And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition (9 page)

It was November 1, 1980, the beginning of a month in which single frames of tragedy in this and that corner of the world would begin to flicker fast enough to reveal the movement of something new and horrible rising slowly from the earth’s biological landscape.

November 1980

U
NIVERSITY OF
C
ALIFORNIA,
L
OS
A
NGELES

Finally, something interesting.

Dr. Michael Gottlieb’s four-month career as an assistant professor at UCLA had proved anything but scintillating. Fresh from his training at Stanford, the thirty-two-year-old immunologist had done what ambitious young scientists are supposed to do when they get their first job at a prestigious medical research center: He went to work with mice. Gottlieb had dutifully brought his own mice from Stanford to UCLA and planned to study the effects of radiation on their immune system, but the damned rodents kept dropping dead from viruses they had picked up in Los Angeles. Gottlieb wasn’t terribly enthralled by bench work anyway, so he put out the word that his residents should beat the bushes for something interesting—some patient that might teach them a thing or two about the immune system.

It didn’t take long for an eager young resident to come back with the story of a young man who was suffering from a yeast infection in his throat that was so severe he could hardly breathe. Babies born with defects in their immune systems sometimes suffered from this florid candidiasis, as would a cancer patient who had been loaded down with chemotherapy, Gottlieb knew, but he’d never seen such a thing in a thirty-one-year-old who appeared perfectly healthy in other respects.

Gottlieb and his residents examined the young man and collectively scratched their heads.

Two days later, the patient, an artist, complained of shortness of breath. He had also developed a slight cough. On a hunch, Gottlieb twisted some arms to convince pathologists to take a small scraping of the patient’s lung tissue through a nonsurgical maneuver. The results presented young Doctor Gottlieb with the strangest array of symptoms he’d ever heard of—the guy had
Pneumocystis carinii
pneumonia.

Gottlieb walked a tube of blood down the hall to a lab immunologist who, like himself, was always on the lookout for something that broke the routine. This researcher was specializing in the new science of T-cells, the recently discovered white blood cells that are key components of the immune system. Gottlieb asked for a T-cell count on the patient. There are two kinds of T-lymphocyte cells to look for: T-helper cells that activate the specific disease-fighting cells and give chemical instructions for creating the antibodies that destroy microbial invaders, and the T-suppressor cells that tell the immune system when the threat ended. The colleague ran his tests on the patient’s blood, laboriously hand-counting the subgroups of T-cells. He was floored by the outcome: There weren’t any T-helper cells. Figuring he had made a mistake, he tested the blood again, with the same results.

Hot damn. What kind of disease tracked down and killed such specific blood cells? Gottlieb brainstormed with residents, colleagues, and anyone with a spare hour. Nobody had a clue. Now Gottlieb was excited. He pored over his books and tracked down research on obscure immunological diseases. Nothing explained it. He also examined the minutiae of the artist’s medical charts; he had suffered from a cornucopia of venereal diseases. In a conversation, the patient mentioned that he was gay, but Gottlieb didn’t think any more of that than the fact the guy might drive a Ford.

After weeks of fruitless investigation, Gottlieb was still stumped. Maybe some leukemia would surface later on. In a year or two, he thought, we’ll find out what’s wrong.

November 4

S
AN
F
RANCISCO

“I don’t have to vote,” the housewife said.

Bill Kraus, holding his neatly piled slate cards from the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club, tried to control his temper. As far as he was concerned, voting was like breathing: How could you
not
do it? The woman cut him short.

“Jimmy Carter was just on TV,” she said. “He’s already conceded the election.”

“Just like that Georgian jerk to call it quits before they were even done voting on the West Coast,” Bill groaned after he got back to the headquarters on Castro Street.

