The Gay Metropolis

by Charles Kaiser

  “I was in a state of shock and grief and numbness,” said Howard Rosenman, who by now had moved to Hollywood to pursue a film career. “All my friends were dying and I thought I was sick because I was so wild in those days. For sure. There was no way of testing and the mode of transmission wasn’t as clear as it is now. At the time if you got a cold or sneezed or you saw a pimple, you thought, That’s it! I called my skin doctor up in the middle of the night to come to his office because I was so hysterical. And my doctor, my general practitioner, who wasn’t gay, looked at it, and said, ‘You have AIDS. That’s Kaposi’s sarcoma.’ And I quickly called Arnie Klein at his office. He walked me across the street and ordered the biopsy and two days later the biopsy came back and it was just a hematoma.

  “It was only in 1987 that I got tested for the first time and found out I was HIV-negative. I never had anal sex for various reasons. Just a throw of the dice.”

  The disease itself was as frightening as anything known to twentieth-century man. If it didn’t kill you within weeks with a particularly virulent strain of pneumonia, it would cover your entire body with sores, sometimes blind you, addle your brain, and force you into diapers with violent diarrhea.

  More optimistic notions flowed from the description of the earliest casualties as gay men who had “as many as 10 sexual encounters each night up to four times a week.” A federal study at the beginning of 1982 estimated the lifetime number of sexual partners for early victims of the disease at 1,200; for some, the number approached 20,000. Even in the rollicking seventies, those were figures very few gay men could match. These statistics nurtured the hope that the immune systems of the first men to get sick were being overwhelmed by overexposure to a whole variety of diseases including hepatitis, syphilis, and intestinal parasites, instead of a single new infectious agent.

  Anyone who was healthy and had been monogamous at first assumed he was safe. (Although rarely articulated, there was plenty of interior speculation among gay men that this pestilence was some kind of retribution for rampant promiscuity.)* But once the disease began to strike men who had been monogamous while their lovers had been promiscuous, only the celibate could retain any confidence about the future.

  Because there are only educated guesses about the number of gay people in America, no one will ever know precisely what proportion of the gay population has been afflicted by this disease. However, anecdotal evidence from doctors with gay practices suggests that at least half of the gay men in New York and San Francisco born between 1945 and i960 were probably infected by the AIDS virus between the end of the seventies and the end of the eighties. In the earliest stages of the epidemic, some died within a month after their diagnosis; most were dead less than three years later.

  Gay men in Manhattan from the generation born after World War II would suffer at least a fifty percent casualty rate from this scourge. (By comparison, less than three percent of the American soldiers who served in World War II died in or after battle.) Virtually every gay man in every large American city would experience the death of at least ten friends during the epidemic; for some, the number of deceased friends and acquaintances has surpassed three hundred.

  At the beginning, in Manhattan, it was known as “Saint’s Disease,” in honor of the downtown discotheque favored by the most beautiful and sought-after men of all—because so many of the best-looking were among the first to die. The novelist David Leavitt recalled the mid-1980s as “a time when the streets were filled with an almost palpable sense of mourning and panic.”

  One gay doctor in Greenwich Village concluded that half of his gay male patients had been exposed to the virus. The office nurse said the test results had been “completely unpredictable.” Patients he had been certain would be positive because of their medical history were sometimes negative, and others who had barely had any sexually transmitted diseases were sometimes positive.

  For more than a year, the doctor pressured his patient “James Blair” (a pseudonym) to get tested. “All your other blood work is fine—why don’t you do it?” the doctor asked. But so many of Blair’s friends had already tested positive that he was certain he would as well—and like thousands of others, he was concerned that he might literally worry himself to death if his fears became concrete. Finally the doctor said, “What if I tested you without telling you, and I only told you the result if you were negative?”

  “Well, obviously that would be ideal,” Blair replied.

  “Well, I did, and you are,” the doctor told him. When he had taken over the practice from another doctor, the new practitioner had apparently tested all of his patients—regardless of whether they had given their consent. The doctor’s behavior was illegal, but Blair felt such gigantic relief that he never challenged the physician’s ethics.

  The AIDS epidemic would cause more pain and loss than anyone within the gay community had hitherto imagined possible. And the deaths among artists would ravage the creativity of American culture for at least a generation. A typical disaster was the devastation of the Violet Quill, a group of seven novelists formed at the end of the 1970s. Its members were Edmund White, then working on A Boy’s Own Story; Felice Picano; Andrew Holleran; Robert Ferro; George Whitmore; Christopher Cox; and Michael Grumley. Vito Russo, who was writing The Celluloid Closet, was also an occasional visitor. By the end of 1991, only White, Holleran, and Picano were still alive.

  “For me these losses were definitive,” Edmund White wrote. “The witnesses to my life, the people who had shared the same references and sense of humor, were gone. The loss of all the books they might have written remains incalculable.”

  IN AMERICA SINCE World War II, only life-and-death struggles have been able to inspire mass political action on the left, and that was especially true of gay people and AIDS. The disease would convert a generation of mostly selfish men, consumed by sex, into a highly disciplined army of fearless and selfless street fighters and caregivers. Since lesbians were never at much risk of infection, the depth of their commitment to this battle was even more impressive.

