And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition (46 page)

Then, there were the other, peskier requests. No, the city would not provide housing or hospice space for AIDS patients kicked out onto the street. That would be perceived as being “special treatment” for gays. New York, Mayor Koch noted, had a gargantuan homeless problem. How could he single out one group for help? As for gay requests for a health center in Greenwich Village, that was impossible. On a general level, Koch said he would match San Francisco’s spending on AIDS, “dollar for dollar,” but he never indicated where that money would be spent.

After the meeting, the AIDS Network issued a press release discussing only the points that Koch agreed to and not alluding to the mission’s failures. It wouldn’t do to offend the mayor just when gays finally had a foot in his door. Yet even the ever-optimistic Paul Popham was disheartened by the visit. The mayor did not seem vaguely concerned about the epidemic. Every answer came too quickly, almost flippantly, Paul thought. And he could see that Health Commissioner David Sencer was not going to push the mayor on this issue. Sencer clearly was full of good intentions on the AIDS issue, but he appeared to have little authority with a mayor who relied on his own staff for health policy. There was nobody in city government who had responsibility for the AIDS epidemic, Paul could see now; there was nobody in city government who really cared.

It was during this month of April 1983 that the momentum of movement on the AIDS epidemic shifted from New York City to San Francisco, typified, as much as anything else, by that meeting in New York City Hall. For the next two years, AIDS policy in New York would be little more than a laundry list of unmet challenges, unheeded pleas, and programs not undertaken. The shift was ironic, considering that New York City was the epicenter for the epidemic, both biologically and, at first, psychologically. Because of the extraordinary reporting of the
New York Native,
the city’s gay community had been exposed to far more information about AIDS than San Francisco’s in 1981 and 1982. All the ingredients for a successful battle against the epidemic existed in New York City, except for one: leadership. In San Francisco, the plethora of gay leaders created an environment in which questions of AIDS policy were debated, albeit brutally. Larry Kramer’s resignation left New York City without a leader willing to take unpopular positions, whether they were favoring bathhouse closures or opposing a popular mayor. Instead, the city’s gay leadership pursued its timid policy of constructive engagement with a mayor who seemed petrified of being highly identified with any gay issue, perhaps because of his status as a perennial bachelor. The New York fight against AIDS would be left to a handful of doctors and overtaxed gay organizations, and many would die there, while AIDS came to be seen as a San Francisco phenomenon because that’s where the action was.

April 23

The search for the beginnings of AIDS had taken scientists back to Africa, and the medical journals of spring 1983 were crowded with letters and notations of early, Africa-linked AIDS cases. The Belgians published notes in the
New England Journal of Medicine
about the Zairian cases that appeared in their country as early as 1977. Meanwhile, other Belgian tropical-disease specialists had ventured to Rwanda and Kinshasa, where they reported current outbreaks of AIDS, apparently among heterosexuals. The earliest documented AIDS case was reported in the letters section of
Lancet
on April 23. A brief letter from a Danish communicable-disease doctor named lb Bygbjerg told of a previously healthy Danish woman who worked as a surgeon in a primitive hospital in northern Zaire from 1972 to 1975. She had died from
Pneumocystis
in December 1977, Bygbjerg wrote, noting, “She could recall coming across at least one case of KS while working in northern Zaire, and while working as a surgeon under primitive conditions she must have been heavily exposed to blood and excretions of African patients.”

During his stay in Zaire, Bygbjerg concluded, he had been impressed by the CDC teams from the United States, who so quickly identified the Ebola Fever virus. “Perhaps such teams should search for another African virus,” he suggested.

April 26, 1983

S
AN
F
RANCISCO
C
ITY
H
ALL

In the beginning, there were two major figures in San Francisco gay politics, Jim Foster and Harvey Milk. Jim Foster had worked since 1964 to lay the foundations of gay political power. His most lasting achievement was the founding of the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club in 1972, the year that Harvey Milk moved to San Francisco. Within months of his migration, Harvey Milk decided there needed to be a gay member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors instead of the polite liberal heterosexuals whom the Toklas Club preferred. The Toklas leaders worried about pushing too hard—that if they were overweening, gays might lose everything they had won. Harvey Milk considered this obsequious and figured homosexuals hadn’t won that much if they couldn’t even stake claim to their own elected officials.

When Harvey Milk asked Jim Foster for his support in his 1973 campaign for supervisor, however, Foster was aghast. Who was this Johnny-come-lately to run for supervisor? he wondered. “We’re like the Catholic Church,” Foster told Milk. “We take converts, but we don’t make them pope on the same day.”

