by Randy Shilts
In what was to prove a forerunner for many similar stories that summer, Life magazine released a dramatic cover feature story and photo essay that grimly announced on the cover: “Now, No One Is Safe from AIDS.” In truth, most Americans were safe from AIDS, and there was more fiction than fact in Life’s assertion that heterosexual hemophiliacs, heterosexual transfusion recipients, and heterosexual partners of intravenous drug users were the epidemic’s “new victims.” None of these risk groups were, in fact, new. What was new was that the media was talking about AIDS in a heterosexual context. This context made AIDS newsworthy, and in the summer months, the most common expression among AIDS organizers became, “AIDS is not a gay disease.”
And it was in answer to those words that the United States took its first tentative steps toward the realization that a new epidemic would be indelibly written into the history of the Republic, and nothing would ever be the same again.
June 30
SAN FRANCISCO
Bright sunshine turned the sky porcelain blue and brightened the greens on San Francisco’s sloping hills. The sun always shone on the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade, it seemed. A crowd of 250,000 clogged sidewalks and streets for two miles in downtown San Francisco, even before the three-hour procession of floats, marching bands, and other contingents began.
The diversity of the world’s preeminent gay community, converging again for its annual celebration, created both the point and counterpoint that demonstrated why the gay community defied singular depiction. Men carried on their shoulders six-year-olds who wore T-shirts proclaiming “I Love My Gay Dad.” A block away from this wholesome sight, the float from the Chaps leather bar lumbered along, featuring a troupe of men clad in black leather straps and handcuffed into all kinds of fascinating positions; they loved their daddies too. After the usual appearance of Dykes on Bykes came Ducks in Trucks, a float with scores of rubber ducks floating around little plastic swimming pools. Behind earnest lesbian-feminists protesting Central American policy were the satirical “Ladies Against Women,” carrying such signs as “Recriminalize Hanky-Panky” and “Suffering NOT Suffrage.”
There was a different mood to this parade, as well as to the community it represented. The depression that had marked the penultimate phase of a community coming to grips with widespread death was beginning to lift. In its place was an acceptance. There might have been a time Before, but it was no longer the moment that people longed for; it was gone, everyone understood now, and it would never come back. Life would forevermore be in this After. It was cruel and it wasn’t fair, but that was the way it would be, and at the sixteenth annual Gay Freedom Day Parade it was clear that most gay San Franciscans understood this.
After the years of denial and anger, the bargaining and incapacitating sadness, the San Francisco gay community was mobilized to fight the epidemic, as was no other single group in the United States. The parade was dedicated to the memory of Bobbi Campbell, the one-time “KS poster boy” who had died the previous summer. The floats with naked men got less applause this year than the numerous contingents of AIDS-related organizations that, by now, had persuaded thousands of local gay men to spend their after-work hours staffing information hotlines, raising funds for AIDS services, and performing chores in the homes of the stricken. This was the new gay community that paraded by the hundreds of thousands under the afternoon sun, and everybody applauded. When the San Francisco AIDS Foundation’s somber float rolled slowly by, with its huge black faux marble tombstone draped with garlands, people seemed to understand that this was part of the gay community too, and the parade judges awarded the float a special prize.
The parade’s largest contingent stretched for two full blocks and marched under the banner of “Living Sober.” They were the burgeoning ranks of gay people who had given up drugs and alcohol, largely through Alcoholics Anonymous, and were among the pioneers of the new life-style emerging in the gay community. Other groups handed out thousands of condoms without fear that gay men would simply blow them up like balloons and discard them, as they had in past parades. And nobody joked any more that they didn’t know how to use the darn things. One Castro Street boutique now reported selling an average of 4,000 rubbers every weekend and had recently started a rack of “designer condoms.” A former porn star had come to the parade to promote his own safe-sex campaign called, “Get Butch with Germs.”
