And the Band Played On

by Randy Shilts

  At the first opportunity on the dance floor, Gaetan stripped off his T-shirt and fished out a bottle of poppers, nitrite inhalants, from his jeans pocket in one swift, practiced move. Fine blond hair outlined the trim natural proportions of his chest.

  He felt strong and vital.

  He didn’t feel like he had cancer at all.

  That was what the doctor had said after cutting that bump from his face. Gaetan had wanted the small purplish spot removed to satisfy his vanity; the doctor had wanted it for a biopsy. Weeks later, the report came back from New York City, and the Toronto specialist told Gaetan that he had Kaposi’s sarcoma, a bizarre skin cancer that hardly anybody got. Maybe that explained why his lymph nodes had been swollen for a year. Gaetan hadn’t told friends until June, after the biopsy. He was terrified at first, but he consoled himself with the knowledge that you can beat cancer. He had created a life in which he could have everything and everyone he wanted. He’d figure a way around this cancer too.

  As he felt the poppers surge through him, Gaetan realized that his high might last longer than this crowd. There were always the baths. He reviewed his choices, as he had so many times before during his regular visits to the city. The Club Baths was guaranteed to be crowded with those Anglo-Saxon men who were so well built, vaguely wholesome, and, well, so American. The fantasy rooms at the Hothouse were intriguing, as was the Bulldog Baths’s promise of a Cellblock Party.

  The summer was just beginning. The beaches of Fire Island and the pool parties of Los Angeles all lay ahead. Later, when the researchers started referring to Gaetan Dugas simply as Patient Zero, they would retrace the airline steward’s travels during that summer, fingering through his fabric-covered address book to try to fathom the bizarre coincidences and the unique role the handsome young steward performed in the coming epidemic.

  On that day in 1980, Gaetan danced to forget under the pulsing colored lights. Feeling whole again, he told himself that one day he would like to move to San Francisco.

  “It looks like that guy has his arm up the other guy’s ass.”

  Kico Govantes thought maybe the man standing between the legs of the guy in the sling was an amputee. Maybe he was just rubbing his stump next to the guy’s butt.

  “He does have an arm up his ass,” Kico’s friend said.

  Kico was sickened. He had heard a lot about bathhouses since moving to San Francisco five weeks before. The local gay papers were filled with ads and catchy slogans for the businesses. The Handball Express motto was “find your limits” the Glory Holes pledged to be “the most unusual sex place in the world” the Jaguar sex club in the Castro hyped “your fantasy, your pleasure” while the coeducational Sutro Baths had a “Bisexual Boogie” every weekend. The Cornholes’s advertising was more pointed, featuring the unclad torso of a man lying on his stomach.

  The handsome psychologist Kico had met at the gay parade had promised to take him to the largest gay bathhouse in the world, the Bulldog Baths. Decorated in San Quentin motif, the place was something of a legend in sexual circles. The leather magazine Drummer had gushed that the central “two-story prison is so incredibly real (real cells, real bars, real toilets…) that when you see a guard standing on the second tier looking down on you, you’re ready to kneel down.”

  This is insane, thought Kico.

  Kico had moved from Wisconsin to San Francisco with a clear sense of what being gay meant. He figured gay people dated and courted; you certainly never went to bed with someone you just met. Kico wouldn’t mind if he had to date someone months before they consummated their relationship and settled into some hip approximation of marriage. As the scion of an aristocratic Cuban family that fled Havana when Kico was three, the young man had led a relatively sheltered life. Suddenly, he was very confused.

  The Cellblock Party, just a few blocks from a rally where speakers were so loftily discussing the finer points of gay love, was like some scene from a Fellini film, intriguing and inviting to the eye, but altogether repulsive to Kico. The scene was even more alienating because these guys were so attractive, and they obviously found Kico attractive. He could sense that, physically, he fit in with these people. With his trim body and handsome swarthy features, he was what they wanted. Every floor was packed with the firm bodies of men clad in towels. Attendants cheerfully passed out free beer while disco music blared. The air felt thick and steamy, heavy with the acrid smell of nitrite inhalants.

