And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition (76 page)

Don Francis had brought to Europe electron micrographs that laid to rest any dispute about whether LAV and HTLV-III were different viruses. They were both extremely unusual human retroviruses; they were the same. Moreover, Dr. Kaly had run his comparisons of HTLV-III to HTLV-I and HTLV-II and found that the AIDS virus bore few similarities to the two previously discovered HTLV retroviruses; they were not related.

Francis felt this was a prima facie case for the French naming the virus. At the end of the negotiations, however, the taxonomy issue remained unresolved. The three researchers ultimately were able to work out an agreement for a joint announcement by the CDC, NCI, and Pasteur. They agreed they would share preprints of articles they were about to publish on LAV and HTLV-III and orchestrate their first public declaration of the breakthrough.

That night, they went to the bawdy Paradise Latin in the Latin Quarter and watched bare-breasted women descend from the ceiling on swings. Both Gallo, with his roguish charm, and Chermann, with his movie-star good looks, were in their element in such informal settings. As Chermann and Gallo stood side by side in the pissoir, Gallo had a proposition.

“We can do this together—just the Pasteur Institute and the NCI,” he said. “We don’t need the CDC.”

Chermann dismissed the idea.

The next morning, over croissants and tea with Don Francis, Gallo confided that he would probably get the lion’s share of the glory in the announcement because he had a lot of HTLV-III isolates. Gallo then put a different spin on the proposal he had made the night before to Chermann.

“We don’t need the Pasteur Institute,” he suggested. “The CDC and the NCI can announce this ourselves.”

In the first week of April, the number of AIDS cases in the United States surpassed 4,000. The first AIDS death in New Zealand was reported from New Plymouth on April 4. A few weeks earlier, British health authorities reported the first AIDS death in Scotland. The epidemic had spread to thirty-three countries worldwide.

April 4

S
AN
F
RANCISCO

At about the same time Don Francis was boarding his plane back to Atlanta, the new edition of the
Bay Area Reporter
with an editorial by Paul Lorch called “Killing the Movement” was being delivered to Castro Street gay bars.

“The gay liberation movement in San Francisco almost died last Friday morning at 11 A.M. No, that’s not quite it. The Gay Liberation Movement here and then everywhere else was almost killed off by 16 gay men and lesbians last Friday morning. This group, whose number changed by the hour as people got on and off what they hoped would be a roller coaster, signed a request or gave their names to give the green light to the annihilation of gay life.”

These “collaborators,” Lorch wrote, were the people who supported bathhouse closure.

“These 16 people would have killed the movement, glibly handing it over to the forces that have beaten us down since time immemorial…. The gay community should remember these names well, if not etch them into their anger and regret.”

The “traitor’s list,” as it became known, quickly followed. In many ways, it was an honor roll of veterans of local gay politics. Number one was Supervisor Harry Britt. Number three was gay campaign strategist Dick Pabich, the aide who had discovered Harvey Milk’s body five years earlier. Number six was Dr. Marcus Conant, who first conceived the idea of San Francisco’s coordinated care model for AIDS patients. Science fiction author Frank Robinson, number nine, had written Harvey Milk’s campaign speeches, the speeches that gave the gay liberation movement its most idealistic articulation; Robinson made the traitor’s list because he was heard to speak for bathhouse closure in one public meeting. Milk Club vice-president Ron Huberman was traitor number eleven. Bill Kraus was number twelve. Larry Littlejohn, who had founded the pioneering group that had made all the later gay politicking possible, was listed as “traitor extraordinaire.”

Hearing that he was going to be put on this list, Cleve Jones had gone to the gay paper and begged that his name not be included. Instead, he was listed merely as someone who “waffled” while others were killing the gay movement.

Bill Kraus was devastated by the criticism. He had spent the past decade doing little else than promoting gay rights. Now he was chastised as a “traitor” for his efforts to ensure the biological survival of gay men. He felt that a homosexual McCarthyism had descended on the gay community. You could be homosexual and be homophobic, by the logic of this McCarthyism, just as McCarthy had denounced American citizens as “un-American.” McCarthy felt he could proscribe all the political views a true American should have; the
Bay Area Reporter
and its like-minded gay leaders now felt they could order all homosexuals to think exactly as they did or be branded unhomosexual traitors. With such logic, the heroes had become the bathhouse owners, who had assured doctors at the AIDS Clinic that bathhouses were fine because “we both make money off” the people who were killing themselves there.

What disturbed Bill Kraus more than the charges themselves was the fact that there was no one in the gay community who would censure this verbal terrorism. Not one gay politico, writer, or thinker would step forward and say, simply, “This is madness.” Insanity triumphed because sane people were silent. Bill felt abandoned and isolated. Publicly, of course, Bill put the best face on his reaction and feigned to be honored at making a list of such esteemed personages. Privately, he complained to his friend Catherine Cusic: “Those bastards. If I get it, it’s because of them.”

On the morning of April 9, Dr. Silverman announced a decision that further complicated the bathhouse issue. Flanked by twenty-two gay physicians and community leaders, the health director announced that rather than close the baths, he would propose regulations to ban high-risk sexual activity.

“What we are doing today is taking steps, with the support of many community members, to eliminate bathhouses, bookstores, and sex clubs as places of sexual encounters between individuals, places where multiple sex takes place,” he said. “We want these places to continue to operate, to be places for social gatherings, for exercise, for a number of things. They just won’t serve the purpose that they have served in the past. What we’re trying to do is not have sex between individuals.”

