by Randy Shilts
Taylor thought the poster was a lot of bullshit and that Silverman was soft-peddling AIDS prevention so he wouldn’t have a lot of angry gay activists yelling at him for being homophobic. There’d been a lot of that in the past few days.
The reality was a mix of both Silverman’s good intentions and Taylor’s more cynical political analysis. The result was the first major public demonstration of AIDSpeak, a new language forged by public health officials, anxious gay politicians, and the burgeoning ranks of “AIDS activists.” The linguistic roots of AIDSpeak sprouted not so much from the truth as from what was politically facile and psychologically reassuring. Semantics was the major denominator of AIDSpeak jargon, because the language went to great lengths never to offend.
A new lexicon was evolving. Under the rules of AIDSpeak, for example, AIDS victims could not be called victims. Instead, they were to be called People With AIDS, or PWAs, as if contracting this uniquely brutal disease was not a victimizing experience. “Promiscuous” became “sexually active,” because gay politicians declared “promiscuous” to be “judgmental,” a major cuss word in AIDSpeak. The most-used circumlocution in AIDSpeak was “bodily fluids,” an expression that avoided troublesome words like “semen.”
Most importantly, however, the new syntax allowed gay political leaders to address and largely determine public health policy in the coming years, because public health officials quickly mastered AIDSpeak, and it was fundamentally a political tongue. With politicians talking like public health officials, and public health officials behaving like politicians, the new vernacular allowed virtually everyone to avoid challenging the encroaching epidemic in medical terms.
Thus, the verbiage tended toward the intransitive. AIDSpeak was rarely employed to motivate action; rather, it was most articulately pronounced when justifying inertia. Nobody meant any harm by this; quite to the contrary, AIDSpeak was the tongue designed to make everyone content. AIDSpeak was the language of good intentions in the AIDS epidemic; AIDSpeak was a language of death.
As public health director for the only city in the United States that was paying much attention to the epidemic, Mervyn Silverman became the chief translator of AIDSpeak for the general population. The former Peace Corps administrator was well-qualified for the role since he was a virtual warehouse of good intentions for the gay community. The past few days had demonstrated this amply.
The brouhaha had started on page two of the Chronicle a few days before in a story concerning the lack of any AIDS information in the city’s bathhouses and sex emporiums. At least 200,000 gay tourists were about to descend on the city for the Gay Freedom Day Parade, the story noted. Many gay men came, in part, to make use of San Francisco’s fabled sex emporiums; most still regarded AIDS as strange media hype. The scenario was one in which epidemics thrived.
Bill Kraus had quietly leaked an account of the ill-fated meeting with bathhouse owners. A public health official, who was not Mervyn Silverman but who asked not to be identified, told the paper about how it would be best to close the joints down; but barring that, they should be required to post some kind of warning.
“I don’t have the power to force the bathhouses to post anything,” Silverman initially told an inquiring reporter.
Technically, he was telling the truth. The only power Silverman had was to use his broad authority to close anything that was a threat to public health. He wasn’t about to do that. In a letter to a citizen in May, Silverman had denied even having this power, saying it would be “illegal for me to close down all bathhouses and other such places that are used for anonymous and multiple sex contacts. It is my belief that we would insult the intelligence of many of our citizens and it would be an invasion of privacy to take such an action.”
Silverman also was not inclined to force the gay businesses to alert customers about the death potential inherent in the use of their facilities. “The government can only play a certain role in this,” he said. “The real validity comes with information from peers. The information that will get across will come from the gay community itself.”
Like all AIDSpeak, the explanation sounded sensible, although it evaded the question of why public health officials exist. If preventing disease in a community was best done by the community itself, why bother to have a public health department?
Dr. Silverman was well-tutored by gay political leaders on the question of why the bathhouses shouldn’t be shut down. “If you close the bathhouses, people will simply go elsewhere to have unsafe sex,” he said.