The national debacle shaping up was no major surprise. Ronald Reagan was sweeping the country and bringing in the first Republican Senate in nearly thirty years. There wasn’t much satisfaction in the thought that, for the first time, gays indeed had been a serious campaign issue—for the other side. To be sure, the Carter camp ended up making every concession gays wanted. They had to in order to battle independent candidate John Anderson, who was even more forthcoming in his attempt to capture gay votes, which tend to concentrate in the urban centers of states rich in electoral votes. However, in the South, the Republicans had used all this to their advantage.

“The gays in San Francisco elected a mayor,” announced the solemn voice in television ads aimed at southern voters. The visuals shifted from photos of deviate-looking gay rights marchers to a still of President Carter. “Now they’re going to elect a president.”

Religious fundamentalists, who had burst forth in 1977 specifically over the volatile gay issue, had been emboldened by their successful repeals of homosexual rights laws in a dozen cities in the late 1970s, and they organized as never before for the 1980 election. Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority became household words, and analysts heralded the fundamentalists as the most important new political force to emerge in America in decades. Falwell and his New Right compatriots rarely let a speech go by without some dark reference to the growing clout of homosexuals, often paired with a citation from Revelation, indicating that this already had been prophesied as a precursor to the Last Days.

On television, Falwell quickly claimed credit for the Reagan landslide and announced he would push forward with his pro-family, and anti-gay, legislative agenda. Most analysts, however, pinned the conservative landslide on the sheer unpopularity of incumbent Carter and the fact that people seemed ready for a frugal government that pledged cuts in domestic spending.

Cleve Jones swept into the gay headquarters with his boss, California Assembly Speaker Leo McCarthy, while Bill Kraus, Gwenn Craig, and their cronies were assessing the impact these Baptist loonies would have on the administration. They cheerfully reminded themselves that a Democratic House could probably stall the anti-gay legislation Falwell had ambitiously proposed. Other than that, the Republican regime would largely mean massive cutbacks in domestic programs that had little effects on gays. The gay politicos turned their attention to local election results. Voters had just thrown out the city’s method of electing supervisors by district. Gays had fought hard for district elections in the 1970s, largely because it seemed that no gay candidate could ever be elected citywide; there just wasn’t that kind of power then. Harvey Milk had won his seat as a district supervisor, and Bill Kraus had slaved for months to engineer the election of Milk’s successor, Harry Britt, in the citywide election. As aides phoned in the results from City Hall, the extent of gay entrenchment in San Francisco became obvious. Harry Britt was easily elected supervisor. Bill’s strategy of building coalitions with Chinese, labor, and liberal groups had succeeded beyond his own expectations. Tim Wolf red, a former Britt aide and Milk Club officer, had also won a citywide race to the San Francisco Community College Board of Directors.

Even better, the results demonstrated that the gay neighborhoods, again, were showing the highest voter registration, feeding the highest voter turnouts in the city. Gay precincts were also proving to be the city’s most liberal, churning out ten-to-one majorities for incumbent Democratic Senator Alan Cranston. Returns from big cities across the country also confirmed the wisdom of targeting gay precincts for the old-fashioned door-to-door ward politics Bill Kraus had helped fashion in San Francisco. Some of the largest Carter voting blocs in Manhattan, New Orleans, and Houston were from homosexual neighborhoods. Quick calculations showed that 62 percent of gay voters in the big cities were going for Carter, compared with 27 percent for Reagan and a surprisingly strong 11 percent for Anderson.

Cleve Jones and Bill Kraus couldn’t conceal their relief at the returns. With its religious-right alliances, this would not be an administration friendly to homosexuals, but it didn’t matter. Whatever happened nationally, they told each other, at least gays were dug in across the country in safe urban enclaves. Jerry Falwell wouldn’t have much say in the city councils of areas where gays were concentrated. That was where the decisions that truly affected the day-today life of homosexuals were made.

As the crowd at the headquarters thinned, Bill shuffled through the posters, leaflets, and slate cards that littered the floor and remembered the euphoric night three years before when Harvey Milk was elected. It was a vaguely troubling thought. Back then, it had been so clear what they were fighting for. There were visible foes, like Anita Bryant and John Briggs’s anti-gay schoolteachers referendum. Now, in such a short time, they had already won much of what they wanted, at least in San Francisco. The votes were still there, but the fire had left the politics of Castro Street. What were they fighting for now?

