And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition (3 page)

June 29, 1980

S
AN
F
RANCISCO

The sun melted the morning fog to reveal a vista so clear, so crystalline that you worried it might break if you stared too hard. The Transamerica Pyramid towered over the downtown skyline, and the bridges loped toward hills turning soft gold in the early summer heat. Rainbow flags fluttered in the gentle breezes.

Seven men were beginning their day. Bill Kraus, fresh from his latest political triumph in Washington, D.C., was impatient to get to the foot of Market Street to take his place at the head of the largest parade in San Francisco. There was much to celebrate.

In his apartment off Castro Street, in the heart of San Francisco’s gay ghetto, Cleve Jones waited anxiously for his lover to get out of bed. This was parade day, Cleve kept repeating. No man, even the delightful muffin lolling lazily in the bed next to him, would make him late for this day of days. Cleve loved the sight of homosexuals, thousands strong. It was he who had led the gay mob that rioted at City Hall just a year ago, although he had now refashioned himself into the utterly respectable aide to one of California’s most powerful politicians. He wasn’t selling out, Cleve told friends impishly; he was just adding a new chapter to his legend. “Meet me at the parade,” he called to his sleepy partner as he finally dashed for the door. “I can’t be late.”

A few blocks away, Dan William waited to meet David Ostrow. The two doctors were in town for a gathering of gay physicians at San Francisco State University. At home in New York City, gay parades drew only 30,000 or so; Dan William tried to imagine what a parade with hundreds of thousands of gays would look like. From what he had heard, David Ostrow was glad they didn’t have parades like San Francisco’s in Chicago; it would never play.

On California Street, airline steward Gaetan Dugas examined his face closely in the mirror. The scar, below his ear, was only slightly visible. His face would soon be unblemished again. He had come all the way from Toronto to enjoy this day, and for the moment he would put aside the troubling news the doctors had delivered just a few weeks before.

In the Mission District, the Gay Freedom Day Parade was the event twenty-two-year-old Kico Govantes had anticipated the entire five weeks he’d been in San Francisco. The tentative steps Kico had taken in exploring his homosexuality at a small Wisconsin college could now turn to proud strides. Maybe among the thousands who had been streaming into the city all week, Kico would find the lover he sought.

Before.

It was to be the word that would define the permanent demarcation in the lives of millions of Americans, particularly those citizens of the United States who were gay. There was life after the epidemic. And there were fond recollections of the times before.

Before and after. The epidemic would cleave lives in two, the way a great war or depression presents a commonly understood point of reference around which an entire society defines itself.

Before would encompass thousands of memories laden with nuance and nostalgia. Before meant innocence and excess, idealism and hubris. More than anything, this was the time before death. To be sure, Death was already elbowing its way through the crowds on that sunny morning, like a rude tourist angling for the lead spot in the parade. It was still an invisible presence, though, palpable only to twenty, or perhaps thirty, gay men who were suffering from a vague malaise. This handful ensured that the future and the past met on that single day.

People like Bill Kraus and Cleve Jones, Dan William and David Ostrow had lived through a recent past that had offered triumphs beyond their hopes; the future would present challenges beyond anything they could possibly fear. For them, and millions more, including many who considered themselves quite separate from such lives in San Francisco, this year would provide the last clear memories of the time before. Nothing would ever be the same again.

Bill Kraus looked up Market Street toward the Castro District, unable to find an end to the colorful crowd that had converged on downtown San Francisco for the Gay Freedom Day Parade. Bill ran his hands through his thick, curly brown hair and decided again that never was there a better place and time to be homosexual than here in this beautiful city on this splendid day when all gay people, no matter how diverse, became expressions of the same thought: We don’t need to hide anymore.

Standing at the front of the parade, behind the banner announcing the gay and lesbian delegates to the 1980 Democratic National Convention, Bill Kraus retraced the steps that had brought him to this day and this parade. Primarily, he recalled the hiding and that nameless fear of being what he was, a homosexual. For years he had hidden the truth from others and, even worse, from himself. It was hard now to fathom the fear and self-hatred of those years without hope. The entire epoch seemed some kind of dream, a memory that had no real part in his waking life today.

