by Randy Shilts
Bygbjerg would never forgive himself for taking her away from the cottage north of the fjord. The virulent microbes that were haunting her body would not reveal themselves in the bombardment of tests she endured in those last days. On December 12, 1977, just twelve days before the Feast of the Hearts, Margrethe P. Rask died. She was forty-seven years old.
Later, Bygbjerg decided he would devote his life to studying tropical medicine. Before he died, he wanted to know what microscopic marauder had come from the African jungles to so ruthlessly rob the life of his best friend, a woman who had been so intensely devoted to helping others.
An autopsy revealed that Grethe Rask’s lungs were filled with millions of organisms known as Pneumocystis carinii; they had caused a rare pneumonia that had slowly suffocated the woman. The diagnosis raised more questions than answers: Nobody died of Pneumocystis. Intrigued, Bygbjerg wanted to start doing research on the disease, but he was dissuaded by wizened professors, who steered him toward work in malaria. Don’t study Pneumocystis, they told him; it was so rare that there would be no future in it.
PART II
BEFORE: 1980
All history resolves itself quite easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON,
“Self-Reliance”
GLORY DAYS
June 29, 1980
SAN FRANCISCO
The sun melted the morning fog to reveal a vista so clear, so crystalline that you worried it might break if you stared too hard. The Transamerica Pyramid towered over the downtown skyline, and the bridges loped toward hills turning soft gold in the early summer heat. Rainbow flags fluttered in the gentle breezes.
Seven men were beginning their day. Bill Kraus, fresh from his latest political triumph in Washington, D.C., was impatient to get to the foot of Market Street to take his place at the head of the largest parade in San Francisco. There was much to celebrate.
In his apartment off Castro Street, in the heart of San Francisco’s gay ghetto, Cleve Jones waited anxiously for his lover to get out of bed. This was parade day, Cleve kept repeating. No man, even the delightful muffin lolling lazily in the bed next to him, would make him late for this day of days. Cleve loved the sight of homosexuals, thousands strong. It was he who had led the gay mob that rioted at City Hall just a year ago, although he had now refashioned himself into the utterly respectable aide to one of California’s most powerful politicians. He wasn’t selling out, Cleve told friends impishly; he was just adding a new chapter to his legend. “Meet me at the parade,” he called to his sleepy partner as he finally dashed for the door. “I can’t be late.”
A few blocks away, Dan William waited to meet David Ostrow. The two doctors were in town for a gathering of gay physicians at San Francisco State University. At home in New York City, gay parades drew only 30,000 or so; Dan William tried to imagine what a parade with hundreds of thousands of gays would look like. From what he had heard, David Ostrow was glad they didn’t have parades like San Francisco’s in Chicago; it would never play.
On California Street, airline steward Gaetan Dugas examined his face closely in the mirror. The scar, below his ear, was only slightly visible. His face would soon be unblemished again. He had come all the way from Toronto to enjoy this day, and for the moment he would put aside the troubling news the doctors had delivered just a few weeks before.
In the Mission District, the Gay Freedom Day Parade was the event twenty-two-year-old Kico Govantes had anticipated the entire five weeks he’d been in San Francisco. The tentative steps Kico had taken in exploring his homosexuality at a small Wisconsin college could now turn to proud strides. Maybe among the thousands who had been streaming into the city all week, Kico would find the lover he sought.
Before.
It was to be the word that would define the permanent demarcation in the lives of millions of Americans, particularly those citizens of the United States who were gay. There was life after the epidemic. And there were fond recollections of the times before.
Before and after. The epidemic would cleave lives in two, the way a great war or depression presents a commonly understood point of reference around which an entire society defines itself.
Before would encompass thousands of memories laden with nuance and nostalgia. Before meant innocence and excess, idealism and hubris. More than anything, this was the time before death. To be sure, Death was already elbowing its way through the crowds on that sunny morning, like a rude tourist angling for the lead spot in the parade. It was still an invisible presence, though, palpable only to twenty, or perhaps thirty, gay men who were suffering from a vague malaise. This handful ensured that the future and the past met on that single day.
People like Bill Kraus and Cleve Jones, Dan William and David Ostrow had lived through a recent past that had offered triumphs beyond their hopes; the future would present challenges beyond anything they could possibly fear. For them, and millions more, including many who considered themselves quite separate from such lives in San Francisco, this year would provide the last clear memories of the time before. Nothing would ever be the same again.
Bill Kraus looked up Market Street toward the Castro District, unable to find an end to the colorful crowd that had converged on downtown San Francisco for the Gay Freedom Day Parade. Bill ran his hands through his thick, curly brown hair and decided again that never was there a better place and time to be homosexual than here in this beautiful city on this splendid day when all gay people, no matter how diverse, became expressions of the same thought: We don’t need to hide anymore.
