “I think we’ll find out that the city is well informed,” he said.

  Koch directly answered the charge in The Normal Heart that he, a bachelor, had avoided a high profile in the epidemic for fear that his own life-style might be questioned: “Regrettably in our society, one technique used in order to seek to slander an individual is to simply accuse that individual of homosexuality. These charges are made even more frequently if the person is a single individual over the age of forty and unmarried. It is an outrageous charge because in many cases it is untrue and, even if true, is irrelevant.”

  Although Larry Kramer aspired for precisely such immediate political impact, audiences leaving the play seemed most struck by the broader themes of prejudice that held the play together. As far as Kramer was concerned, AIDS was not the wrath of God but the wrath of heterosexuals. Heterosexuals had decreed that gays could not legally marry or even live together in any semblance of openness without risking ignominy. The gay movement, in Kramer’s view, had colluded with straights by becoming a cause of sexual liberation, rather than human liberation. As Kramer’s alter ego in the play, Ned Weeks, said, “Why didn’t you guys fight for the right to get married instead of the right to legitimize promiscuity?” The play ended with Weeks marrying his lover in a hospital bed, moments before the lover succumbed to AIDS.

  As for GMHC, Kramer decried the group as a bunch of “Florence Nightingales” who had turned away from pressuring the government for their share of research funds and services in favor of the melodrama of deathbed scenes. “I thought I was starting a bunch of Ralph Naders or Green Berets,” fumed Weeks in Act II, “and at the first instant they have to take a stand on a political issue and fight, almost in front of my eyes they turn into a bunch of nurse’s aides.”

  Insiders gleefully picked out who was who in the cast, since virtually all the play’s characters were based on real people within the GMHC hierarchy. GMHC executive director Rodger McFarlane, Kramer’s own lover, became Tommy, an adorable southern queen confronting the daily dramas of suffering that comprised so much of GMHC work. Stolid GMHC president Paul Popham became Bruce Niles in the drama, worrying about whether the word “gay” should be openly displayed on GMHC party invitations.

  Paul Popham had heard enough about the play’s preview performances to decide against attending the show. He had already heard the rhetoric many times over, and he had other things on his mind now.

  In March, the doctor had told Paul that the purple spot on his neck was Kaposi’s sarcoma. Paul had taken the news stoically and told only a very few close friends. He had noticed that once people knew you had AIDS, they treated you differently, and he did not want people treating him differently. Friends pleaded with him to take advantage of the support network he had played such a central role in creating at GMHC, but Paul declined. That was for other people, he said, not for him.

  Paul Popham had no doubt that he had done the right thing in his stewardship at GMHC, despite all the bad publicity GMHC was getting now. He did not feel he was a murderer for not agreeing with Larry Kramer. Paul had given up four years of his life for the organization and, in the process, lost a lot. He had lost the comfortable confidence he once held in his adopted city, and he felt betrayed by a government for which he had fought and in which he had spent a lifetime believing.

  He had gained something, as well, something he never knew had value. Being gay, as such, had never meant much to Paul Popham, and he had never seen the sense of all this gay-movement talk. Now, when he saw a GMHC volunteer returning from the bedside of a dying man, he realized he had gained faith in his embattled gay community. Larry Kramer might call it the work of gray ladies, but Paul viewed the GMHC volunteers as pioneers, imbuing this community with a measure of dignity. The vigils at deathbeds testified to the value of each gay life being snuffed out in this epidemic. The presence of just one witness to the deaths of the lonely sufferers said aloud, “This person was worth something. He was a person.”

  Larry Kramer was fond of saying, “There are no heroes in the
AIDS epidemic,” but Paul Popham disagreed. There were heroes in the AIDS epidemic, he thought, lots of them.

  Within weeks of Paul Popham’s diagnosis, Enno Poersch learned that still another friend from the house on Ocean Walk in the summer of 1980 had AIDS. The late Rick Wellikoff’s lover, Bob, was preparing to leave for Paris to receive HPA-23 treatments when The Normal Heart premiered. It was a shattering time for Enno, recalling that first rush of tragedy that had accompanied Nick’s death four years before. Now Rick was dead, and another Ocean Walk roommate, Wes, was dead, and Paul’s boyfriend Jack was dead, and Paul and Bob were dying.

