And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition (53 page)

May 24

“The sexual revolution has begun to devour its children. And among the revolutionary vanguard, the Gay Rights activists, the mortality rate is highest and climbing.”

The commentary that appeared in newspapers across the United States that day was the dropped shoe so many gay politicians had awaited. A speech writer for former President Nixon, Patrick J. Buchanan had served in recent years, as a right-winger without portfolio, making his most dashing appearances on editorial pages where editors were constantly searching for conservative columnists to compensate for the media’s liberal bias. Buchanan was said to hold much favor with the more conservative of White House aides, and so his first column on AIDS was viewed with much interest. Where would President Reagan, who had somehow managed to make it through two years of the epidemic without whispering a word about it, end up on AIDS? Conservatives thus far had stayed away from talk of the disease; even Jerry Falwell wasn’t saying much. Now, with AIDS in the headlines, those days were coming to an end and the first signs of potential backlash came with this column.

“The poor homosexuals—they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution,” Buchanan wrote.

Like most extremists, Buchanan did not strive for any particular consistency in his arguments. He drew on Kevin Cahill’s assertion of a “conspiracy of silence” about AIDS among doctors to support the contention that liberals were covering up the horrible threat to Americans posed by AIDS carrying homosexuals. He conjured the image of San Francisco’s police officers putting on their masks and gloves to establish the danger of AIDS. After citing many irrelevant medical statistics, Buchanan concluded by saying no homosexual should be permitted to handle food and that the Democratic party’s decision to hold their next convention in San Francisco would leave delegates’ spouses and children at the mercy of “homosexuals who belong to a community that is a common carrier of dangerous, communicable and sometimes fatal diseases.”

Days later, Buchanan followed this with a second column quoting from
The New York Times’
unfortunate coverage of the “routine close contact” study. Gays not only were slaughtering hemophiliacs and blood-transfusion recipients, Buchanan said, but now they threatened to kill children by working as pediatricians and custodians in day-care centers. “It has long been the defiant slogan of the gay rights movement that, so long as we don’t injure anyone, what we do is our own business,” he concluded. “If promiscuous homosexuals in the urban centers of New York and San Francisco are capable of transmitting death with a casual sexual contact, their slogan, to put it mildly, would no longer seem to apply.”

May 26

C
ASTRO
S
TREET
, S
AN
F
RANCISCO

“You’re a sexual Nazi.”

Bill Kraus heard variations on this theme from the moment he stepped onto Castro Street that afternoon. His essay calling on gay men to change their life-styles and redefine gay liberation had been printed in the
Bay Area Reporter
that hit the streets that afternoon. Bill had tried to be positive in the article, advancing the idea that “we gay men can transform this epidemic into our finest hour.” Nevertheless, the reaction was swift and nasty. Bill was called an “anti-sex” brownshirt, out to destroy the gay community with his talk about not going to bathhouses. Bill’s critics in the Toklas Club were ecstatic that he had handed them such explosive ammunition to use against the Milk Club.

The right wing was beginning to draw battle lines around issues of promiscuity and bathhouses. Rather than define their own battle lines, many gays adopted these issues as their front line of defense. By acknowledging defects in the old gay life-style, Bill had strayed to the enemy camp, as far as many of his critics were concerned. They started whispering the ultimate psychological insult, that he hated himself because he was gay, that he suffered from “internalized homophobia.”

Bill Kraus was crushed at the criticism, especially coming at a time when his own work on AIDS had accelerated into hyperdrive. He was working sixty-hour weeks at the congressional office, monitoring national AIDS legislation and funding. Days before, he had been elected to the board of directors of the National KS/AIDS Foundation that Marc Conant was organizing as an American Cancer Society-type group for AIDS. Bill was also working with Dana Van Gorder to devise a local public education campaign for AIDS risk reduction to try to bolster the long-stalled efforts of the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

“Don’t they see I want to save their lives?” Bill moaned to Kico Govantes.

Although the two weren’t lovers, Kico remained Bill’s confidant. Kico ran his fingers through Bill’s thick curly hair and hugged him. He couldn’t understand how gay politicians, people who said their cause was to promote love, could be so cruel to each other. He could also see that the rejection stung Bill deeply, far more acutely than something merely political should.

“If I get AIDS,” Bill said, “it’s going to be those people’s fault.”

In San Francisco, plague met politics. Instead of being confronted by a united authority with intelligent plans for defense, it found divided forces among which the question of its presence became the subject of factional dispute. There was open popular hostility to the work of the sanitarians, and war among the City, State and Federal Health authorities…For a while the people were in the gravest danger and it seemed impossible to convey any adequate warnings to them.