  Kico turned to his companion. Certainly, a psychologist would see that this was unhealthy, a corruption of the very gay love that this day was supposed to celebrate. The shrink eyed him curiously, as if he were a naive child. He seemed to enjoy guiding the twenty-two-year-old through the labyrinthine hallways.

  “That’s fist-fucking,” the psychologist said.

  “Oh,” Kico said.

  Knowing the words for the acts didn’t help him fathom the meaning of what he was seeing. Where was the affection? he wondered. Where was the interaction of mind and body that creates a meaningful sexual experience? It was as if these people, who had been made so separate from society by virtue of their sexuality, were now making their sexuality utterly separate from themselves. Their bodies were tools through which they could experience physical sensation. The complete focus on the physical aspect of sex meant constantly devising new, more extreme sexual acts because the experience relied on heightened sensory rather than emotional stimulation.

  Kico thought it ironic that a community so entirely based on love should create institutions so entirely devoid of intimacy. He left the bathhouse feeling horrified and disillusioned. He walked through the empty Civic Center Plaza where street sweepers were clearing the debris from the rally and muscular carny men were dismantling the amusement park rides. The fog had swept across the city on this day of interregnum. Kico was cold.

  BEACHES OF THE DISPOSSESSED

  August 1980

  FIRE ISLAND, NEW YORK

  Larry Kramer looked across the table toward Enno Poersch. Larry could tell from the edge on Enrio’s deep, broad voice that he was frantic with concern.

  Enno recounted, again, the mysterious diarrhea, vague fatigue, and stubborn rashes that had devastated his lover Nick. Endless tests by countless doctors had found nothing, and the strict health-food regimen to which Nick had adhered religiously for years wasn’t doing any good either. Larry was a famous author who seemed to know everybody, Enno thought; he should know something.

  “Aren’t there hospitals where they specialize in treating bizarre sicknesses?” Enno asked.

  Larry remembered when he had met Nick on an all-gay cruise of the Caribbean.

  Witty, gregarious, and handsome in a compact Italian way, Nick was a popular cruise staffer. Every day, Nick had sat away from the continuous partying to write long love letters to Enno, and at each port, packets of Enno’s romantic missives waited for Nick. They were the kind of lovey-dovey letters that Larry had always wanted, and the pair’s love seemed to have lost none of its luster in the eight years since they had met on a sunny Fire Island beach.

  As Enno talked about taking Nick from hospital to hospital, Larry imagined Enno, a tall, broad-shouldered lumberjack of a man, cradling the small, wiry Nick in his arms while he carried him up steep, steely stairways to save his life. The image made Larry want to cry, but no, he didn’t know anything about hospitals or doctors or what could be ailing Nick.

  After Enno excused himself, Larry thought about how strange it was that summer. All that people seemed to talk about were the latest intestinal parasites going around. Dinner conversation often evolved into guys swapping stories about which medications stomped out the stubborn little creatures and whether Flagyl, the preferred antiparasite drug, was really carcinogenic. It was like eavesdropping on a bunch of old ladies sharing arthritis stories on shaded benches in Miami.

  Later that night, Larry made his way toward the Ice Palace, where the neverending Fire Island summer party was in full swing. He walked tentatively through the c
rowded doorway and saw the “Marlboro Man” saunter languorously through the disco. Larry knew that, intellectually, he could hold his own with anybody in New York, but the sight of Paul Popham, so self-assured in his model-handsome good looks, always left Larry in awe, the way you have to catch your breath after you see a movie star.

  At the Y, Larry had told Paul that he had such a naturally well-defined body that he didn’t need to work out, and Paul responded with a shy aw-shucks ingenuousness that reminded Larry of Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart. At the Ice Palace, the thumping heart of Fire Island nightlife, Larry wondered what it would be like to be Paul, to fit in so well and be accepted in a way Larry, the outsider, had never experienced. No matter where he was, Paul seemed to settle naturally among the beautiful people. On Fire Island, he lived in the house with Enno, Nick, and a few other handsome men who made the A-list of every major island party.