Silverman’s move had the effect of satisfying no one. Bathhouse supporters were angry that anything was being done to impede bathhouse sex, so Silverman was denounced in the gay community as a homophobe. People who wanted the facilities shut down were dissatisfied by the fact they would remain open, and months of political dilly-dallying clearly lay ahead. Mayor Feinstein was said to be livid at the decision. With this announcement, however, the political heat was off the issue, because Larry Littlejohn said he would not pursue his ballot measure, which had in effect asked for the same restrictions that Silverman had announced.

Nationally, gay leaders turned rabid on the issue. On the afternoon Silverman announced the restrictions,
New York Native
publisher Charles Ortleb left a message with Jim Curran’s secretary, asking, “Now that you’ve succeeded in closing down the baths, are you preparing the boxcars for relocation?”

The
Native
’s next cover story, “I Left My Towel in San Francisco,” obscured a story Ortleb had unearthed in an interview with James Mason, CDC director. Buried in the
Native
was the first report anywhere from a government official stating flatly that the cause of AIDS had been discovered. The virus, Mason said, was called LAV and had been discovered by the French.

N
ATIONAL
C
ANCER
I
NSTITUTE
,
B
ETHESDA

The same day Dr. Silverman announced his bathhouse sex ban, a doctor from the National Cancer Institute went to Building 31 on the NIH campus and picked up a bottle that had been carefully packed in a double-sealed plastic bag. He drove the bottle to the “P3 containment facility” at the Frederick Cancer Research Facility in suburban Maryland. The bottle contained 100 million particles of HTLV-III. The center, which once housed the nation’s biological warfare research, was beginning to gear up to produce the 750 gallons of virus that would be needed each month for blood assays to test every unit of blood used in transfusions. Although one branch of the U.S. Public Health Service, the Food and Drug Administration, continued to maintain that the threat of transfusion AIDS was so minimal that it did not need regulatory action, another PHS branch, the NCI, had made the blood test its top AIDS priority.

Evidence supporting HTLV-III as the cause of AIDS mounted. Since 1981, Drs. Bob Biggar and James Goedert from the NCI’s Environmental Epidemiology Branch had been collecting blood from gay men in Washington and New York as part of a prospective study on AIDS in this high-risk population. As various theories for different AIDS agents emerged in the following years, the blood was tested for a host of agents, including African Swine Fever virus, parvo viruses, and even interferon levels. By the time HTLV-III tests were available to Biggar in April, there was only enough blood from each study subject to conduct this one last blood test. Fortunately, his tests showed that HTLV-III was not another bum lead.

In San Francisco, an AIDS researcher inadvertently speeded the timetable for the HTLV-III announcement with an offhand remark to a radio interviewer. Like just about everyone in AIDS research, Dr. Donald Abrams, AIDS Clinic assistant director, knew of the breakthrough. He alluded to the discovery of “the AIDS agent” during a radio interview with the local CBS affiliate on Sunday afternoon, April 15.

“Is that a scoop?” the reporter asked.

Abrams immediately regretted mentioning it. It broke all rules of scientific courtesy to announce somebody else’s discovery. The reporter, however, seemed innocuous enough in her Snoopy sweatshirt. She probably didn’t understand the significance of what he had said, Abrams thought.

“This is just for the local audience,” she assured him, for airing in “the next week or so.”

“What’s an agent?” she asked casually. “Is that a virus?”

“An agent is anything that causes a disease,” Abrams said. “But in fact, this is a virus.”

Abrams didn’t think much more of the interview until he got a phone call from a cousin in New Jersey the next morning.

“Mazeltov,” he said. “Everybody heard you on the radio this morning when you announced the discovery of the AIDS virus.”

When more newspapers and networks started calling, Abrams declined to comment. CBS upped the ante, however, when a reporter demanded that he either retract his statements or reveal the researchers.

That afternoon, Don Francis got a call from the CBS News bureau in Paris.

“What is this?” the reporter asked. “Gallo says
he
has the cause of AIDS.”

The
San Francisco Chronicle
was going with its own story on HTLV-III the next morning, and a number of other newspapers were calling to demand a press conference on the “new virus.”

In England, also, the news was about to break because a few weeks earlier a BBC correspondent had persuaded Bob Gallo’s secretary to give him copies of Gallo’s
Science
articles, promising not to air the information until July. He then released the reports to
New Scientist,
which quickly ran with the HTLV-III news. When the journal contacted Jean-Claude Chermann for a comment, the Pasteur Institute researcher called Don Francis in a rage.

“If Gallo violates our agreement, I’ll kill him,” Chermann said.

The National Cancer Institute scheduled a press conference to make the announcement, but Secretary Heckler was on the West Coast and could not attend. The press conference was ordered delayed until Monday, April 23.

Days before the announcement, Don Berreth, CDC public affairs chief, got a draft of the NCI’s press release. Their announcement made no mention of LAV or the Pasteur Institute. Although Assistant Secretary for Health Edward Brandt now had preprints of the papers to be published in
Science,
neither he nor the NCI had shared them with the CDC. James Mason, Jim Curran, and Don Francis put through a conference call to Brandt, pleading with him to delay the announcement until it could be orchestrated with the French. Francis explained that HTLV-III and LAV were the same virus, that this was not an American discovery.