—
Eradicating Bubonic Plague from San Francisco, 1907,
The Report of the Citizens’ Health Committee

June 2, 1983

S
AN
F
RANCISCO
D
EPARTMENT OF
P
UBLIC
H
EALTH

“Dr. Silverman, this poster says people should have fewer sexual partners. Does that mean that if somebody had ten sexual partners a week last year that they can cut down to five sexual partners a week now and they won’t get AIDS?”

Merv Silverman looked uncomfortable. He had taken Barbara Taylor, a no-nonsense reporter for the all-news KCBS radio, and a
Chronicle
newsman to proudly unveil the health department’s AIDS poster, the one everybody was talking about.

“We’re trying to give a message that people will pay attention to,” said Silverman.

For five years Merv Silverman had served as a popular public health director. The media loved him; the gay community adored him. He wasn’t accustomed to such sharp questioning. Barbara Taylor, who had spent the last seven years listening to politicians, pressed on.

“Dr. Silverman, it says on this poster that people should limit their use of recreational drugs. Does that mean that if somebody was shooting up, say, three times a week, that they’d be safe from AIDS if they shot up just once a month? You’re not saying not to use recreational drugs; you say limit your use of drugs.”

“We’re trying not to lecture people,” answered Silverman. “It doesn’t do any good if you give people a message they don’t listen to.”

“I thought we were trying to tell people how not to get AIDS,” said Taylor. “Why aren’t we telling them that?”

Merv Silverman thought Barbara Taylor was taking an old-fashioned, textbook kind of approach to public health. The health director understood this approach; after all, his master’s in public health came from Harvard. The silver-haired forty-five-year-old had spent his life in the field. But AIDS was not a classical public health problem. It was sensitive. It required messages that were…appropriate.

Taylor thought the poster was a lot of bullshit and that Silverman was soft-peddling AIDS prevention so he wouldn’t have a lot of angry gay activists yelling at him for being homophobic. There’d been a lot of that in the past few days.

The reality was a mix of both Silverman’s good intentions and Taylor’s more cynical political analysis. The result was the first major public demonstration of AIDSpeak, a new language forged by public health officials, anxious gay politicians, and the burgeoning ranks of “AIDS activists.” The linguistic roots of AIDSpeak sprouted not so much from the truth as from what was politically facile and psychologically reassuring. Semantics was the major denominator of AIDSpeak jargon, because the language went to great lengths never to offend.

A new lexicon was evolving. Under the rules of AIDSpeak, for example, AIDS victims could not be called victims. Instead, they were to be called People With AIDS, or PWAs, as if contracting this uniquely brutal disease was not a victimizing experience. “Promiscuous” became “sexually active,” because gay politicians declared “promiscuous” to be “judgmental,” a major cuss word in AIDSpeak. The most-used circumlocution in AIDSpeak was “bodily fluids,” an expression that avoided troublesome words like “semen.”

Most importantly, however, the new syntax allowed gay political leaders to address and largely determine public health policy in the coming years, because public health officials quickly mastered AIDSpeak, and it was fundamentally a political tongue. With politicians talking like public health officials, and public health officials behaving like politicians, the new vernacular allowed virtually everyone to avoid challenging the encroaching epidemic in medical terms.

Thus, the verbiage tended toward the intransitive. AIDSpeak was rarely employed to motivate action; rather, it was most articulately pronounced when justifying inertia. Nobody meant any harm by this; quite to the contrary, AIDSpeak was the tongue designed to make everyone content. AIDSpeak was the language of good intentions in the AIDS epidemic; AIDSpeak was a language of death.

As public health director for the only city in the United States that was paying much attention to the epidemic, Mervyn Silverman became the chief translator of AIDSpeak for the general population. The former Peace Corps administrator was well-qualified for the role since he was a virtual warehouse of good intentions for the gay community. The past few days had demonstrated this amply.

The brouhaha had started on page two of the
Chronicle
a few days before in a story concerning the lack of any AIDS information in the city’s bathhouses and sex emporiums. At least 200,000 gay tourists were about to descend on the city for the Gay Freedom Day Parade, the story noted. Many gay men came, in part, to make use of San Francisco’s fabled sex emporiums; most still regarded AIDS as strange media hype. The scenario was one in which epidemics thrived.

Bill Kraus had quietly leaked an account of the ill-fated meeting with bathhouse owners. A public health official, who was not Mervyn Silverman but who asked not to be identified, told the paper about how it would be best to close the joints down; but barring that, they should be required to post some kind of warning.

“I don’t have the power to force the bathhouses to post anything,” Silverman initially told an inquiring reporter.

Technically, he was telling the truth. The only power Silverman had was to use his broad authority to close anything that was a threat to public health. He wasn’t about to do that. In a letter to a citizen in May, Silverman had denied even having this power, saying it would be “illegal for me to close down all bathhouses and other such places that are used for anonymous and multiple sex contacts. It is my belief that we would insult the intelligence of many of our citizens and it would be an invasion of privacy to take such an action.”