That comment made Harvey Milk hate Jim Foster, more for the personal rebuff than for the loftier philosophical differences. The Toklas Club never endorsed Harvey Milk for anything. By 1976, Milk had organized his own club, the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club, based on his own style of pragmatic power politics. The club’s clout grew with Milk’s election in 1977 and renamed itself the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club days after its mentor’s assassination in November 1978. Five years later, both Harvey Milk and Jim Foster were absent from the political scene, the latter nursing a lover stricken with AIDS. Nevertheless, their feud lingered and defined San Francisco gay politics. The Toklas and Milk clubs still hated each other passionately, with the Toklas faction probably fostering the bigger resentment because it had been eclipsed by the Milk Club in recent years.

Tonight all that was changing.

Reporters, pundits, and various political hangers-on listened in astonishment as the registrar of voters methodically announced the returns from the recall vote on Mayor Dianne Feinstein. Not only had San Francisco’s first female chief executive won, she had seized the election with a majority rarely observed in democracies west of the Soviet Union, tallying 81 percent of the vote in her favor. Her weakest precincts were, predictably, in the Castro area, where she won only 58 percent of the vote.

Rather than being an indictment of Feinstein’s four-year-old administration, the recall vote had proved to be a major triumph. Already, her critics were finding that no credible politician would oppose her reelection in the fall. Her only announced opponent was a disciple of some political wacko named Lyndon LaRouche who talked about “curing” homosexuals. Moreover, just days before, Feinstein had secured the biggest plum of her mayoral career when the Democratic Party announced that it would hold its 1984 national convention in San Francisco. This raised the hackles of conservative Democrats, who fretted that a party meeting by the Golden Gate would hopelessly identify the party with fringe faggotry, but the Democratic national chairman was a Californian who preferred the mediterranean city for sentimental reasons. Already, there was speculation that Feinstein might be chosen as the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 1984.

Most of this would be a mere embellishment to our tale except that the recall election set in motion an unfortunate political mechanism that would have a profound effect on the city’s battle against an encroaching viral invader. The battle lines drawn between recall opponents and supporters in the gay community roughly paralleled the divisions among gay leaders on how to handle the AIDS epidemic. On one side were Bill Kraus and the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club, who favored an aggressive campaign to alert gays to the dangers of the disease. The biological survival of the gay community was at stake. The Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club was one of the few major political organizations in the city to support recall, largely out of anger over the domestic partners’ ordinance. On the other side were leaders of the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club and such groups as the Coalition for Human Rights, who favored a low-key approach to the epidemic, fearing that panic could spread to heterosexuals who might resort to such unsavory actions as mass quarantines of gays. For them, the political survival of the gay community was at stake. Toklas Club members became Feinstein’s staunchest supporters in the recall election.

Politics knows only two principles: loyalty and revenge. As of this night, these two principles dictated who would wield the most influence in municipal politics and policies. The Milk Club might curry more favor among the city’s two congressional representatives and sundry state legislators, but the Toklas Club carried the weight in matters pertaining to the city and county of San Francisco, including health policy. It was an ironic state of affairs, given the fact that Mayor Feinstein’s status as a doctor’s daughter and her own instincts always favored the more assertive stance of the Milk Club. Nevertheless, a good politician must listen to her allies, and the mayor was nothing if not an artful politician. Her allegiance to the Toklas Club would have an effect on public policy for the next crucial year. San Francisco remained the most highly politicized city west of Chicago, and everyone knew whose advice pulled the most political leverage, whose counsel could be heeded and whose could be ignored.

All this would become more obvious, but it was even apparent on that Tuesday in April in the memo Supervisor Harry Britt wrote to Public Health Director Dr. Mervyn Silverman. At this point, Britt was still in the phase of politely pressuring Silverman to issue risk-reduction guidelines to gay men. The San Francisco Department of Public Health had yet to put out so much as one brochure on the epidemic. The supervisor had personally ushered appropriations for such publication through the city government. Bill Kraus and Dana Van Gorder, Harry Britt’s aide, then sat down and wrote specific language for a pamphlet. “It was great to hear the department will have money to print this piece,” Britt wrote in his memo to Silverman that day. Just in case the department was having trouble coming up with guidelines, Britt wrote, some suggested language was enclosed.

The recommendations, of course, were ignored; Harry Britt had had an unfortunate association with the Harvey Milk Club, having been its president when tapped to succeed the slain Milk as supervisor.

Things would become far less polite later, but by that night, the battle lines were drawn and probable victors could be predicted. It would be problematical to calculate how many San Franciscans would be infected with a deadly microbe and ultimately die because of political loyalty and because in 1973 Jim Foster and Harvey Milk decided they hated each other.

