And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition (70 page)

Thus far, estimates of AIDS incubation represented little more than a hodgepodge of guesses. Most scientists used the two-year figure, although some transfusion cases reached back four years. Lawrence thought that a mathematical curve should be able to offer the first scientific assessments of the shortest and longest incubation periods for the disease. The CDC statistician devised seventeen pages of complicated formulae to plot the survival analysis.

On the last working day of 1983, the statistician gave Lawrence the results. Lawrence was horrified. According to the analysis, the mean incubation period for the disease was 5.5 years. It appeared that some cases would take more than 11 years to incubate, based on the mathematical projections, although some people would come down with AIDS in as little as six months.

Lawrence rushed from his office in the Division of Host Factors to the AIDS offices. He saw Jim Curran in the hall talking to Harold Jaffe and Bill Darrow.

“The incubation period is along the lines of five years,” said Lawrence.

He explained the curves. Jim Curran grasped his logic immediately.

“It makes sense,” Curran said.

That’s what Lawrence was afraid of. He had believed that tens of thousands would die in the AIDS epidemic. This long incubation period, however, meant that the genetic machinations of the still-unknown virus had permitted it to spread for years before anyone even knew it existed. It just hadn’t shown up yet in a dramatic way because of the long incubation period for AIDS. The 3,000 AIDS cases now reported marked the barest beginning of the havoc the epidemic would bring. The future these projections promised was going to be worse, far worse, than anyone had ever imagined.

January 3, 1984

N
ATIONAL
I
NSTITUTES OF
H
EALTH
,
B
ETHESDA

Larry Kramer had spent much of the past month visiting the federal agencies involved in AIDS work. His agent was reading the early draft of his play
The Normal Heart,
and having been out of AIDS action for nine months, Larry wanted to review government efforts against the epidemic. In a December trip to Atlanta, he was not surprised to see that the Centers for Disease Control seemed as underfunded and overworked as ever. He was taken aback, however, when one prominent staffer in the AIDS Activities Office bluntly asked him, “Why don’t you guys get married?” When Larry started to explain that most states have laws specifically barring same-sex matrimony, the CDC doctor got impatient. “I don’t mean marry men,” he said. “I mean women. If you guys had been married to women, this never would have happened.” The comment, from one of the CDC’s top AIDS people, gave Larry insight into why, nearly three years into the epidemic, the CDC still did not include even one openly gay person on their burgeoning staff at the AIDS office.

Interagency rivalry between the CDC and the National Cancer Institute was frequently alluded to during the Atlanta trip. One CDC official candidly admitted, “We don’t even talk to them.”

In early January, congressional staffer Tim Westmoreland arranged a visit for Larry Kramer to the home of the director of one of the largest and most prestigious institutes among the National Institutes of Health. Like several of the other top NIH directors, this agency chief lived in a baronial mansion on the Bethesda campus, surrounded by antiques and a doting staff.

During the luncheon, Larry excused himself to visit the lavatory. Upstairs, he was attracted to a crowded bookshelf that faced an open bedroom door opposite the stairs. Convinced that you can judge a lot about people by their books, Larry wandered in. The shelves had an eclectic assortment of volumes: popular fiction, philosophical texts, and scientific volumes, except for one shelf, on which were several expensively framed photos of handsome men in bathing suits, posing with muscles flexed and arms wrapped around each other. In one, a prominent NIH official struck a campy Charles Atlas stance.

Back at the luncheon, the prominent institute director excused himself to return to his office after earnestly impressing on Larry how much his agency had done for AIDS. Larry remained unconvinced, knowing that this particular agency had been extremely slow to respond to AIDS. Much of its current energy, he suspected, was spent squabbling with the National Cancer Institute over which arm of the NIH should be most prominent in the fight against AIDS.

The director’s top assistant chatted with Larry as he took the meal’s last dishes into the kitchen. Once alone with the author, the assistant confided, “My friend and I loved your novel,
Faggots.
We’d love to have you to dinner the next time you’re in town.”

Larry could have been knocked over with a feather.

“Is that one of the reasons this institute has been so negligent with AIDS?” he asked. “Because the director is in the closet?”