  This war transformed the survivors, leaving them alternately awed by their strength and guilt-ridden over the mystery of their survival. Partly because just as many healthy people were forced out of the closet by this battle as sick people, for the first time in its history, the gay movement would begin to have the kind of political clout that was roughly commensurate with its size and talents. Beyond the gay community, ten years of lobbying by gay activists obsessed with survival overturned revered scientific assumptions about how quickly experimental drugs for the terminally ill should be introduced—and whether it can ever be ethical to offer anyone facing death a placebo.

  Antibiotics and other so-called miracle drugs had made Americans supremely arrogant about their power over contagion. After polio had been conquered in the fifties, we remained vulnerable to cancer and plenty of other incurable diseases. But the possibility of an incurable disease that was also infectious had practically disappeared from the nation’s consciousness.

  Everything about AIDS—from its long latency period to the groups it first affected and the moment in American history when it was first detected—all these factors conspired against swift and dramatic action to contain it. AIDS was so unlike any other illness that Americans had dealt with in the previous twenty-five years that its behavior and its impact were literally unimaginable to almost everyone, except for a handful of prescient researchers.

  The latency period and the initial mystery about its transmissibility led most experts to underestimate the threat AIDS posed to America’s health. And because all of the initial cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control were among homosexuals, for many months there was far less response than the government and the media exhibited after outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease, toxic shock syndrome, or even the poisonings from a handful of tainted Tylenol capsules.

  Homophobia led many decision makers to discount this epidemic, partly because they didn’t care much about those
who were sick, and partly because they believed that as long as they were straight, they themselves would never have to worry about it. The only real heroes were a few scientists inside the CDC, who lobbied early and often for more money to fight the epidemic, and a very small group of congressmen from California and New York, including Philip Burton, Henry Waxman, and Ted Weiss, whose openly gay staff members convinced them to take the epidemic seriously. Bill Kraus, a gay aide to Burton, and Tim Westmoreland, the gay counsel to a Waxman health subcommittee, were particularly important in sounding the alarm. In April 1982, Westmoreland wrote a statement for Waxman to read which declared, “There is no doubt in my mind that if the same disease had appeared among Americans of Norwegian descent, or among tennis players, rather than gay males, the responses of both the government and the medical establishment would have been different.” In September of that year, the Congressional Research Service estimated that the National Institutes of Health had spent $36,100 per toxic shock death in fiscal 1982; $34,841 per Legionnaires’ disease death in the most recent fiscal year; and just $3,225 per AIDS death in fiscal 1981 and $8,991 in fiscal 1982. Congressional staffers joked that NIH really stood for “Not Interested in Homosexuals.”

  Republican priorities were perfectly clear, right from the start of the Reagan government. One of the administration’s first official acts was to propose a cut of nearly fifty percent in the appropriation for the CDC—from $327 million to $161 million. At the same time, Reagan asked for an immediate increase of $7 billion in defense spending and an additional increase of $25 billion for the following fiscal year—for a new annual total of $220 billion. Veneration for what Dwight Eisenhower had dubbed the “military-industrial complex” had never been higher. And although the Democratic House did a good job of resisting many of the Republican efforts to reduce spending on health care and research, the administration frequently retaliated by refusing to spend the moneys that Congress had appropriated.

  Inside the Reagan administration—at the White House, at the Office of Management and Budget, and within the Department of Health and Human Services—there were no openly gay staffers, and therefore, very little will to attack the problem forcefully. In public, Reagan officials routinely pretended they had all the dollars they needed to fight the disease, while dissidents inside the administration secretly begged for more money.

  The national press suffered from the same defect as the Reagan administration. Despite all the changes of the seventies, most newsrooms remained macho places where openly gay or lesbian reporters were almost nonexistent. Gail Shister believed that she became the first “out lesbian” at a major metropolitan daily when she revealed her orientation to her colleagues at the New Orleans States Item in 1975. Five years later, in San Francisco and New York, there were just two reporters at major dailies who had come out in their newsrooms—one at The New York Post, and one at The San Francisco Chronicle. There were none at The New York Times or The Washington Post. Nor were there any openly gay network television correspondents—and there still weren’t any fifteen years later. The closeted reporters who did work in big city newsrooms were almost uniformly reluctant to lobby for “gay” stories, for fear of betraying their secret orientation. In 1982, the Columbia Journalism Review reported that “as gays see it, the prevailing attitude is a compound of hostility and ignorance that prevents gay journalists from openly acknowledging their sexual preference and thus virtually guarantees that coverage of … the lives led by the majority of gay men and women, will be inadequate and uninformed.”

  At The New York Times, a homophobic atmosphere continued to keep all gay employees in the closet, but there was an indication that the future might be more palatable.* In 1981, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the twenty-nine-year-old son of the paper’s publisher, had moved from the Washington bureau to New York to continue his apprenticeship in the newsroom.

