And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition (4 page)

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 change 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.

Such public witnessing had always been a central article of faith of the gay liberation movement, Cleve Jones knew. This, after all, would be the only way their political cause could get anywhere because homosexuality was a fundamentally invisible trait. The fact that gays could hide their sexuality presented the gay movement with its greatest weakness and its most profound potential strength. Invisible, gays would always be kicked around, the reasoning went, because they would never assert their power. On that day in 1978, never had the power been so palpable. Months later, when California voters rejected the Briggs Initiative by a ratio of two to one, it appeared to be a wonderful year.

However, three weeks after the election, Supervisor Dan White, San Francisco’s only anti-gay politician, had taken his Smith and Wesson revolver to City Hall and shot down Harvey Milk and the liberal mayor, George Moscone. Cleve had helped organize a candlelight march to City Hall that night for Harvey and George. Six months later, when a jury decided that Dan White should go to jail for only six years for killing the two men, Cleve had organized another march to City Hall—the one that turned into a riot, a vivid affirmation that this generation of gay people weren’t a bunch of sissies to be kicked around without a fight. This White Night Riot left dozens of policemen injured and the front of City Hall ravaged; gay leaders across the country grimaced at the televised coverage of police cars set aflame by rampaging gay crowds.

By 1980, Cleve had helped fashion the story of Harvey and the 1970s, the Dan White trial, and the White Night Riot into one of the new legends of the fledgling gay movement, a story of assassinations and political intrigue, homophobic zealots and rioting in the streets. From it all, Cleve had emerged as the most prominent street activist in town, the most skillful media manipulator since Harvey Milk. Reporters loved the ever-so-militant pronouncements Cleve Jones was apt to make.

In recent months, Cleve had traded his blue jeans and sneakers for Armani suits to work for the Speaker of the California Assembly. It was a time when the outsiders who once marched angrily on the government were becoming insiders learning how to use the power they had gained. Cleve had spent most of the spring organizing Democratic Assembly campaigns. He split his time between Sacramento and San Francisco, where he was dating a wonderful Mexican-American lawyer named Felix Velarde-Munoz. Both knew the key players in local politics, and both loved to talk politics and liberation movements and make love and dance to the ubiquitous disco music.

That’s what the summer of 1980 was to Cleve Jones. The gay community was a burst of creative energy that emanated from San Francisco and spread across America. Gays had staved off challenges that ran from bigots’ ballot initiatives to political murder; now they could look forward to greater victories.

Yet like many gay activists, Cleve was troubled by the amusement park rides at Civic Center Plaza. He knew that the gay revolution was, at best, half-completed. Its tenuous gains could be wiped away by some other strongly organized force. He could understand that to a gay refugee from Des Moines, the city represented freedom beyond anything imaginable. He also knew, however, that freedom to go to a gay bar was not real freedom.

What was the right direction? Cleve asked himself. The gay movement had shifted from one of self-exploration, in which people moved through their own fears and self-alienation, to a movement of electoral politics, focused outward. Voter registration tables had replaced consciousness-raising groups as the symbol of liberation. Cleve sometimes wondered whether the new men crowding the Castro had already gone through this personal growth elsewhere or whether they had simply skipped it because being gay in San Francisco was so easy now that you didn’t need to plummet to your psychic depths to make a commitment to the life-style.

Too many questions. It was nothing to dwell on today. When Cleve remembered the wonderful 1978 parade, and everything that had happened since, he felt like celebrating too. From his promontory on the Ferris wheel, he once more scanned the thousands stretched for miles around the City Hall rotunda where gay people had once marched and rioted, and where they now exerted so much power. The wheel jerked again, and slowly he began to return to the crowd, turning full circle.

A new disease.

It was never a formal topic of discussion, but on that weekend, when gay doctors from across the country gathered in San Francisco, it was discussed occasionally in hallways and over dinners. What would happen if some new disease insinuated itself into the bodies of just a few men in this community? The notion terrified Dr. David Ostrow; it was an idea he tried to put out of his mind as he wandered through the crowded rally site between the whirling amusement park rides with two other doctors from the convention, Manhattan’s Dan William and Robert Bolan of San Francisco.

Ostrow grimaced as a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence sashayed by. The sight rankled his midwestern sensibilities. This was all too weird, he thought. The media would play up the open display of sexuality and once again drag queens and half-naked muscle boys would be presented as the emblems of homosexual culture. People like Ostrow, who leaned toward long, steady relationships, would never get the press. The bizarre, it seemed, would always overshadow the positive things going on in the gay community, like the doctors’ conference. Doctors weren’t flamboyant enough to get in the headlines. They were barely mentioned in the gay newspapers, counting themselves lucky to make it a page ahead of the latest gossip about the hottest leather bar.

While strategists like Bill Kraus read the gay community’s future in voter registration rolls, and street activists like Cleve Jones heard it in ringing oratory, the gay doctors had spent that weekend reading the community’s prognosis from its medical chart. Like many physicians, Ostrow had been quite troubled when he left the medical conference, which had adjourned in time for the parade.

The fight against venereal diseases was proving a Sisyphean task. Ostrow was director of the Howard Brown Memorial Clinic, which provided a sensitive alternative for gay men who wanted to avoid the sneers of staffers at the Chicago Public Health clinics. The screening in Ostrow’s clinic had revealed that one in ten patients had walked in the door with hepatitis B. At least one-half of the gay men tested at the clinic showed evidence of a past episode of hepatitis B. In San Francisco, two-thirds of gay men had suffered the debilitating disease. It was now proven statistically that a gay man had one chance in five of being infected with the hepatitis B virus within twelve months of stepping off the bus into a typical urban gay scene. Within five years, infection was a virtual certainty.