  This was the last summer Enno would lease the house on Ocean Walk. There were now several Fire Island homes that had earned the kind of ghostly reputation that had accrued to Enno’s summer home. People walked by these houses, and somebody would point, and then they’d all nod and walk a little faster. Enno’s new lover was so upset by the number of deaths among the house’s former residents that he refused to step inside the building.

  It had started five years before, when Nick had come home from work with diarrhea. As far as Enno was concerned, however, it could have been a century ago, so much had happened and so much had changed. With so many of his friends dead from AIDS while he remained as healthy as ever, Enno sometimes felt like he was enjoying a picnic lunch in the eye of a hurricane. The only way out was to become part of the hurricane and perish, and so he stayed in the center, his life wholly encompassed by gales of death.

  As New York City belatedly began to grapple with the epidemic, AIDS policy matters were becoming local issues in a number of jurisdictions. In Massachusetts, Democratic Governor Michael Dukakis enraged gay leaders by submitting a $3.3 billion health and human services budget that did not earmark one cent for AIDS. In 1984, when Dukakis had made a similar oversight, the legislature had allocated $1.5 million for education and university research. After substantial pressure, Dukakis added $1.63 million to the 1985-1986 budget.

  In New York State, Governor Mario Cuomo, another Democrat with liberal credentials, also was accused of shortchanging AIDS research. For the third year in a row, his budget proposal for state spending was below that suggested by health authorities. When pressed as to why New York State would spend only $3 million for education and direct services, compared with the $9 million being spent in San Francisco, Mel Rosen, the New York AIDS Institute director, adopted the rhetoric of the Reagan administration. “In New York, we don’t believe in throwing money at a problem,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do with $9 million.” Health workers in poor and minority communities, where the state had yet to spend any money to stem the tide of AIDS among intravenous drug users, quickly informed Rosen of plenty of ways to spend such funds.

  The objections that Democratic governors had voiced against state AIDS spending were a comfort to conservative California Governor George Deukmejian. In May 1985, Deukmejian was embroiled in his ritualistic fight with Democratic legislators over AIDS funding. After an exhaustive seven hearings on the next year’s AIDS budget, the legislature approved $21.5 million in AIDS spending. Deukmejian vetoed $11.6 million of it, part of which was restored. When Democrats criticized the governor, Republicans pointed out that California was spending more on AIDS than every other state in the nation combined, and that the western Republican was approving far more AIDS funds than the eastern Democrats. These were difficult arguments to counter.

  Public health issues continued to percolate on the local level, giving health officials a taste of what the future would hold. In Oakland, for example, a gay AIDS patient was making repeated visits to a local venereal disease clinic with sundry sexually transmitted diseases. He admitted that he did not warn his contacts of his health problems and ignored advice that he might cut down on unsafe sex. When Dr. Robert Benjamin, the county communicable disease director, gathered gay leaders to discuss the problem, the gay press branded him an anti-gay bigot out to lock up every homosexual in a concentration camp.

  Bathhouse owners nervously waited for the onslaught of national closures that was expected after San Francisco banned sexual behavior in bathhouses. The Association of Independent Gay Health Clubs had announced that it had raised $500,000 in pledges to pay legal fees to fight closure. It was more than the group had ever proposed to spend on AIDS prevention, critics noted. Indeed, there was so much nervousness about AIDS education that the Club Bath Association threatened the Key West Club Baths with expulsion if they proceeded with a plan to sponsor a five-part local television program on the syndrome.

  In early May, a number of bath owners were considering withdrawing from the Club Bath Association, because of that group’s opposition to any AIDS education in bathhouses. The association’s executive director, however, stood firm. “Where do we draw the line?” he asked in a letter to shareholders. “If a person died in a sauna, would we instruct all our members to remove saunas from all our clubs?” Rather than rush into handing out AIDS brochures, the director suggested that businesses adopt a “wait and see” attitude toward the epidemic.