November 15

S
T
. L
UKE’S
-R
OOSEVELT
H
OSPITAL,
N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY

Enno Poersch put Nick’s hand in his own strong grip, hoping his optimism might course into the vacant man’s eyes.

“This is great,” said Enno. “They finally know what you have. Now they’ll be able to cure you and you’ll be fine.”

Nick was still so exhausted from the surgery he could barely manage a smile. The white gauze still capped most of his head. The exploratory surgery had been most indelicate. The doctors had simply taken off the top of Nick’s skull to try to figure out what had created the three massive lesions. The effort had at last produced a diagnosis. Nick, they said, had toxoplasmosis; yes, it could be treated.

“Everything’s gonna be fine,” Enno said.

November 25

S
AN
F
RANCISCO

Ken Home had always wanted to be a dancer, performing a dazzling array of pirouettes, entrechats, and arabesques before a rapt audience that would nod approvingly at his grace and beauty. A glowingly optimistic sort, he loved everything about the theater, with its romance and costumes and fairy-tale happy endings. Maybe he could even be a star, the guy people cheered and wrote about. That’s why he had left his blue-collar family in Oregon and moved to San Francisco in 1965, when he was twenty-one, to study at the San Francisco Ballet School. A nose job had complemented an otherwise delicate face, and his body was hard and muscular from years of training. The sheer contrast between his childhood plainness and his adult beauty made Ken’s introduction to San Francisco gay life rewarding. All these men liked him so much, and he so desperately wanted to be liked. Sometimes, he confided to friends, he felt like a Cinderella who had finally arrived at the ball.

Maybe that’s why it was easier to let go of the dancer’s dream in the late 1960s. Ken told friends a vague story about the ballet director decreeing that all the single men had to get married or engaged to stay in the company, something about hating to be embarrassed by all the dancers’ arrests in gay bar raids. In any event, Ken dropped out of the ballet school, assuring friends he would get back into it once he got his finances straightened out. In 1969, he took a clerical job at the Bay Area Rapid Transit system and found he liked the regular paycheck as well as a work week that was a dream compared to the regimen of 6 A.M. to 9 P.M. he’d followed with the ballet. He had more time to go out at night now. “This isn’t so bad after all,” he told a friend. “I’m having fun.”

Ken soon fell in love with a German sign painter and lost touch with his early San Francisco friends, who recalled a sweet young kid who loved romance. They were surprised five years later to happen into Ken at the Folsom Prison, a leather bar. His hair was cut severely and he sported a close-cropped, narrow beard that followed the line of his jaw like a chin strap on some Nazi helmet. His old friends were floored, not only because he was so thoroughly the prototype of the black leather machismo then sweeping San Francisco, but also because he looked so wasted. His hair had gone gray and his eyes looked glazed. Ken complained about how tough it was in this “city of bottoms” to find a man who would screw him.

His friends decided that Ken had fallen into the trap that had snared so many beautiful gay men. In his twenties, he had searched for a husband instead of a career. When he did not find a husband, he took the next best thing—sex—and soon sex became something of a career. It wasn’t love but at least it felt good; for all his time at the Cinderella ball, the prince had never arrived.

As the focus of sex shifted from passion to technique, Ken learned all the things one could do to wring pleasure from one’s body. The sexual practices would become more esoteric; that was the only way to keep it from getting boring. The warehouse district alleys of both Manhattan and San Francisco had throughout the 1970s grown increasingly crowded with bars for the burgeoning numbers of leathermen like Ken Home. By 1980, it was a regular industry.

Life is a disappointment, Ken was thinking as he walked into San Francisco’s largest medical office building on the morning of November 25, 1980. It was an ironic thought for a man who was taking his first steps toward finally becoming someone that people would write about.