And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition (96 page)

Health authorities worldwide braced for growing caseloads, given evidence that the virus already had spread widely, even in nations that had yet to see many AIDS cases. In Montreal, 28 percent of gay men in one study were found to be infected with the AIDS virus. Between 20 and 30 percent of gay men in a Melbourne, Australia, study were infected. In England, an organizer of Britain’s major AIDS organization, the Terence Higgins Trust, bluntly advised English gay men to avoid sex with any Londoner after one study found that one-third of the city’s gay men were infected with HTLV-III.

The governments that were most intransigent about acknowledging the AIDS problem were those that were widely believed to be hardest hit. Although African health officials claimed only a handful of AIDS cases, one CDC staffer reported in March that there were 11,000 AIDS cases in Zaire alone. The huge number of prostitutes infected with the AIDS virus in such nations as Rwanda and Uganda suggested that the heterosexual spread of “slim disease” continued unabated.

There was a familiar element in the policy questions that rose around AIDS in western Europe. By early 1985, Denmark had the highest per capita rate of AIDS in Europe. One study found that 36 percent of gay men were infected with the AIDS virus, and gay men who went to bathhouses were being infected at a rate of 3 percent a month. Clinicians like Dr. Ib Bygbjerg felt that bathhouses should be closed and the country should include AIDS in its venereal disease laws, as Sweden had. However, health authorities made no move without approval of the well-organized gay community. Still unimpressed by the relative handful of cases in Denmark, homosexual leaders viewed the AIDS threat as homophobic hyperbole and persuaded authorities that bathhouse closure would be an unacceptable infringement on their civil rights.

As case after case came to
Rigshospitalet,
the hospital where Dr. Grethe Rask had died eight years before, Bygbjerg despaired. “Gay radicals are holding public policy hostage to their politics,” he complained. “We need to stop this disease, and we’re not being allowed to.”

In Paris in early 1985, Dr. Willy Rozenbaum had examined a lymphadenopathy patient and had given his opinion that the man should not continue to have sex. The man had been outraged at the suggestion.

“It’s my right,” he said.

Rozenbaum had argued, but he could see he wasn’t getting anywhere.

There was, of course, no question that this man was infected with the AIDS virus. Indeed, his body was home to the progeny of the most famous AIDS virus in the world, because it was from his lymph node that the Pasteur Institute had cultured the first isolate of LAV in early 1983.

May 17

D
UBLIN
S
TREET
, S
AN
F
RANCISCO

The week-long hospitalization at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco did not cure Frances Borchelt’s brutal psoriasis. Bob Borchelt felt his heart would tear apart, watching his wife return to her bed in the home where they had shared so many happy years. Sometimes, Frances sat in her orange overstuffed chair in the living room, but she’d shoo away anybody who tried to give her a hug.

“You don’t want to come near me, guys,” she’d say.

Frances was no longer interested in food or drink, so Cathy or Bob thought of all kinds of imaginative ways to feed her. They methodically marked the ounces of water she drank on a jar; every gulp became a small victory.

At times, it seemed the grandmother’s mind was going. She had proficiently worked her daily
New York Times
crossword puzzle for years, but suddenly she found it impossible to think of the right words and maintain her concentration. It was hard even to hold a pencil.

Throughout the last weeks of May, it seemed there was no end to the litany of ailments that struck Frances Borchelt. She had severe lymphadenopathy, and the doctors had now diagnosed a blood disease, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, as well. She also had mastitis and oral thrush.

Still, Frances tried to act as if she could live a normal life. Every morning, she made her bed, as she had always done during her four decades of marriage. Now, however, tidying the sheets sometimes took forty-five minutes; she just didn’t have the energy. By the time Frances Borchelt developed a coarse cough in the first few days of June, Bob, Cathy, and the rest of the family had no doubt that the end was near.

On Monday, June 10, the family took Frances Borchelt back to Seton Medical Center to be treated for bronchial pneumonia. Her lungs had filled with fluids, and she sweated continuously from fierce fevers. After the hospital priest administered the last rites, Frances looked up to Cathy and asked, “Who was that?”

As the days passed, she began muttering to herself. Cathy noticed that, at times, the babbling had all the inflections of a conversation. At one point, she turned away from her imaginary interlocutor and asked Cathy, “Why am I sick?” Next, she fell into a coma.

On Saturday, June 15, Frances Borchelt went blind.

Frances had been adamant that she did not want to be buried with her wedding rings. As her body began to fill with fluids and bloat, Cathy decided it was time to remove them. However, her mother’s fingers were already so swollen, the hospital had to call custodians to cut the plain bands of white gold from her fingers. After that, Frances’s muttering stopped.

Weeks before, the blood bank lawyers had scheduled a June 20 interview with Frances so they could take her deposition for the family’s negligence lawsuit against Irwin Memorial Blood Bank. When attorneys heard that the woman was in the hospital, they asked to reschedule the appointment. The request made Cathy Borchelt angry.

“They should be forced to come here and see what actually happens to somebody who gets AIDS,” she said. However, she did not prevail.