For the past decade, spokespeople of the gay rights movement had held endless press conferences to argue against the stereotype that gay men were sex fiends wholly preoccupied with getting their rocks off. With AIDSpeak, however, many of these same spokespeople were now arguing that bathhouses must stay open because gay men were such sex fiends that they would be screwing behind every bush if they didn’t have their sex clubs.
After the initial Chronicle story on the sex managers’ refusal to post warnings, Mayor Dianne Feinstein inveighed: “Within the language of the health code, I think Dr. Silverman can write to them and tell them to post whatever warnings are necessary. I do think it is advisable.” A majority of the board of supervisors also said that the public health director should order the obdurate bathhouse owners to post warnings. A day later, Dr. Silverman announced he would require warnings in the bathhouses. If the proprietors didn’t cooperate, he would shut them down. “We would have done this anyway,” he said.
By Thursday morning, June 2, Silverman was meeting with the bathhouse owners who suddenly said they were “looking forward” to putting up the posters. The public health director pledged the most “intensive” public health education campaign in city history. After that press conference, Silverman showed Barbara Taylor the AIDS poster. It gave four pieces of advice: “use condoms,” “avoid any exchange of bodily fluids,” “limit your use of recreational drugs,” and “enjoy more time with fewer partners.” The poster did inform gay men that there was a nasty disease out there that could kill you; but in saying to only “reduce” the number of partners and “limit” drugs, it did not get to the blunt fact that just one partner or bad needle could bring death.
The leadership of the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club figured from the start that the bathhouse controversy had been raised by Bill Kraus and his Milk Club allies. Randy Stallings, the Toklas Club president, quickly launched a vitriolic counterattack. Kraus had violated the unwritten agreement that bathhouses were something that should not even be discussed publicly. The official Toklas policy was released the day after Silverman’s meeting with the bathhouse owners.
The order requiring health warnings was a “direct attack on the social and economic viability of our community,” the Toklas Club complained. “There is no evidence that the bathhouses or private clubs are the cause of this illness. To single out one type of gay business as somehow ‘responsible’ for this epidemic is to begin the process of destroying our community.”
As for Kraus’s essay in the Bay Area Reporter, the Toklas Club editorialized, “It is the height of arrogance to assume that only a small group of ‘concerned individuals’ are aware of this epidemic and are capable of dictating sexual behavior for the rest of us. There is a trend among some elements of our community to be anti-sexual and panic prone at a time when we should be banding together to defend a way of life that is precious and hard-won.”
Now they were convinced Bill Kraus suffered from “internalized homophobia” otherwise he would say that gay men were sex fiends and needed their bathhouses.
The most rabid supporter of sexual liberation was Konstantin Berlandt, the co-chair of the gay parade board of directors. “I didn’t become a homosexual so I could use condoms,” said Berlandt. “Of course, we’re concerned about spreading a disease. But what should we do? Take our bodily fluids and put them in barrels off the Farallons?”
Kraus thought it was strange that anybody would reduce the aspirations of the gay
movement to a disinclination for rubbers.
Like so many public policy issues in the epidemic, the bathhouse altercation of early June 1983 demonstrated the complex interrelationship that had grown between media and government. The matter arose only because a newspaper wrote a story about it, forcing public officials to take some rather obvious positions. In Los Angeles and New York, the newspapers didn’t write about such distasteful subjects and the issues were not raised.
Moreover, public health officials in those two cities had already issued blanket assurances to anxious gay leaders that they would never close the bathhouses under any circumstances. In San Francisco, it was only the threat of closure that secured the agreement of bathhouse owners to the notices and brochures. Bathhouse owners in New York and Los Angeles, guaranteed that no such action would happen in their cities, had no similar incentive to provide education on AIDS. The handful of gay leaders who prodded for such materials found they had no leverage with the businessmen.