  This was not Larry’s summer to fit in. He hadn’t even bothered to buy a house share, slipping to the island for a weekend here or there. He kept a decidedly low profile, but that didn’t prevent some nasty moments. The gay man who owned the grocery store had glared at Larry when he was buying an orange juice. “You’re trying to ruin the island,” the grocer glowered. “I don’t understand why you come here.”

  As the deejay turned up the volume on a Donna Summer song, Larry watched an old friend, another writer, enter the Ice Palace, glance in his direction, and purposefully walk the other way.

  The antipathy, Larry Kramer knew, surrounded the book he had written about gay life in New York and on this island. Everything, from its title, Faggots, to its graphic descriptions of hedonism on the Greenwich Village-Cherry Grove axis had stirred frenzy among both gay reviewers and the people whose milieu Larry had set out to chronicle. Manhattan’s only gay bookstore had banned the novel from its shelves while gay critics had advised readers that its purchase represented an act inimical to the interests of gay liberation.

  Faggots had explored every dark corner of the subculture that gays had fashioned in the heady days after gay liberation. There were scenes of drug-induced euphoria at the discos, all-night orgies in posh Upper East Side co-ops, and fist-fucking at The Toilet Bowl, one of the many Manhattan sleaze bars where every form of exotic sexuality was explored with gritty abandon. The story climaxed with a weekend of parties and dancing on Fire Island, punctuated by cavorting in the Meat Rack, a stretch of woods that is home to some of the most animated foliage since Birnam Wood marched to Dunsinane.

  Against this backdrop, lovers argued about fidelity and the plausibility of having anything resembling a meaningful commitment in the midst of such omnipresent carnality. When the book’s protagonist, a Jewish screenwriter-movie producer not unlike Larry Kramer himself, sees his own hopes for love fade, he delivers a tirade that raised many troubling questions.

  “Why do faggots have to fuck so fucking much?” Larry had written. “It’s as if we don’t have anything else to do…all we do is live in our Ghetto and dance and drug and fuck…there’s a whole world out there!…as much ours as theirs…I’m tired of being a New York City-Fire Island faggot, I’m tired of using my body as a faceless thing to lure another faceless thing, I want to love a Person! I want to go out and live in a world with that Person, a Person who loves me, we shouldn’t have to be faithful!, we should want to be faithful!…No relationship in the world could survive the shit we lay on it.”

  It all needs to change, Larry’s protagonist told an unfaithful lover at the book’s climax, “before you fuck yourself to death.”

  The book had proved a sensation, but ever since its publication, Larry had been something of a persona non grata on the island, returning only occasionally to visit friends and observe. It was already past 1:00 A.M. as he watched Paul Popham squire his handsome boyfriend, Jack Nau, back to the dance floor. The beautiful people, at last, were beginning to descend on the Ice Palace. Life on this long spit of sand in the Atlantic, Larry knew, was a regimen of sybaritic sameness.

  Afternoons on the beaches were followed by light dinners, perhaps a nap, and then some outrageous party, before adjournment to whatever was the fashionable disco of the season. Of course, nobody got to the Ice Palace before 2:00 A.M., so you’d need some drugs to stay up. Once properly buzzed, it would be hard to get to sleep early, so you’d stop at the Meat Rack after dancing, and then you’d eventually walk home as the sun was rising over the sand. The unchanging ritual made Larry feel old. At forty-five, he didn’t have the long nights in him anymore, and he wondered how the other guys could subject themselves to weekends that were more of a burnout than even the hectic pace of life in Manhattan.

  At times, Larry Kramer compared the gay life of New York with San Francisco; it was another penchant that irritated the Manhattan gay intelligentsia. Larry had been in San Francisco the day Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were shot, and he had wept the night that 30,000 candles glimmered outside City Hall and speakers talked idealistically of changing the world. He had been amazed to see the governor of California, the entire state supreme court, and scores of other officials at Milk’s memorial service. Gays in New York had never achieved such power and respect, he thought, because they seemed more intent on building a better disco than a better social order. Being gay in New York was something you did on weekends, it seemed. During the week everybody went back to their careers and played the game, carefully concealing their sexuality and acting like everything was okay.