April 29

L
OS
A
NGELES
, C
ALIFORNIA

Michael Gottlieb knew he was taking a chance when he joined other University of California AIDS researchers in the Los Angeles office of California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. But it was worth the risk. Gottlieb could see the need in the gaunt faces of the men he was treating at UCLA. They were dying and the system wasn’t working. The first federal AIDS grants for nongovernmental research were due to be released in a few days, but they would scarcely cover money already diverted from other sources to pay for the past two years of AIDS studies, much less the work that needed to be done in the months ahead. Traditional university channels weren’t responding to the crisis either. The epidemic demanded that its researchers wear many hats, Gottlieb saw. He was spending free nights on the board of directors of the AIDS Project-Los Angeles. Now he would enter a realm even more unfamiliar to a scientist—partisan politics.

As Gottlieb scanned the room, he knew that the assembly of twenty-eight AIDS researchers from the various campuses of the University of California system shared his fears. They were about to make an end run around the university’s hierarchy and plead directly to the legislature for money for AIDS research. As it was, UC officials tolerated the legislature’s involvement in its funding as a disdainful necessity born from the peculiarities of democracy and the role of state tax dollars in underwriting the institution. But university officials routinely repelled attempts by legislators to insert their own agenda into university priorities. Few UC instructors dared to circumvent their administrators by going directly to the legislature, much less mere assistant professors like Michael Gottlieb or Paul Volberding. Gottlieb understood that the penalties for breaking this unwritten university code could be far more severe than the revenge meted out even in the political arena. In politics, the players jockey for power; in academia, they play for vanity, a far more compelling instinct that could conjure far more vindictive punishment.

Marc Conant, who was wearing many hats himself as he tried to organize a national foundation to raise funds for AIDS research, had called the meeting on a few days’ notice. The meeting was designed to put together a coordinated proposal for all the projects the UC researchers were undertaking on AIDS. The San Francisco doctors had come with a neatly organized plan. The southern California researchers tended to be more competitive, fractiously bickering about turf. However, agreement was worked out by the end of the day. Essentially, the group devised a wish list for the budding AIDS experts, although, given the dearth of interest among university researchers, the funding amounted only to $2.9 million. The idea was to channel money quickly to the impoverished AIDS labs, they agreed. Time was the enemy; they needed speed.

With Willie Brown, they knew they had an effective champion. He was generally regarded as the second most powerful official in the state, after conservative Republican Governor George Deukmejian. His sponsorship of the appropriation virtually assured its passage. Within days of the meeting, Brown introduced the measure into the legislature and started speeding it through committees as emergency legislation. The cavalry was at hand.

Days after the Los Angeles meeting, Marc Conant got a taste of the problems that lay ahead when he received a call from a prominent UCLA retrovirologist. The scientist had not tempted fate by attending the meeting but, instead, had sent an assistant, who observed the proceedings and secured a modest sum for the researcher’s lab. Now that a proposal was actually going to the legislature, however, the doctor wanted a bigger piece of the action. He was particularly peeved that his laboratory was to receive less money than Dr. Jay Levy for retrovirology research.

“I’m going to sabotage the whole thing if I don’t get as much as Jay Levy,” said the eminent scientist.

Conant knew the man carried a lot of weight with university administrators. The active opposition might doom the proposal. Still, Conant was irritated that the professor would demand a certain sum of money even though he had no proposal for how he would spend it. Until this point, there had been little evidence that the man had harbored much interest in AIDS.

“We’re talking about science, not whether you have parity,” Conant argued.

The researcher repeated his threat, and Conant ultimately figured out an agreeable allotment of funds. It was only the beginning of the problems AIDS research would face in the UC system that year. Later, the University of California boasted of doing more than any other university system in the nation on the AIDS epidemic. And the claims were truthful; that was precisely the problem.

Saturday, April 30

M
ADISON
S
QUARE
G
ARDEN,
N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY

All day Paul Popham worried, although not about whether the circus would succeed; that already was assured. All 17,000 seats had sold out a week ago, the first time a charity benefit sold out Madison Square Garden in advance. Aside from gay parades, the night was shaping up as the biggest gay event of all time and had put $250,000 into the treasury of Gay Men’s Health Crisis. This was terrific, but Paul was still anxious about whether his face would be on television and his name in the newspapers as president of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. The title said it: gay. Paul really didn’t want it to get back to work. Not that he was ashamed, he’d tell you. He just felt it would create problems. How would people react? He didn’t feel anybody had an obligation to come out openly as gay and had argued endlessly about it with Larry Kramer. Now, Larry was gone and Paul had only himself to argue with.

By the 6:30 P.M. press conference before the circus, Paul could see that his fears were unfounded. He should have known. The straight media in New York didn’t cover AIDS or gays, and they weren’t about to cover some queer circus for AIDS, no matter how big it was or how worthy the cause. Paul was relieved that his secret was safe. He let himself fall into exultation at the scope of how far the gay community had come.