Standing at the front of the parade, behind the banner announcing the gay and lesbian delegates to the 1980 Democratic National Convention, Bill Kraus retraced the steps that had brought him to this day and this parade. Primarily, he recalled the hiding and that nameless fear of being what he was, a homosexual. For years he had hidden the truth from others and, even worse, from himself. It was hard now to fathom the fear and self-hatred of those years without hope. The entire epoch seemed some kind of dream, a memory that had no real part in his waking life today.
At times, he wondered what he had been thinking all those years. Of what had he been so afraid? It wasn’t just being Catholic. The edification of thirteen years of Cincinnati parochial schools dissipated within months of his arrival at Ohio State in 1968. There, he grew his hair long and answered the call of the Bob Dylan songs he played incessantly on his beat-up stereo. “The first one now will later be last,” Dylan said. The times, they were a-changing. The message never rang true to him, not in the years of anti-Vietnam War marches or social activism, not until Bill had moved to Berkeley just a decade ago and discovered Castro Street and the promise of a new age.
There, with a middle-aged camera shop owner named Harvey Milk, Bill had learned the nuts and bolts of ward politics. He had learned how to walk precincts, study election maps, and forge coalitions. He had seen how everyone had power, how everyone could make a difference if only they believed and acted as if they could. This became the central tenet of his political catechism: “We can make a difference.” Bill now repeated it in every speech, and on this Gay Freedom Day he felt it more strongly than ever. Everything in the last three years—Harvey Milk’s election as supervisor and the first openly gay elected official in the nation, the political assassinations, and the consolidation of power after that—had conspired to convince Bill that it was true. Castro Street couldn’t even get its gutters swept a few years back; today, gays were the most important single voting bloc in the city, comprising at least one in four registered voters. Bill Kraus had become president of the city’s most powerful grass-roots organization, the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club.
The organizational power that he helped build had kept a gay seat on the board of supervisors after Harvey Milk’s assassination in 1978 for a one-time Methodist minister and Milk crony named Harry Britt. Bill Kraus had replaced Britt as president of the Milk Club and now worked as his aide in
City Hall. He had also managed Britt’s reelection campaign in 1979, securing his reputation as the city’s leading gay tactician.
The city’s gay community was acquiring a legendary quality in political circles with influence far beyond the 70,000-odd votes it could boast in a city of 650,000. For the past three months, emissaries for presidential candidates had scoured the Castro neighborhood for votes. As other cities followed San Francisco’s blueprint for political success, a national political force was coalescing. Bill Kraus and Harry Britt were leaving in two weeks for New York to be Ted Kennedy delegates to the Democratic National Convention. With seventy delegates, the convention’s gay caucus was larger than the delegations of twenty states. This year, they would make a difference.
The gay parade had grown so mammoth in recent years that a good chunk of downtown San Francisco was needed just to get the scores of floats, contingents, and marching bands in proper order. While the parade assembled, Gwenn Craig smiled as she watched the young men mill near Bill Kraus, all thinking of some excuse to approach the famous young activist. Friends had teased Bill about his thirty-third birthday just days before; he was “l’age du Christ,” somebody had joked. Bill was scarcely the scruffy malcontent with whom Gwenn had spent so many leisurely afternoons in Castro Street cafes. His once-shaggy hair was now neatly cut, and his thick glasses were replaced by contacts, eliminating an owlish stare and revealing startling blue eyes. His body was superbly toned. He carried himself with increasing confidence, much like the body politic whose ideals he was articulating.
Bill Kraus was even beginning to cut his own national reputation. Just two weeks earlier, he had delivered an impassioned plea for a gay rights plank to the Democratic Platform Committee, which was hammering together a party agenda to present at the Democratic National Convention in July. Bill had delivered the address as a gay rights manifesto, articulating the goals of the nascent political force. Gay papers across the country had written up the performance for the issues being distributed on the gay pride weekend.
The gay rights plank, Bill Kraus said, “does not ask you to give us special privileges. It does not ask anyone to like us. It does not even ask that the Democratic party give us many of the legal protections which are considered the right of all other Americans.
“Fellow members of the Platform Committee, what this amendment asks in a time when we hear much from prominent members of the Democratic party about human rights is that the Democratic party recognize that we, the gay people of this country, are also human.”
The San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Marching Band blared the opening notes of “California Here I Come,” and the parade started its two-mile trek down Market Street toward City Hall. More than 30,000 people, grouped in 240 contingents, marched in the parade past 200,000 spectators. The parade was the best show in town, revealing the amazing diversity of gay life. Clusters of gay Catholics and Episcopalians, Mormons and atheists, organized for years in the city, marched proudly beneath their banners. Career-designated contingents of gays included lawyers and labor officials, dentists and doctors, accountants and the ubiquitous gay phone-company employees. There were lesbian moms, gay dads, and homosexual teenagers with their heterosexual parents. Gay blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and American Indians marched beneath banners proclaiming their dual pride. The campy Gays Against Brunch formed their own marching unit. A group of drag queens, dressed as nuns and calling themselves the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, had picked the day for their debut.