Bob Borchelt sat with his wife all day on Monday, June 17. She had drifted into a deeper coma, and the nurses, seeing Bob’s exhaustion, suggested that he go home and rest. They’d phone if anything happened, and the call came not long after Bob got back to Dublin Street. Frances was dead.

On the day that Frances Borchelt died, the Centers for Disease Control announced that the number of Americans stricken with AIDS had surpassed 11,000. New cases could now be expected at a rate of about 1,000 a month. As of June 17, the CDC said, 11,010 Americans had contracted AIDS and 5,441 had died.

On June 21, AIDS patients at George Washington University Hospital opened their eyes to see a woman in a white linen gown moving among them. She wore no mask or gloves and was not afraid to approach their beds and ask the young men about their illness. Mother Teresa came to visit the AIDS patients directly from the White House, where President Reagan, who had yet to acknowledge the disease, had awarded her the Medal of Freedom.

Although the dramatic events of the next five weeks would overshadow such gestures, it was apparent even in the first days of the summer of 1985 that wider interest in the problem of AIDS was growing. The problem was becoming too vast to ignore.

Religious leaders had played a key role in demanding more attention for AIDS. In San Francisco, Episcopal Bishop William Swing delivered a seminal sermon in which he argued that if Jesus were alive in 1985, he would not be standing with the moralists condemning gays but with the people suffering from AIDS. One of the things that made Christ so compassionate, he said, was the fact that he cast his lot with outcasts.

The new scientific understanding of the virulence of the AIDS virus prompted an unprecedented action at the American Medical Association’s mid-June national convention. Although the AMA had a long-standing policy against promoting funding of specific medical research, the House of Delegates voted to put the AMA on record as seeking more funds for AIDS research. The resolution passed overwhelmingly with little debate. As one proponent explained, “We now realize that this is not just another disease, but a major epidemic having a serious impact on public health.”

In what was to prove a forerunner for many similar stories that summer,
Life
magazine released a dramatic cover feature story and photo essay that grimly announced on the cover: “Now, No One Is Safe from AIDS.” In truth, most Americans were safe from AIDS, and there was more fiction than fact in
Life
’s assertion that heterosexual hemophiliacs, heterosexual transfusion recipients, and heterosexual partners of intravenous drug users were the epidemic’s “new victims.” None of these risk groups were, in fact, new. What was new was that the media was talking about AIDS in a heterosexual context. This context made AIDS newsworthy, and in the summer months, the most common expression among AIDS organizers became, “AIDS is not a gay disease.”

And it was in answer to those words that the United States took its first tentative steps toward the realization that a new epidemic would be indelibly written into the history of the Republic, and nothing would ever be the same again.

June 30

S
AN
F
RANCISCO

Bright sunshine turned the sky porcelain blue and brightened the greens on San Francisco’s sloping hills. The sun always shone on the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade, it seemed. A crowd of 250,000 clogged sidewalks and streets for two miles in downtown San Francisco, even before the three-hour procession of floats, marching bands, and other contingents began.

The diversity of the world’s preeminent gay community, converging again for its annual celebration, created both the point and counterpoint that demonstrated why the gay community defied singular depiction. Men carried on their shoulders six-year-olds who wore T-shirts proclaiming “I Love My Gay Dad.” A block away from this wholesome sight, the float from the Chaps leather bar lumbered along, featuring a troupe of men clad in black leather straps and handcuffed into all kinds of fascinating positions; they loved their daddies too. After the usual appearance of Dykes on Bykes came Ducks in Trucks, a float with scores of rubber ducks floating around little plastic swimming pools. Behind earnest lesbian-feminists protesting Central American policy were the satirical “Ladies Against Women,” carrying such signs as “Recriminalize Hanky-Panky” and “Suffering NOT Suffrage.”

There was a different mood to this parade, as well as to the community it represented. The depression that had marked the penultimate phase of a community coming to grips with widespread death was beginning to lift. In its place was an acceptance. There might have been a time Before, but it was no longer the moment that people longed for; it was gone, everyone understood now, and it would never come back. Life would forevermore be in this After. It was cruel and it wasn’t fair, but that was the way it would be, and at the sixteenth annual Gay Freedom Day Parade it was clear that most gay San Franciscans understood this.

After the years of denial and anger, the bargaining and incapacitating sadness, the San Francisco gay community was mobilized to fight the epidemic, as was no other single group in the United States. The parade was dedicated to the memory of Bobbi Campbell, the one-time “KS poster boy” who had died the previous summer. The floats with naked men got less applause this year than the numerous contingents of AIDS-related organizations that, by now, had persuaded thousands of local gay men to spend their after-work hours staffing information hotlines, raising funds for AIDS services, and performing chores in the homes of the stricken. This was the new gay community that paraded by the hundreds of thousands under the afternoon sun, and everybody applauded. When the San Francisco AIDS Foundation’s somber float rolled slowly by, with its huge black faux marble tombstone draped with garlands, people seemed to understand that this was part of the gay community too, and the parade judges awarded the float a special prize.