And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition (101 page)

For his part, Gallo dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. He already was a star in the field of human retrovirology without the discovery of HTLV-III, he said. Of course, he wanted a Nobel Prize and he believed he deserved one, but he would not commit a scientific felony to achieve it.

Facing the possibility of open court hearings, the U.S. government began to reconsider fighting the French. In the early months of 1987, Dr. Jonas Salk shuttled between the warring scientists like an ambassador at large, forging a compromise. Ultimately, the settlement was signed by President Reagan and French President Jacques Chirac in a White House ceremony. It was one of the first times in the history of science that heads of state were called upon to resolve a dispute over a viral discovery.

The settlement accorded each researcher partial credit for various discoveries on the way to isolating HIV. It was from this settlement, and because none of the mainstream press had pursued the controversy in any depth, that the pleasant fiction had arisen that Drs. Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier were “co-discoverers” of the AIDS virus. To this extent, Gallo had won. Now, moments before the president was to deliver his first speech on the epidemic, Gallo accepted his award for being a “co-discoverer” of HIV.

Dr. Mathilde Krim stepped forward to give a comparable award to Montagnier. Perhaps it was all the memories that jarred the normally unflappable Krim that night. Until that point the ceremony certainly had been polite enough. Krim, however, had spent so many of the past four years fighting for people to care, whether in the New York City Department of Health or in the federal government, that she would not be silent and courteous, not when there was still so much to do.

There were AIDS treatments on the shelf that needed to be tested, for instance, but the drug testing process had been stalled. There was talk that no treatment or vaccine would get quick FDA approval for experimentation unless it was developed by the federal government; among AIDS organizers, NIH had become the acronym for the agency disinterested in treatments that were Not Invented Here. There was no stop the government did not pull out for AZT, a drug the NCI had originally developed. However, there seemed no bit of red tape too minor to delay the release of other treatments. Throughout the country, vast networks of gay men now distributed their own AIDS treatments, some obtained in Mexico, others put together in kitchen laboratories.

The delays and disorder, Krim knew, was due less to malevolence than to incompetence, bureaucratic bumbling, and, most importantly, the lack of any leadership on AIDS within the administration.

Krim told the crowd that she had heard optimistic talk about a vaccine that might come for AIDS, someday, and she had heard of possible treatments, someday.

“But when?” Krim pleaded, as her audience suddenly fell silent.

Outside the tent, where the echo of protesters could be faintly heard, was a candlelight vigil, she noted.

“Thousands of candles, carried by people with AIDS, are flickering in the night, asking the question of us. ‘When?’ The answer to that question depends on the national will.”

Tim Westmoreland sat near the back of the tent, a few rows behind Paul Volberding, waiting for the applause for Dr. Montagnier to die down. President Reagan would speak next.

As counsel to the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, Westmoreland had worked on AIDS for longer than just about anyone on Capitol Hill, back in the days when he and Bill Kraus counted themselves lucky if their struggles could get an extra $2 million for AIDS research tacked on to a supplemental appropriations bill. The days of such nickel and diming were past. Only a week earlier Senator Kennedy had introduced legislation calling for nearly $1 billion in AIDS spending for the next year, and it appeared that a figure close to this amount would ultimately be enacted. Money was no longer the key issue, Westmoreland understood. It was leadership.

Westmoreland hoped the president’s speech would not focus on testing, but on research and education, the only real ways the epidemic could be fought. Westmoreland and Senate aides had been carefully formulating bipartisan AIDS legislation for this session of Congress. Democrats and moderate Republicans both seemed eager for some compromise, because most leaders understood that AIDS had a dangerous potential if it were overly politicized. It touched too many nerves and engendered too many fears; it was better left to the offices of public health departments. As the old saying went, when war is contemplated, turn to your politicians; when war is declared, turn to your generals. By declaring a national war on AIDS, Westmoreland thought, Reagan could at last give his moral support to the generals of public health and pull the battle away from the politicians and all their calls for mandatory AIDS testing.

“Ladies and gentleman,” Dr. Silverman said, “the President of the United States.”

Ronald Reagan grinned boyishly and started his first address on AIDS with the words, “Many years ago, when I worked for General Electric Theater…”

After a brief reminiscence about GE Theater, the president decided to tell a little joke. It was a story he told often at fund-raising dinners, about a charity committee that goes to the wealthiest man in town to seek a contribution.