Silverman also was not inclined to force the gay businesses to alert customers about the death potential inherent in the use of their facilities. “The government can only play a certain role in this,” he said. “The real validity comes with information from peers. The information that will get across will come from the gay community itself.”

Like all AIDSpeak, the explanation sounded sensible, although it evaded the question of why public health officials exist. If preventing disease in a community was best done by the community itself, why bother to have a public health department?

Dr. Silverman was well-tutored by gay political leaders on the question of why the bathhouses shouldn’t be shut down. “If you close the bathhouses, people will simply go elsewhere to have unsafe sex,” he said.

For the past decade, spokespeople of the gay rights movement had held endless press conferences to argue against the stereotype that gay men were sex fiends wholly preoccupied with getting their rocks off. With AIDSpeak, however, many of these same spokespeople were now arguing that bathhouses must stay open because gay men were such sex fiends that they would be screwing behind every bush if they didn’t have their sex clubs.

After the initial
Chronicle
story on the sex managers’ refusal to post warnings, Mayor Dianne Feinstein inveighed: “Within the language of the health code, I think Dr. Silverman can write to them and tell them to post whatever warnings are necessary. I do think it is advisable.” A majority of the board of supervisors also said that the public health director should order the obdurate bathhouse owners to post warnings. A day later, Dr. Silverman announced he would require warnings in the bathhouses. If the proprietors didn’t cooperate, he would shut them down. “We would have done this anyway,” he said.

By Thursday morning, June 2, Silverman was meeting with the bathhouse owners who suddenly said they were “looking forward” to putting up the posters. The public health director pledged the most “intensive” public health education campaign in city history. After that press conference, Silverman showed Barbara Taylor the AIDS poster. It gave four pieces of advice: “use condoms,” “avoid any exchange of bodily fluids,” “limit your use of recreational drugs,” and “enjoy more time with fewer partners.” The poster did inform gay men that there was a nasty disease out there that could kill you; but in saying to only “reduce” the number of partners and “limit” drugs, it did not get to the blunt fact that just one partner or bad needle could bring death.

The leadership of the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club figured from the start that the bathhouse controversy had been raised by Bill Kraus and his Milk Club allies. Randy Stallings, the Toklas Club president, quickly launched a vitriolic counterattack. Kraus had violated the unwritten agreement that bathhouses were something that should not even be discussed publicly. The official Toklas policy was released the day after Silverman’s meeting with the bathhouse owners.

The order requiring health warnings was a “direct attack on the social and economic viability of our community,” the Toklas Club complained. “There is no evidence that the bathhouses or private clubs are the cause of this illness. To single out one type of gay business as somehow ‘responsible’ for this epidemic is to begin the process of destroying our community.”

As for Kraus’s essay in the
Bay Area Reporter,
the Toklas Club editorialized, “It is the height of arrogance to assume that only a small group of ‘concerned individuals’ are aware of this epidemic and are capable of dictating sexual behavior for the rest of us. There is a trend among some elements of our community to be anti-sexual and panic prone at a time when we should be banding together to defend a way of life that is precious and hard-won.”

Now they were convinced Bill Kraus suffered from “internalized homophobia” otherwise he would say that gay men were sex fiends and needed their bathhouses.

The most rabid supporter of sexual liberation was Konstantin Berlandt, the co-chair of the gay parade board of directors. “I didn’t become a homosexual so I could use condoms,” said Berlandt. “Of course, we’re concerned about spreading a disease. But what should we do? Take our bodily fluids and put them in barrels off the Farallons?”

Kraus thought it was strange that anybody would reduce the aspirations of the gay movement to a disinclination for rubbers.

Like so many public policy issues in the epidemic, the bathhouse altercation of early June 1983 demonstrated the complex interrelationship that had grown between media and government. The matter arose only because a newspaper wrote a story about it, forcing public officials to take some rather obvious positions. In Los Angeles and New York, the newspapers didn’t write about such distasteful subjects and the issues were not raised.

Moreover, public health officials in those two cities had already issued blanket assurances to anxious gay leaders that they would never close the bathhouses under any circumstances. In San Francisco, it was only the threat of closure that secured the agreement of bathhouse owners to the notices and brochures. Bathhouse owners in New York and Los Angeles, guaranteed that no such action would happen in their cities, had no similar incentive to provide education on AIDS. The handful of gay leaders who prodded for such materials found they had no leverage with the businessmen.

Selma Dritz thought the posting of signs was a cop-out. The U.S. Constitution might be construed to allow the right to commit suicide, but the ramifications of bathhouses did not end with the patron. These people went to other places, picked up and infected others. The Constitution did not grant the right to take other people with you. The day of Silverman’s announcement, the city attorney issued an opinion telling the public health director that under the state health code “you may…order the public bathhouses closed immediately.”