The assistant looked at Larry with an embarrassed expression and did not answer.

The situation was achingly familiar to Larry. It was a truism to people active in the gay movement that the greatest impediments to homosexuals’ progress often were not heterosexual bigots but closeted homosexuals. Among the nation’s decision makers, the homophobes largely had been silenced by the prevailing morality that viewed expressions of overt hostility toward gays as unfashionable. In fact, when not burdened by private sexual insecurities, many heterosexuals could be enlisted to support gays on the basis of personal integrity. By definition, the homosexual in the closet had surrendered his integrity. This makes closeted homosexual people very useful to the establishment: Once empowered, such people are guaranteed to support the most subtle nuances of anti-gay prejudice. A closeted homosexual has the keenest understanding of these nuances, having chosen to live under the complete subjugation of prejudice. The closeted homosexual is far less likely to demand fair or just treatment for his kind, because to do so would call attention to himself.

Again and again, this sad sequence of self-hatred and policy paralysis played out in the AIDS epidemic, just as it did in Bethesda.

In Washington, one of the top officials in the Department of Health and Human Services was a closeted homosexual. Dr. Marcus Conant had once hoped that this official, who had an important role in the department’s budget process, might prove a valuable ally in securing more AIDS funds. Instead, the man was a haughty defender of administration policy in his meetings with gay leaders and AIDS researchers.

In California, a top health official in conservative Republican Governor George Deukmejian’s administration was a covert homosexual. His job, however, required that he appear before legislative committees to argue vociferously against allocating funds for AIDS education programs in the gay community, and he performed his duties with gusto. On the municipal level, the public health director of one of the four American cities hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic was a closeted gay doctor. This man distinguished himself by presiding over a public health department that did even less than New York City’s to combat AIDS. Leaders of AIDS groups in that city privately agreed that the official declined to seek money for AIDS education from the county government because he did not want to draw attention to himself and his secret. Among gays, however, the health director was an expert articulator of AIDSpeak and talked convincingly of confidentiality and what wonderful places bathhouses were. Grateful gays made him board chairman of the city’s major AIDS group.

As Larry Kramer shrugged on his heavy winter coat and stalked out of the agency chiefs home in Bethesda, he wondered when the deception would end. Just days before, he had met one of the nation’s most influential closet cases at a cocktail party in Washington. Larry immediately recognized Terry Dolan when he arrived at the party. The millions Dolan raised for his National Conservative Political Action Committee had been almost solely responsible for electing the New Right senators who tipped the balance of Senate power to Republicans in 1980. And in the 1980 presidential race, he had raised $10 million for Ronald Reagan. Dolan’s brother was now a White House speech writer.

The advertising that the committee sponsored sometimes chastised Democrats for coddling homosexuals. Terry Dolan, however, was fresh from an affair with a staff epidemiologist from the New York City Health Department, Larry knew, and was thoroughly enjoying the gay life his political fund-raising sought to squash. With characteristic reserve, Larry threw a drink in Dolan’s face.

“How dare you come here?” Larry screamed. “You take the best from our world and then do all those hateful things against us. You should be ashamed.”

January 7

U
NION
S
QUARE
, S
AN
F
RANCISCO

Cleve Jones could barely drag himself out of bed that morning, but these were demonstrations that he could not miss. Dan White was being released from Soledad Prison after serving five years, one month, and thirteen days of his prison sentence. Cleve remembered the day when he saw Harvey Milk’s corpse being rolled over and stuffed into a black plastic body bag, and knew he had to join in protesting the killer’s release.

Speakers told the crowd at the Union Square rally that the Dan White story should inspire them to work at rooting out the deeper social bias that had allowed White to think it was entirely moral to murder a gay man. The crowd, however, wanted no part of such cool analysis, and they booed these speakers down with chants of “Kill Dan White.” Some protesters wore lapel buttons announcing themselves as members of the “Dan White Hit Squad.”