  Of course, this was not to say that Larry was some crazy gay militant. In fact, he didn’t have much use for the gay activist types in New York. The radicals seemed ensconced in rhetoric that was as passé as Chairman Mao. The more respectable gays, who talked earnestly of civil rights, seemed more intent on defending the current gay life-style than on changing it to something more meaningful. Rather than fight for the right to get married, the gay movement was fighting for the prerogative of gays to bump like bunnies.

  The community seemed lost, and sometimes Larry felt lost. He had created two hits in his life and those were now behind him. First, after years in the movie business, Larry had written and produced a film based on a D. H. Lawrence novel that everybody agreed could never be made into a movie. Women in Love became one of the most acclaimed films of its year, winning an Oscar nomination in screenwriting for Larry and an Academy Award for one of its stars, Glenda Jackson. He had produced other films, but his next big hit as an artist, albeit controversial, was Faggots. And now he was fiddling with another novel and typing some screenwriting assignments, but in truth, he felt something like the gay community itself, at sixes and sevens and not really set in any particular direction.

  Paul Popham had noticed Larry Kramer at the Ice Palace and thought, briefly, that he ought to give Faggots another try. He had managed to read only twenty or thirty pages before he got bored. He had a hard time seeing why anybody would be so deadly serious about being homosexual. Yes, Paul was gay, but it was no more an overwhelming trait than the fact he had been a Green Beret or that he had grown up in Oregon. It just was, and he didn’t see any reason to talk about it much. He never felt discriminated against, never pondered suicide, nor wrestled with any guilt about being homosexual. Being gay had, at worst, been only a mild inconvenience, something he had to maneuver around.

  None of Paul’s private life was anybody else’s damn business, he thought. None of it had much to do with politics either. Like a lot of gays on Wall Street, he voted his pocketbook as a registered Republican. This year, he wasn’t crazy about the Reaganites, but Carter was a wimp. Come November, Paul had every intention of voting for independent presidential candidate John Anderson, a moderate Republican congressman from Illinois.

  Paul scanned the dance floor, taking in the cream of New York gay society, the taut-bodied mustachioed men who were so beautiful you worried they might break if you stared too hard. It all made Paul regret that he hadn’t taken better advantage of his share in the beat-up old house on Ocean Walk. Enno had been rentin
g the place for years, and Paul had moved in this year to take the room of his best friend Rick Wellikoff.

  Rick had mentioned last September that he had some funny bumps behind his ear. He hadn’t wanted to go to the doctor, but Paul talked him into going to the famous dermatologists at New York University, where Paul was being treated for persistent psoriasis. Both Paul and Rick were stunned when the doctors said Rick had cancer, an unheard-of kind of cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma. It was even stranger when the doctor mentioned that there was another gay man with the same cancer at a nearby hospital. Rick and the second patient, it turned out, even had some mutual friends.

  Rick hadn’t seemed too sick until lately, and even now it wasn’t that he was terribly ill. He just felt dog-tired all the time. Paul thought that maybe Rick’s job as a fifth-grade teacher in a rough Brooklyn neighborhood was burning him out, but Rick insisted it was more than that. He quit his job and stayed holed up with his lover in their brownstone on West 78th Street. With a heavy load of work and the bedside visits with Rick, it was all Paul could do to get away for a rare weekend of carefree nights at the Ice Palace and days on friendly Fire Island sands.

  Back at the house on Ocean Walk, Enno Poersch stared down at Nick’s sleeping form. The idea had been for Nick to spend a relaxed summer at the beach and regain his health. Enno had stayed in the city all summer working on a major architectural drawing project. He wasn’t prepared for how much Nick had changed.

  Nick looked emaciated and rarely had the strength to move off the deck of the run-down, three-bedroom beach house. It was certainly peculiar that such two good friends as Rick and Nick should both be sick, Enno thought occasionally. At least Rick looked healthy enough to him. Recently, the thought had pierced the thick layers of Enno’s Oregonian optimism that Nick wasn’t doing as well. Enno felt as though he were breaking inside, because he loved Nick so much.