“Our book shows that you haven’t contributed any money this year,” the committee tells the man.

The prosperous businessman asks if the charity committee’s book shows that he has an infirm mother and a disabled brother.

“Why no,” the committee says. “We didn’t know that.”

“Well,” the man retorts. “I don’t give them any money. Why should I give any to you?”

The crowd laughed uncertainly. Tim Westmoreland marveled at how much the joke summed up Reagan’s handling of AIDS: He hadn’t ascribed much importance or funding priority to any other non-armaments program during his presidency, why should he have given any to AIDS?

“That wasn’t a joke,” said Westmoreland to the friend sitting next to him. “That was a fable.”

In the next twenty minutes, the president laid out his views on AIDS. There was little talk of education and a lot of talk about testing. There was no mention, however, of confidentiality guarantees or civil rights protection for those who tested positive. Reagan’s program, of course, would do very little to actually stop the spread of AIDS. Though testing heterosexuals at marriage license bureaus created the illusion of action, very few of these people were infected with the virus and very few lives would be saved. But then saving lives had never been a priority of the Reagan administration. Reagan’s speech was not meant to serve the public health; it was a political solution to a political problem. The words created a stance that was politically comfortable for the president and his adherents; it was also a stance that killed people. Already, some said that Ronald Reagan would be remembered in history books for one thing beyond all else: He was the man who had let AIDS rage through America, the leader of the government that when challenged to action had placed politics above the health of the American people.

All afternoon, Larry Kramer had asked himself how he would respond this night to President Reagan’s speech. Though Larry remained one of the most outspoken gay activists in the country, he was no longer alone in his rage against the Reagan administration. Even Kramer’s sharpest critics could no longer maintain he was wrong, even if his personal style had been off-putting; he had only been ahead of his time. With the success of
The Normal Heart,
Kramer had found his measure of vindication, and another play was beginning to form itself in his imagination. He had even made his peace with Paul Popham, the staid GMHC president with whom he had had so many struggles in the early years. When they talked for the last time, only days before Paul died, Larry apologized for their fights, and Paul just said, “Keep fighting.”

Though mellower, Kramer still felt compelled to make some protest when Reagan spoke. Other gay advocates present that night agreed, but no protest had been organized. Dr. Krim had passed word that she and other AIDS researchers would walk out if Reagan endorsed mandatory testing, but his speech had artfully dodged such a call. In fact, the speech seemed crafted to touch on all the right themes. There were calls for compassion and understanding, and tributes for the volunteer efforts helping people with AIDS. Reagan even singled out San Francisco’s Shanti Project for praise.

As Larry listened, he became aware the president’s speech made no mention of the word “gay.” There was talk about hemophiliacs who got AIDS, transfusion recipients, and the spouses of intravenous drug abusers, but the G-word was never spoken. And then Reagan turned to the nitty-gritty of testing.

Larry’s temper began to rise. There was something so utterly dishonest about discussing almost every aspect of the AIDS epidemic in this address and not mentioning the fact that it was homosexuals who had been killed and homosexuals who had, in fact, done so much of the work in fighting the epidemic for all those years that Reagan had ignored it.

On the night President Reagan finally spoke, Paul Popham was three weeks dead, having gone to his grave profoundly disillusioned with the United States, the country in which he had always believed, the country for which he had fought in Vietnam. This country had turned its back on Popham and his friends and let them die. And now Reagan refused to talk about Paul Popham or any of the gay men who had shown such courage for so many years, as if Popham had played an embarrassing role in the epidemic and not Reagan himself. And when Reagan started talking about testing, as if he were really proposing policies that might at last do something to stop the epidemic, the anger of six years welled up inside Larry Kramer, and he began to jeer.

By the time President Reagan had delivered his first speech on the epidemic of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed with the disease; 20,849 had died.

T
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When Dr. Dan William remembered the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade on a sunny day in June 1980, he was struck by how naive he had been. That must have been what it was like in Europe in the 1920s, before the Depression and war, when everyone was so rambunctiously and hedonistically joyous and so oblivious to the future and their own vulnerability.