  As children of the sixties, Sulzberger and his wife, the artist Gail Gregg, were fierce opponents of all kinds of prejudice; no one ever had to lobby them about the importance of diversity and equality. During his first two years in New York, Sulzberger did a remarkable thing: he met with every reporter who he learned was gay. Over lunch, he told each one that he knew about his orientation. Then the future publisher assured all of them that this fact would have no effect on their careers at the newspaper. After a few moments of dumbfoundedness, these employees felt tremendously relieved. As long as they were willing to remain at the paper until after Rosenthal had retired, Sulzberger would make sure that they would never have to hide who they were, or suffer because they were gay.

  Five years later, Rosenthal left the newsroom to become a columnist, and Sulzberger kept his word, working with Max Frankel, who was Rosenthal’s successor. One of the first things that Sulzberger accomplished was the lifting of a ban on the use of the word gay in the Times. During Rosenthal’s tenure, the word could be used only if it was in the name of an organization, or part of a quotation. In a memo to Sulzberger’s more old-fashioned father, who was still publisher of the paper in 1986, Frankel wrote, “Punch, I’m afraid you’re just going to have to swallow hard, and let us use the word ‘gay’ in The Times.” Coverage of gay issues and the treatment of gay employees improved dramatically during the Frankel regime, but the new executive editor was modest about this achievement.

  All he had done, Frankel said, was to “let people know that whether they wanted to be openly gay, or whether they wanted to be relaxed, but not very openly gay, or whether they wanted to be secretly gay or lesbian, was their business, and essentially not mine.” Frankel said he had never been attacked by anyone after the paper expanded its coverage of gay subjects, with one exception. “When we ran a picture of the two guys in Connecticut kissing—then you get a couple of stray letters saying, ‘What the hell’s going on? Are you going too far?’”

  Within a few years, Sulzberger and Frankel had transformed one of the most homophobic institutions in America into one of the best places in the world for a gay person to work. And because of the influence of the Times, its example gradually had a huge impact on the way lesbians and gays were covered, and treated, at hundreds of other news-gathering organizations all over the country.

  THE REPORTER WHO would make the biggest difference in the way the AIDS catastrophe was reported did not work at the Times. Randy Shilts was a product of the nation’s heartland. He was born in Davenport, Iowa, and grew up in Aurora, Illinois, outside Chicago. As a teenager, this child of conservative and religious parents had founded a local chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom, which championed right-wing causes. But when he got to the University of Oregon in Eugene, he found himself.

  At Oregon, Shilts studied journalism and became the managing editor of the student newspaper. Then he came out of the closet to head the Eugene Gay People’s Alliance. After a stint as a writer at the gay newsmagazine the Advocate and reporting jobs with two different Bay Area television stations, he learned that the San Francisco Chronicle was looking for an openly gay reporter, and he got the job.

  Shilts was the kind of journalist who requested the night shift when he arrived at the Chronicle so he could spend his days finishing his first book, The Mayor of Castro Street, a fine biography of the gay city supervisor Harvey Milk, who was assassinated by a colleague in 1978. Shilts said gays “know they have somebody they can call up who won’t make queer jokes when they hang up the phone. And within the paper I think a lot of dumb things that are written because of ignorance, not malice, don’t appear because [colleagues] can come to me and feel like they’re getting things in clearer perspective.”

  The young reporter inaugurated an admirable tradition of self-criticism among gay journalists. During his lifetime it brought him tremendous pain from the people he covered, but it would also inspire many of his gay colleagues to emulate him. “Writing about the gay community is like being a journalist in a small town,” he once explained. “You get immediate reaction. I walked down the street and had people shout
at me. … Self-criticism was not the strong point of a community that was only beginning to define itself affirmatively after centuries of repression.”

  Shilts was disgusted by how little attention the national media paid to the epidemic during its initial stages. In his landmark book about the first five years of the catastrophe, And the Band Played On, he was especially critical of reporters who ignored the politics behind the epidemic—among the scientists who were supposed to unravel it and between the legislative and executive branches in Washington.

  It was true that none of the leading newspapers turned the story into a crusade, but a reluctance to write about homosexuals was only one of a number of reasons for that failure. Science writers are usually most comfortable writing about new discoveries; as a result, American newspapers have never done a very good job of covering the politics of science.

  Especially at the beginning of the epidemic, the paucity of knowledge about the nature of the disease made it logical for the press to be concerned about the danger of causing unnecessary panic—either among gay men, or in the general population. Gay leaders expressed similar worries: the idea that too much publicity could lead to hysteria, or even quarantine for gay Americans.

  Shilts himself was intimately familiar with these problems. When a report was leaked at the end of 1982 suggesting that at least one percent of the gay men in the city’s Castro District were already infected with the disease, a gay activist pleaded with him not to write about it. “They’ll put barbed wire up around the Castro,” said Randy Stallings, a senior gay leader in the Bay Area. “It will create panic.” Shilts printed the story anyway. Later Shills deduced that the real proportion of infected gay men in San Francisco at that moment was probably closer to twenty percent. Subsequent investigations indicated that a new viral agent had probably infected gay men for the first time in 1976 or 1977.