At the AIDS Foundation booth, staffers were touting the results of a new survey that found that four in five local gay men had totally eliminated high-risk sexual practices from their repertoire of bedroom activities. Only one in eleven gay men still engaged in unprotected oral sex, and only one in fourteen practiced anal intercourse without a rubber. More than half of gay men were ensconced in relationships. No longer was the foundation giving gays a “safe sex can be fun” message. Instead, new ads bluntly admonished, “There is no longer any excuse for unsafe sex.”
The gay community had managed to take this dramatic turnaround in sexual norms with typical good humor. Comedian Doug Holsclaw routinely broke up audiences with his one-liner, “I like to fuck with strangers—call me old-fashioned.”
What was particularly noteworthy was that rather than dissipating in the wake of the epidemic, gay political strength continued to increase. Nothing demonstrated this more amply than the presence of Alan Cranston, the first U.S. Senator to ever address a Gay Freedom Day audience, at the rally following the parade. “From our freedom, we produce diversity,” Cranston said, “and from our diversity we gain strength to overcome our problem.”
The loudest ovations of the day came not for politicians or entertainers, but when the rally’s master of ceremonies announced the release of two San Francisco gay men who had been among the twenty-nine Americans held hostage by terrorists in Lebanon. The two men, who had been aboard TWA Flight 847 on an Athens-to-Rome leg of a world tour, had spent most of their captivity living with the terror that their fundamentalist Moslem captors would learn that they were gay and kill them, as they had killed an American serviceman on the flight.
Early in their captivity, San Francisco news organizations learned that hostage Jack McCarty had worked as a chef for the Elephant Walk on 18th and Castro streets, one of the city’s most famous gay bars, before embarking on the tour with his lover, postman Victor Amburgy. With unprecedented restraint, local news organizations withheld reporting on this angle of the story, fearing the gay story would result in the two hostages’ deaths.
In the long days of captivity, McCarty and Amburgy were kept in dark, rat-infested basements while the terrorists played Russian roulette with the hostages, again and again. When other hostages began to crack, some of the Americans turned to McCarty, who had seemed preternaturally calm. McCarty could not tell them the reason he could handle the prospect of imminent death—that he was a gay man from San Francisco. Instead, he adopted the role of an unofficial counselor for the other hostages. It was a role to which McCarty was accustomed; he had been a Shanti Project volunteer.
Throughout the ordeal, the forty-year-old chef recalled Scott Cleaver, a twenty-seven-year-old whom he had counseled as part of his Shanti work. McCarty had watched Cleaver muster incredible strength and courage to fight his terminal disease, and McCarty promised himself that he would be as brave in the hands of these terrorists. The fortitude was something he shared with the other hostages, and it helped them all survive.
When Amburgy and McCarty stepped off the Air Force plane after their release, while a quarter-million lesbians and gay men celebrated Gay Freedom Day in San Francisco, they walked down the ramp arm-in-arm. They loved each other, and they were proud they loved each other, and they had survived in part because of the strength they had developed as gay men in San Francisco.
On that sunny Gay Freedom Day in San Francisco, it was clear that this entire gay community also had something to share with the larger society. Hopefully, Americans could learn from the gay community’s mistakes and not waste valuable time floundering i
n denial; perhaps Americans could learn from the gay community’s new strengths, as well. It was a far different vision of strength than what gays had imagined they would fashion when they marched proudly in the 1980 Gay Freedom Day Parade. The outward push for power continued, but it was largely eclipsed by the inward struggle for grit in the face of some of the crudest blows that fate had meted out to any American community. As gay people had helped each other find this strength, they had forged a gay community that was truly a community, not just a neighborhood. And by now, there was also a shared sense that they wanted the dream to survive. It had been a painful and difficult five years to reach this point, but it had come this day.