Gay tourists streamed to this homophile mecca from all over the world for the high holy day of homosexual life. Floats came from Phoenix and Denver; gay cowboys from the Reno Gay Rodeo pranced their horses down Market Street, waving the flags of Nevada and California, as well as the rainbow flag that had become the standard of California gays.
Although the parade route was only two miles, it would take four hours for the full parade to pass. Within an hour, the first contingents arrived at the broad Civic Center Plaza, where a stage had been erected in front of the ornate facade of City Hall.
Radical gay liberationists frowned at the carnival rides that had been introduced to the rally site. Parade organizers had decided that the event had grown “too political” in recent years, so the chest-pounding rhetoric that marked most rallies was given a backseat to the festive feeling of a state fair.
“We feel it definitely isn’t a time for celebration,” complained Alberta Maged to a newspaper reporter. She had marched with a coalition of radical groups including the Lavender Left, the Stonewall Brigade, and the aptly named Commie Queers. “You can’t celebrate when you’re still being oppressed. We have the illusion of freedom in San Francisco that makes it easy to exist, but the right-wing movement is growing quickly. It’s right to be proud to be gay, but it isn’t enough if you’re still being attacked.”
Many hard-line radicals, remembering the days when gay liberation was not nearly as fashionable, agreed. The event, after all, commemorated the riot in which Greenwich Village drag queens attacked police engaged in the routine harassment of a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. From the Stonewall riot, on the last weekend of June 1969, the gay liberation movement was born, peopled by angry women and men who realized that their fights against war and injustice had a more personal side. This was the gay liberation movement—named after the then-voguish liberation groups sweeping the country—that had taken such delight in frightening staid America in the early 1970s.
By 1980, however, the movement had become a victim of its own success. Particularly in San Francisco, the taboos against homosexuality ebbed easily in the midst of the overall sexual revolution. The promise of freedom had fueled the greatest exodus of immigrants to San Francisco since the Gold Rush. Between 1969 and 1973, at least 9,000 gay men moved to San Francisco, followed by 20,000 between 1974 and 1978. By 1980, about 5,000 homosexual men were moving to the Golden Gate every year. The immigration now made for a city in which two in five adult males were openly gay. To be sure, these gay immigrants composed one of the most solidly liberal voting blocs in America, but this was largely because liberals were the candidates who promised to leave gays alone. It was enough to be left alone. Restructuring an entire society’s concept of sex roles could come later; maybe it would happen by itself.
To the veterans of confrontational politics, the 1980 parade was a turning point because it demonstrated how respectable their dream had become. Success was spoiling gay liberation, it seemed. Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr., had issued a proclamation honoring Gay Freedom Week throughout the state, and state legislators and city officials crowded the speaker’s dais at the gay rally. For their part, gays were eager to show that they were deserving of respectability. The local blood bank, for example, had long ago learned that it was good business to send their mobile collection vans to such events with large gay crowds. These were civic-minded people. In 1980, they gave between 5 and 7 percent of the donated blood in San Francisco, bank officials estimated.
The Ferris-wheel gondola rocked gently as it stopped with Cleve Jones at the apex, staring down on the 200,000 milling in front of the majestic City Hall rotunda. This was the gay community Cleve loved. Tens of thousands, together, showing their power. Marches and loud, angry speeches, an occasional upraised fist and drama, such drama. This was what being gay in San Francisco meant to Cleve Jones.
“This is my private party.” He grinned. “Just me and a few thousand of my closest friends.”
From the time he was a fourteen-year-old sophomore at Scottsdale High School, Cleve Jones knew that this is where he wanted to be, at gay rights marches in San Francisco. He had suffered through adolescent years in which he was the class sissy and the locker room punching bag. But, as soon as he could, he had hitchhiked to San Francisco and marched in the 1973 gay parade. For the rest of his life, he would know that he had arrived at the right place at the right time.
San Francisco in the 1970s represented one of those occasions when the forces of social chan
ge collide with a series of dramatic events to produce moments that are later called historic. From the day Cleve walked into Harvey Milk’s camera shop to volunteer for campaign work, his life was woven into that history and drama. Political strategists like Bill Kraus recalled the 1970s in terms of votes cast and elections won; Cleve Jones, the romantic, framed the era as a grand story, the movement of a dream through time.
Cleve remembered 1978, when he had walked in the front of the parade dressed all in white, holding the upraised hand of a lesbian, who was also dressed in white, in front of a banner that showed a rainbow arch fashioned from barbed wire. Death-camp motifs had been de rigueur that year because a state senator from Orange County, John Briggs, was campaigning statewide for a ballot measure that would ban gays from teaching in California public schools. The initiative brought an international spotlight both to California, where the anti-gay campaigns started by Anita Bryant in 1977 were culminating, and to the 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade, where gays made a defiant show of strength. They had come to the parade 375,000 strong, with Harvey Milk defying death threats to ride the long route in an open convertible before mounting the stage to give his “hope speech,” prodding the crowd to create the best future by coming out and announcing their homosexuality.