Selma Dritz thought the posting of signs was a cop-out. The U.S. Constitution might be construed to allow the right to commit suicide, but the ramifications of bathhouses did not end with the patron. These people went to other places, picked up and infected others. The Constitution did not grant the right to take other people with you. The day of Silverman’s announcement, the city attorney issued an opinion telling the public health director that under the state health code “you may…order the public bathhouses closed immediately.”
In the weeks after Dr. Silverman’s press conference, the posters and brochures were distributed to bathhouses. A few honest bathhouse owners posted the notices prominently, but most put them in the darkest corners, if they bothered to post them at all. The syntax of AIDSpeak was in word not deed. Dr. Silverman did not dispatch anyone to see whether his orders were executed. By the thousands, gay men continued to go to the baths, and by the thousands they would later die.
June 3
There was venality, and there was also courage.
Gary Walsh’s friend Mark Feldman died one month after he joined other AIDS patients in the candlelight march. Gary took his friend Lu Chaikin with him to the memorial service. Mark was the first to die among those early AIDS victims who had gone public with their plight. Though near death, they had braved social hysteria and personal rejection from friends so they could make people understand, so they could make people care.
Mark had died a particularly gruesome death. For weeks, his mouth was so engulfed in excruciating herpes sores that he could not eat. He was fed intravenously while the Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions covered his insides and Pneumocystis protozoa filled his lungs.
Gary was grim at the service. Lu wasn’t particularly cheerful herself, because she couldn’t put aside the thought that one day she would have to sit through a similar service for Gary.
Gary scanned the room. He saw the faces of those who would die; he saw the faces of those who had died; he saw himself.
Despair overwhelmed Gary Walsh in the days after the service. He started lodging calls to Secretary Margaret Heckler’s office. She should talk to him before she goes around saying that the government is spending all it needs to on AIDS research. She should talk to somebody who has had a friend die, he said. Gary tried to get an appointment with Governor Deukmejian, who had yet to utter one word of concern about the epidemic. He even wrote Ann Landers. For once, fighting didn’t salve the anger, the depression, or the fear.
A few weeks later, Gary mentioned to Lu that he didn’t think he would be going to any more memorial services.
The service also marked the first such ceremony for Bill Kraus. Bill had gone with his friend Ron Huberman, who had dated Mark Feldman before his illness. Afterward, Ron noticed that Bill was unusually somber. Ron thought it was because Mark’s death battered any remnants of denial they could have about the severity of what the community was facing. This wasn’t just hitting those other people—the fist-fuckers on Folsom Street—it was affecting respectable middle-class gays like themselves. Bill had a broader concern as well.
“Anita Bryant couldn’t destroy our community. The FBI could never destroy our community; the police couldn’t; Dan White couldn’t; the government couldn’t do it,” confided Bill. “But AIDS might. We’ve made all this progress only to be undone by some virus.”
Mark Feldman was one of the people with AIDS who had signed the letter asking the Bay Area Reporter publisher to fire editor Paul Lorch. When Lorch learned that Feldman had died, he pulled out the list of AIDS patients and crossed off Feldman’s name.
PASTEUR INSTITUTE, PARIS
Luc Montagnier now knew that the new AIDS-related retrovirus was not a leukemia virus. He no longer called it RUB or HTLV. He had devised a new name, stemming from its retrieval from the lymph node of a lymphadenopathy patient. It was now called LAV, or lymphadenopathy-associated virus. Montagnier was surprised that there wasn’t more enthusiasm about the Pasteur Institute’s announcement of a new retrovirus. Most scientists wanted to defer final judgment until more research came from Robert Gallo’s lab at the National Cancer Institute. Gallo was, after all, a far more famed retrovirologist, and he was talking HTLV. Montagnier, however, felt his group was more on target. In recent weeks, Pasteur researchers had isolated LAV in the blood of some hemophiliacs. Montagnier was gaining more confidence that the Pasteur Institute had indeed discovered the virus that caused AIDS. Still, he was stumped as to which family of viruses LAV belonged. If not HTLV, then what?