  The first controversy over the wisdom of California’s antibody test law erupted in San Francisco after a gay man, claiming he had AIDS, bit a police officer. The officer wanted the man tested for the AIDS virus, and the district attorney’s office said it might press charges of “assault with the intent to do great bodily harm” if the man was infected.

  However, the antibody test law gave all the rights to the man who did the biting. He could not be forced to have the test, a judge ruled, and a doctor would be violating the law if he released antibody test results without the man’s permission. As far as the officer was concerned, however, he was the victim. What about his civil rights?

  AIDSpeakers had not anticipated this. They operated on the principle that a person with AIDS could do no wrong. Therefore, the policeman was subjected to the kind of vicious personal attacks meted out to those who dared to think dangerous thoughts. The only thing that saved the policeman from being accused of wanting all gays locked up in concentration camps was the fact that he was openly gay himself, having been the first person to join the local police force by invoking the city’s gay anti-discrimination law.

  It was in response to the policeman’s suit, however, that the press liaison for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation fashioned the ultimate expression of AIDSpeak, when she said that the officer was suffering from “AIDSphobia.”

  What was AIDSphobia?

  “That’s acting like AIDS is the worst thing that could possibly happen to you,” she said.

  CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL, ATLANTA

  AIDS statistics were now tabulated on a Model 277 Display computer in Room 274 of Building 6 at CDC headquarters. Every week, a crew of people, whose job consisted of updating weekly AIDS body counts, categorized the deaths by risk group and geographic region. In the last week of April 1985, exactly four years after drug technician Sandra Ford had written a memo about unusual orders of pentamidine from a New York City gay doctor, the computer said that the number of AIDS cases in the United States had surpassed 10,000.

  56

  ACCEPTANCE

  May 1985

  MAUI, HAWAII

  If he were fated to die of AIDS, Cleve Jones did not want to undergo the public deterioration that had marked the last months of so many of his other friends. When Cleve left San Francisco, he bought a one-way ticket, thinking he might never return alive. Within a few weeks of his arrival on Maui, however, his health problems cleared. The furrows in his brow smoothed, and he began to think he might stay in Hawaii, not to die, but to enjoy life again.

  Cleve spent his days smoking marijuana and wandering through the plush forests; every night he went to Maui’s gay bar, Hamburger Mary’s, and drank vodka martinis until closing time. It was a good life for the first month, but then his conscience started bothering him. One morning, Cleve woke up and announced to himself: “Today, I start taking care of myself. I’m not going to drink. I’m going to get healthy.�
�� That night, however, he found himself back at Hamburger Mary’s drinking vodka martinis. Day after day, he awoke with the same resolution, and every night he was back at Hamburger Mary’s.

  The drinking, he knew now, was completely out of control. It had been out of control for years, but he had not admitted it to himself. He had denied his problem, been angry with it, and even bargained with it, assuring himself that he could drink moderately if only he could drink. But Cleve did not control his drinking; the drinking controlled him. His hangovers were worse than ever, and an emptiness seized his spirit. Remorseful mornings followed drunken nights, and still he could not make himself stop.

  Who was Cleve Jones? What had become of the idealist who once led demonstrations to protest injustice? That Cleve was gone. There seemed nothing left of him, except the compulsion to drink. It was when this awareness overwhelmed him that Cleve thumbed through the phone book and called the number he knew he had to dial.

  That night, Cleve edged nervously into the Wailuku Community Center and slid into a folding metal chair in the back of the room. He listened to a thirteen-year-old boy and an eighty-year-old man talk about their struggles with alcohol; he recognized the common threads that wove their stories into his, and he began to weep.

  In the days that followed, Cleve stayed home and read books about alcoholism. He felt fear growing in his stomach, knowing that if he failed to act now, there would be no hope. If he survived the epidemic, he would not survive his addiction to alcohol. He would either learn to live with the truth or be prepared to die with the lie.