By the time the marchers had wound their way through the financial district, more than 3,000 had joined the cacophonous procession, many in three-piece business suits. On Castro Street that night, 9,000 held a rally against the release, again chanting their mantra of hate: “Kill Dan White. Kill Dan White.” The anger was problematical. It was doubtful that the fury was connected as much to the now five-year-old murder of Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone as to the simmering rage at the AIDS epidemic.

Cleve marched and shouted with the throngs, ecstatic that some of the old fighting spirit had returned to the gay community. As the afternoon waned, however, Cleve left the march and returned to his apartment off Castro Street. The exertion had exhausted him completely. In fact, persistent fatigue had dogged him for months. At nights, he sometimes broke into unexplained sweats.

Prejudice makes prisoners of both the hated and the hater. That truth would surface less than two years later, when Dan White put his car in his closed garage and turned on the motor, killing himself. Even outside Soledad, he lived as a prisoner and died as one.

January 26

Dr. Marcus Conant avoided memorial services for his patients, but Paul Dague had not merely been a patient. In August 1981, Conant had recruited Paul to counsel newly diagnosed Kaposi’s sarcoma patients at Conant’s KS Clinic at UCSF. It was Paul who enlisted a floundering Berkeley grief-counseling group, the Shanti Project, to help in the epidemic. In the years since then, Marc Conant and AIDS Clinic doctors Paul Volberding and Don Abrams increasingly had called on Paul Dague to help them as they coped with their daily stress of telling thirty-year-old men that they were about to die.

As Marc Conant listened to the speakers eulogize Paul at the memorial, he remembered how devastated he had been when he told Paul Dague that the purple spots that had appeared on Paul’s skin were Kaposi’s sarcoma. That was in June 1982, when Paul was the 52nd local man to be diagnosed with AIDS. Now, in January 1984, Paul was the 149th San Franciscan to die of the disease. It was the week that the city’s AIDS caseload surpassed 400.

Conant remained unsettled throughout the service. Glancing around the crowded room, he noticed Gary Walsh, sitting with a worried-looking friend. It had been a year since Conant had told Gary that he suffered from KS—one year and one day, to be exact—and Conant noticed that Gary looked as though he didn’t have much longer to live.

Gary Walsh also usually avoided AIDS memorial services, but he had known Paul Dague for years and felt obliged to attend this night. Lu Chaikin was there with him. As she fidgeted in her folding metal chair, Lu reflected that out of love she had allowed most of her life the past year to revolve around Gary Walsh. Already, she recognized, she was suffering anticipatory grief for Gary’s death. Through all the eulogies, she could only think that soon she would be sitting through a service like this for her closest friend. Always the streetwise tomboy from Flatbush, Lu knew she could endure the grief; always the psychotherapist, she also knew she would learn from it.

The memorial service impressed upon her, however, how much she already had learned about feelings this past year. In her earlier relationship with Gary, he was the sweet one, while she was strong. As Gary’s disease progressed, however, Lu noted that Gary had gained an inner strength, confronting fate’s cruel prognosis. Lu had learned about vulnerability; she had opened herself completely to Gary, without procrastination, because they had so little time. Even now, as their time together evaporated, Lu saw that during the past year she had learned from Gary much about being a woman, and Gary acknowledged that he had learned from her much about being a man.

Such realizations tended to overwhelm Lu with sadness, because she saw again how much she would miss Gary when he was gone. At the end of the service, Lu felt weak and borrowed Gary’s silver-headed cane so she could walk out.

C
ENTERS FOR
D
ISEASE
C
ONTROL
,
A
TLANTA

On the same day that Marc Conant, Gary Walsh, and Lu Chaikin attended Paul Dague’s memorial service, Dr. Max Essex at Harvard told Don Francis that Robert Gallo had twenty different isolates of the retrovirus that caused AIDS. That week, Gallo also told Jim Curran at the CDC that he had isolated the elusive AIDS agent.

Gallo now was trying to culture as many different isolates of the AIDS virus as he could. He wanted the evidence to be overwhelming when it was announced, so there would be no lingering doubt as to what caused AIDS. Gallo decided the new retrovirus was the third variant of the Human T-cell Leukemia virus family he had discovered in 1980, and so he called it HTLV-III.