57
ENDGAME
Friday, July 12, 1985
RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Conflicts again arose between the administration and the House of Representatives as Congress entered the final phase of budget writing for the coming fiscal year. For two months, Representative Henry Waxman had prodded Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler for documents indicating what the nation’s health agency doctors had requested for AIDS research. The administration’s claim that the researchers were getting all the funds they wanted meant that doctors had asked for a 10 percent reduction in funds to fight the epidemic. Henry Waxman and aide Tim Westmoreland had no doubt that if they could get their hands on internal memoranda, they would find that, once again, government doctors were pleading for more funds, not fewer. Heckler’s office ignored the requests.
Meanwhile, Dr. James Mason, Acting Assistant Secretary for Health, was known to be making trips to the Office of Management and Budget to argue for more money. When an interviewer for the Cable Health Network had asked Dr. Robert Gallo a few weeks before whether he had sufficient funds to study AIDS, the normally effusive researcher would only offer a terse “no comment.” Privately, Gallo complained bitterly that over a year after the administration’s spotlighting of his HTLV-III discovery, the government had still produced no significant increase in funds for his lab. To a group of French journalists, Gallo openly complained, “The work done right now in therapeutic research is insufficient.”
Unrest was growing in Congress as well. California Senator Cranston, looking ahead to a difficult reelection campaign in 1986, had become a leading Senate spokesman for AIDS funding. House Appropriations Committee chair Ed Roybal had become radicalized on the AIDS issue after a gay staffer in his Los Angeles district office succumbed to the syndrome.
Representative Waxman had scheduled hearings on the AIDS budget for Monday, July 22. He wanted documentation for the need of more AIDS funds by then, so on July 12, he threw down the gauntlet in a letter to Secretary Heckler.
“If all documents are not received by that date, I will be forced to consider action to subpoena the information,” he wrote. “I am indeed sorry to be so blunt in my request…. For six months, however, the Congress has awaited the courtesy of a response, and none has been forthcoming. During those six months, almost 1,800 Americans have died of AIDS and almost 3,300 were confirmed to have this almost certainly terminal condition. Under such circumstances and in light of the Administration’s previous years of delay and neglect, I do not believe that we can wait longer.”
Once again, Waxman felt, the administration would need to be shamed into allocating appropriate funds for its “number-one health priority.”
Monday, July 15
CARMEL, CALIFORNIA
Rock Hudson’s friends had pleaded with the actor to cancel the planned taping of a television segment with Doris Day, but the affable matinee idol insisted that he had given his word. He knew that Day, with whom he had starred in Pillow Talk and other romantic comedies in the early 1960s, was counting on the publicity from their reunion to promote her new animal show on the Christian Broadcasting Network.
When Hudson arrived, the physical deterioration evident in his haggard face and wasted frame stunned Day and the reporters who attended the press conference near her home in Carmel. Hudson barely had the strength to walk, but he went through his two days of taping bravely and told reporters he had the flu. It was Rock Hudson’s last public appearance.
When asked if Hudson was ill, the actor’s press spokesman, Dale Olson, said he was “in perfect health” and had dropped some excess weight as part of a diet regimen.
When Rock Hudson returned to Los Angeles, he collapsed from fatigue. His Kaposi’s sarcoma had been progressing for a year now. A few weeks earlier, he had been diagnosed with lymphoblastic lymphoma, a cancer seen increasingly among AIDS patients. Hudson told his friends he would return to Paris for his HPA-23 treatments as soon as he could muster the strength.
On July 17, Bahamian health authorities shut down a cancer clinic that was treating patients with blood-derived drugs. Batches of the drugs, it turned out, were infected with the AIDS virus. As many as 1,000 patients had been treated at the clinic, and after an initial investigation by the Centers for Disease Control, health officials warned patients that they might be at risk for developing AIDS.
Among the patients was former Georgia Governor Lester Maddox. During the height of the civil rights movement, Maddox had found a permanent place in the history of American racism. He had handed out ax handles to white patrons of the segregated restaurant he owned, after civil rights leaders had targeted the establishment for a sit-in. As taciturn as ever, Maddox reacted poorly to the news that he might have been infected with the AIDS virus. “I’d rather go with straight cancer than AIDS,” he said. “There’s more dignity with cancer.”