At times, he wondered what he had been thinking all those years. Of what had he been so afraid? It wasn’t just being Catholic. The edification of thirteen years of Cincinnati parochial schools dissipated within months of his arrival at Ohio State in 1968. There, he grew his hair long and answered the call of the Bob Dylan songs he played incessantly on his beat-up stereo. “The first one now will later be last,” Dylan said. The times, they were a-changing. The message never rang true to him, not in the years of anti-Vietnam War marches or social activism, not until Bill had moved to Berkeley just a decade ago and discovered Castro Street and the promise of a new age.

There, with a middle-aged camera shop owner named Harvey Milk, Bill had learned the nuts and bolts of ward politics. He had learned how to walk precincts, study election maps, and forge coalitions. He had seen how everyone had power, how everyone could make a difference if only they believed and acted as if they could. This became the central tenet of his political catechism: “We can make a difference.” Bill now repeated it in every speech, and on this Gay Freedom Day he felt it more strongly than ever. Everything in the last three years—Harvey Milk’s election as supervisor and the first openly gay elected official in the nation, the political assassinations, and the consolidation of power after that—had conspired to convince Bill that it was true. Castro Street couldn’t even get its gutters swept a few years back; today, gays were the most important single voting bloc in the city, comprising at least one in four registered voters. Bill Kraus had become president of the city’s most powerful grass-roots organization, the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club.

The organizational power that he helped build had kept a gay seat on the board of supervisors after Harvey Milk’s assassination in 1978 for a one-time Methodist minister and Milk crony named Harry Britt. Bill Kraus had replaced Britt as president of the Milk Club and now worked as his aide in City Hall. He had also managed Britt’s reelection campaign in 1979, securing his reputation as the city’s leading gay tactician.

The city’s gay community was acquiring a legendary quality in political circles with influence far beyond the 70,000-odd votes it could boast in a city of 650,000. For the past three months, emissaries for presidential candidates had scoured the Castro neighborhood for votes. As other cities followed San Francisco’s blueprint for political success, a national political force was coalescing. Bill Kraus and Harry Britt were leaving in two weeks for New York to be Ted Kennedy delegates to the Democratic National Convention. With seventy delegates, the convention’s gay caucus was larger than the delegations of twenty states. This year, they would make a difference.

The gay parade had grown so mammoth in recent years that a good chunk of downtown San Francisco was needed just to get the scores of floats, contingents, and marching bands in proper order. While the parade assembled, Gwenn Craig smiled as she watched the young men mill near Bill Kraus, all thinking of some excuse to approach the famous young activist. Friends had teased Bill about his thirty-third birthday just days before; he was “l’age du Christ,” somebody had joked. Bill was scarcely the scruffy malcontent with whom Gwenn had spent so many leisurely afternoons in Castro Street cafes. His once-shaggy hair was now neatly cut, and his thick glasses were replaced by contacts, eliminating an owlish stare and revealing startling blue eyes. His body was superbly toned. He carried himself with increasing confidence, much like the body politic whose ideals he was articulating.

Bill Kraus was even beginning to cut his own national reputation. Just two weeks earlier, he had delivered an impassioned plea for a gay rights plank to the Democratic Platform Committee, which was hammering together a party agenda to present at the Democratic National Convention in July. Bill had delivered the address as a gay rights manifesto, articulating the goals of the nascent political force. Gay papers across the country had written up the performance for the issues being distributed on the gay pride weekend.

The gay rights plank, Bill Kraus said, “does not ask you to give us special privileges. It does not ask anyone to like us. It does not even ask that the Democratic party give us many of the legal protections which are considered the right of all other Americans.

“Fellow members of the Platform Committee, what this amendment asks in a time when we hear much from prominent members of the Democratic party about human rights is that the Democratic party recognize that we, the gay people of this country, are also human.”

The San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Marching Band blared the opening notes of “California Here I Come,” and the parade started its two-mile trek down Market Street toward City Hall. More than 30,000 people, grouped in 240 contingents, marched in the parade past 200,000 spectators. The parade was the best show in town, revealing the amazing diversity of gay life. Clusters of gay Catholics and Episcopalians, Mormons and atheists, organized for years in the city, marched proudly beneath their banners. Career-designated contingents of gays included lawyers and labor officials, dentists and doctors, accountants and the ubiquitous gay phone-company employees. There were lesbian moms, gay dads, and homosexual teenagers with their heterosexual parents. Gay blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and American Indians marched beneath banners proclaiming their dual pride. The campy Gays Against Brunch formed their own marching unit. A group of drag queens, dressed as nuns and calling themselves the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, had picked the day for their debut.