The chance encounter with another virologist on the Pasteur campus gave Montagnier the final piece to the puzzle. The associate mentioned a family of viruses, primarily found in animals, called lentiviruses. Lenti means slow. These viruses go into the cells, lie dormant for a while, and then burst into frenzied activity. Montagnier had never heard of the family before. He spent the night reading about equine viruses and was amazed at the similarities. LAV had the same morphology, the same proteins, and even looked the same in the electron microscope pictures. At the regular Saturday meeting of the doctors working on AIDS, Montagnier confidently announced that they had indeed discovered a new virus and it was not HTLV.
This proved to be a turning point in the scientific understanding of the epidemic. In the lives of the French researchers, it was noted as the beginning of the great frustration. They had taken the mystery out of the mystery disease but nobody was going to believe them.
June 13
NEW YORK CITY
The headline screamed from every newsstand in the New York metropolitan area. The New York Post had struck pay dirt: “L.I. Grandma Dead of AIDS,” read the bold headline. The blood bank wouldn’t admit it, of course, because blood banks still weren’t admitting that transfusion-associated AIDS even existed. The Mineola grandmother, however, appeared to have no other risk for AIDS than the blood transfusion she had received three years before during heart surgery. Like most transfusion-AIDS cases diagnosed in 1983, Lorraine DeSantis had received the blood in 1980, long before the epidemic was even detected.
Suddenly, again, AIDS seemed a threat to everybody, and the wave of hysteria that had started building months before reached its crescendo in the final weeks of June and the first weeks of July. No part of the country seemed immune.
Each anecdote had the same premise spoken in the rarely heard dialect of AIDSpeak whispered outside the gay community. “Scientists don’t really know…” In gay AIDSpeak, that meant that scientists couldn’t prove AIDS was spread by sex, so people shouldn’t take measures to protect themselves. When those same words were spoken with a heterosexual accent, however, they meant that scientists couldn’t prove that AIDS was not spread by casual contagion, therefore people should take any measure possible to protect themselves and society. Both dialects were rooted in the same language of paranoia, one political and the other medical, although they implied drastically different solutions.
During this wave of AIDS hysteria in 1983, the heterosexuals got the most press. Every corner of the
country seemed to have its own twist on AIDS fright. Because the New York Post had mastered the art of fashioning exaggerated fear and paranoia into headline copy, it seemed the best stories were happening in the five boroughs.
The day after the Long Island grandma headline, the Post ran another frightening story: “Junkie AIDS Victim Was Housekeeper at Bellevue.” The story, strategically placed next to “A real-life Bambi finds a home in Westchester,” told of how a thirty-one-year-old drug addict had been toting sheets and changing beds at Bellevue. When police officers delivered him to court for an arraignment, they wore rubber gloves and surgical masks.
A day after that, jail guards showed up at suburban Westchester County Jail in protective suits and surgical masks. The county jail did have one AIDS sufferer, but he was housed a quarter mile away from the main prison building where the guards wore padded nylon coveralls with hoods. “Grim future is here as guards model garb for handling AIDS inmates at Westchester County Jail,” read the caption.
The news that a jail cook at the Queens House of Detention had died of AIDS complications sent officials of the prison guards’ union scurrying in protest. When a Department of Corrections official told guards that they had nothing to fear from AIDS patients as food handlers, the president of the Correction Officers Benevolent Association said he would buy a steak and lobster dinner for the entire Department of Corrections executive staff if the food could be prepared and served by AIDS patients.
San Francisco was suffering a simultaneous case of the AIDS jitters. The day after the Post’s classic grandmother headline, two AIDS sufferers were scheduled to be part of an “A.M. San Francisco” segment whose goal was to “demystify” AIDS and calm the fears. However, the two patients couldn’t appear on the show because studio technicians refused to mike them. Then, cameramen said they would not shoot the show if they had to walk onto the same sound stage as the two gay men. The two patients instead talked through a telephone in a separate room; only their disembodied voices appeared in the “demystification” show.
