And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition (83 page)

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 syndrome. 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

T
HE
C
APITOL
,
W
ASHINGTON
, 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.

“Every day there are deaths that are a monument to your irresponsibility,” Waxman berated the HHS budget chief.

The final allocation passed within hours of the conference negotiations and represented a 60 percent increase over what President Reagan had requested for AIDS funds. It marked the fourth fiscal year in which Congress had constructed its own AIDS budget over the objections of the administration. The budget included $58 million for the National Institutes of Health and $23 million for the Centers for Disease Control.

The day after Congress appropriated these funds, Dr. Edward Brandt announced he was leaving the administration at the end of the year.

Days after adjournment, however, another dispute erupted between Congress and the administration. Included in the last-minute appropriations was an extra $8.35 million for the Food and Drug Administration to rush the development of an HTLV-III antibody test. The administration, however, decided it would only use $475,000 of the funds for the blood test, allowing the rest of the money to revert back to the treasury. Already, the administration was behind on its April promise to have a blood test available in blood banks within six months. The reluctance to spend money to speed the test stupefied both Republican and Democratic senators. The ensuing outcry, however, created little interest within the news media and brought no response from the administration.

October 25

C
ASTRO
T
HEATER
,
S
AN
F
RANCISCO

The premiere of a documentary film on Harvey Milk moved Bill Kraus briefly back to the glory days of the gay movement in San Francisco, when the enemy was Anita Bryant, not some virus, and the dream seemed so clear. After the lights rose and the applause faded, everybody congratulated Bill on how articulate he had been in the movie when he described what it was like marching with candles toward City Hall.

From across the theater, Cleve Jones saw Bill surrounded by admirers. Cleve had heard that Bill had been diagnosed, but Bill’s friends had also made it a point to tell Cleve he would not be a welcome guest at Bill’s doorstep. Bill’s friends had not forgiven Cleve for withdrawing his support for bathhouse closure six months before. Bill’s diagnosis came as the latest blow to Cleve, who walked daily in a cloud of constant personal despair. Of four roommates he had had in 1980, two were dead from AIDS and a third was suffering from ARC. Cleve’s excruciating shingles infection had cleared, but his lymph nodes remained swollen. And now Bill.