Friday, July 19
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The subpoena for administration AIDS records was about to be prepared when a messenger hastily delivered Secretary Heckler’s missive to Representative Waxman’s office late Friday night.
“There has been agreement within the Administration on the necessity of additional funding,” Heckler wrote. The Secretary announced that the administration had just discovered “deficiencies” in the AIDS budget totaling $45.7 million, and Heckler authorized the diversion of the funds from other health programs to the AIDS budget. Heckler’s redirection of funds increased AIDS spending for the next fiscal year by 48 percent to a total of $126.4 million. The increase, Heckler said, was evidence of the administration’s commitment to AIDS as its “number-one health priority.”
Sunday, July 21
PARIS
Shortly after his arrival in Paris, as he walked across the lobby of the Ritz Hotel, Rock Hudson collapsed. A doctor examined Hudson in his room and assumed that the heart condition, for which the actor had undergone cardiac surgery in 1981, was responsible. Hudson was driven to the American Hospital in the suburb of Neuilly. Doctors at the hospital were told only that Hudson had a history of heart disease.
Monday, July 22
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The AIDS hearings of Representative Waxman’s Subcommittee on Health and the Environment followed the ritual format for congressional inquiries into the government’s handling of the epidemic. Various doctors, including Paul Volberding from San Francisco and Michael Gottlieb from Los Angeles, appeared to chastise the government’s low funding levels and, in particular, the lack of even fragmentary research into AIDS treatments. Dr. Martin Hirsch of Massachusetts General Hospital pleaded for a “crash program” of research on the disease and warned, presciently, “Before it is finished, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, more will become victims.”
Dr. James Mason defended the administration’s record, noting the “tremendous progress in a short period of time” and reminding Congress that the epidemic was the administration’s “number-one health priority.”
This led to the usual angry cross-examination by Representative Waxman, who, nevertheless, thanked Mason for the increase in research funds. Sardonically, he added, “almost 2,000 Americans died and thousands more were infected” with the AIDS virus while Congress had awaited the additional budget request. “For these pe
ople,” Waxman said, “even this budget is too little, too late.”
Tuesday, July 23
URGENT. ROCK HUDSON FATALLY ILL. URGENT
HOLLYWOOD (UPI)—ACTOR ROCK HUDSON, LAST OF THE TRADITIONAL SQUAREJAWED, ROMANTIC LEADING MEN, KNOWN RECENTLY FOR HIS TV ROLES ON “MCMILLAN & WIFE” AND “DYNASTY” IS SUFFERING FROM INOPERABLE LIVER CANCER POSSIBLY LINKED TO AIDS, IT WAS DISCLOSED TUESDAY.
The bulletin arrived after 1 P.M., in time to make the afternoon headlines. Several news organizations had been tracking rumors that Hudson had AIDS, since his appearance with Doris Day a week earlier. The Hollywood Reporter ran an item on the morning of July 23, saying bluntly that Hudson had AIDS. That afternoon, American Hospital sources confirmed that the ailing film star had been in the hospital for two days. Lab tests showed that Hudson, an alcoholic, had liver irregularities, so rumors spread that the actor had liver cancer.
Hudson had told only four friends that he had the syndrome, heatedly denying the AIDS rumors to everyone else. Press spokesman Dale Olson issued the first of many denials about Hudson’s AIDS diagnosis minutes after the first United Press International bulletin.
“My official statement is that Rock Hudson is in the American Hospital where his doctors have diagnosed that he has cancer of the liver and that it is not operable,” Olson said. Hudson’s personal doctors in Los Angeles, however, confirmed that the actor was in Paris to consult with doctors from the Pasteur Institute. Given the Pasteur’s reputation for its AIDS research, many reporters began to draw the obvious conclusions.
