And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition (57 page)

As the chuckles subsided, Curran continued, “But the Secretary does support us in our efforts.”

The well-mannered physicians blanched when they saw a
Chronicle
reporter trail Curran out of the room and into the men’s bathroom and right up to the urinal, asking impertinent questions about the adequacy of funding resources. The polite doctors had not asked such questions, perhaps as a matter of professional courtesy to a respected colleague.

“We have everything we need,” insisted Curran.

It was the message he delivered across the country that summer.

Three years later, the same reporter who had dogged Jim Curran in the lavatory asked him about those comments. Freedom of Information Act requests had revealed that things weren’t so rosy at the CDC, and Curran knew it. Even while he reassured gay doctors in San Francisco, he was writing memos to his superiors begging more money.

Curran chose his words carefully.

“It’s hard to explain to people outside the system,” he said. “It’s two different things to work within the system for a goal and talking to the people outside the system for that goal,” he said. “Should I have answered: ‘I’ve been trying to get a statistician but can’t?’ I knew the assistant secretary was working on budget proposals to get that. It was not time to stand up in San Francisco and announce it. Listen, you have three options: you can exit in frustration; maybe you can take a second option, exit and then become an outside voice; or you can be loyal and work on the inside. People on the outside might think you’re lying or covering up. That’s not true.”

Besides, there weren’t many willing to listen to complaints. The news media were not doing public policy stories, Curran later noted. No newspaper or television network showed any interest in using such information even if Curran had provided it. “There were only two things keeping AIDS programs alive—inside pressure and pressure from the gay community,” he said. “That was it.”

In Atlanta, Dr. Bruce Evatt of the CDC’s Division of Host Factors was worried about how hardened the battle lines had become between blood banks and the CDC. He frequently flew to Washington to advise blood industry leaders about the mounting evidence that AIDS had contaminated the blood supply. Rather than reaching agreement on some course of action, however, each side grew more entrenched. Meetings often degenerated to blood bankers questioning Evatt’s credentials as a scientist and mocking the CDC’s competence to guide policy matters. Bruce Evatt had never seen such nasty personal attacks in all his years at the CDC. Repeatedly, Evatt warned the bankers that they were opening the way for negligence suits. Under special protection granted by Congress, blood banks were immune from product liability claims. But negligence was an entirely different matter, he warned. It could be argued that by now the blood banks knew better than to dispense freely blood they suspected of being infected with AIDS without taking any precautions except the cursory screening of donors. The argument, Evatt could see, carried little weight with a blood industry that considered itself above any law because of its special congressional protection.

In late June, the American Red Cross, the American Association of Blood Banks, and the Council of Community Blood Centers issued a joint statement decrying the fears about poison blood and insisting again that, if the problem existed at all, there was only “one AIDS case per one million patients transfused.” As he tried to forge a consensus policy on blood, Assistant Secretary for Health Edward Brandt—the official at whose desk the buck stopped for health policy—reiterated his support for guidelines that permitted screening donors but did not require any actual testing of blood itself.

June 25

N
APLES
, I
TALY

As far as AIDS conferences went, the first workshop of the European Study Group on the Epidemic of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and Kaposi’s Sarcoma did not attract a stellar cast of scientists. However, the conference did feature a most romantic setting, in the grand Castel del Ovo, a fifteenth-century castle set on the Bay of Naples. Dr. Michael Gottlieb was there from Los Angeles to present his current theory on a two-virus model for Kaposi’s sarcoma. The cancer had presented Gottlieb with the most intriguing mysteries of the epidemic, because its appearance seemed limited to gay men. In Africa, the disease had long been linked to the CMV herpes virus, leading Gottlieb to believe that, perhaps, a second virus worked in tandem with a still-undiscovered AIDS virus to cause KS. According to his two-step idea, a person first needed infection with a virus that clobbered lymphocytes, a lymphotrophic virus, while a second virus caused the specific outbreak of KS. The lymphotrophic virus alone would bring about AIDS, under this thinking, which explained why intravenous drug users and transfusion recipients rarely experienced the skin cancer. Gottlieb’s likely candidate for the KS-specific virus was CMV; he still lacked a nominee for the lymphotrophic agent.

Michael Gottlieb had read the Pasteur Institute’s
Science
article on their discovery of a new human retrovirus, but he hadn’t thought much of the work. Like most scientists, he needed more evidence. When Dr. Jean-Claude Chermann from the Pasteur Institute started presenting the institute’s latest discoveries on its virus, Gottlieb perked up. Their virus, LAV, was incredibly cytopathic, Chermann reported, devastating the cells it infected. Gottlieb matched the viral description to the wasted immune systems he had seen as a UCLA clinician. It made sense. He raised his hand during the question session.

“Is this virus HTLV-I?” Gottlieb asked.

“Ah,” said Chermann, warming to the question. “If you ask me if it’s an HTLV, I’ll say yes. It is a human T-cell lymphotrophic virus. But if you ask me if it’s HTLV-I, no, it is not.”

The Frenchman explained the differences between the core proteins and other characteristics of the virus. Meanwhile, another Pasteur immunologist, David Klatzmann, presented blood work from a variety of AIDS patients that clearly implicated LAV.

Michael Gottlieb was convinced. The French had discovered the necessary lymphotrophic virus behind AIDS. He asked Chermann to breakfast the next morning and invited the researcher to a conference he was organizing for next February at a ski resort in Utah. Unlike other conferences that dealt with a variety of epidemiological and psychosocial issues, Gottlieb wanted his symposium to be a high-powered gathering of scientific minds, dealing only with the pure science of AIDS. He hoped the seminar might light a fire under an American scientific community that had been slow to respond to the challenge of the new epidemic.

Another American AIDS researcher who was impressed by Dr. Jean-Claude Chermann’s presentation was Dr. Harry Haverkos from the Centers for Disease Control. Over dinner, Haverkos, his wife, Chermann, and other Pasteur scientists toasted each other over the discovery of the virus. Haverkos wanted to fly to Paris immediately to pick up some virus that he could take back to Atlanta to study. However, because of CDC funding shortages, Haverkos couldn’t add the side trip to his itinerary. The Pasteur Institute had to mail the virus to CDC, in test tubes packed in dry ice. By the time the samples arrived in Atlanta, however, the virus had died, requiring the institute to ship the virus again and delaying CDC tests on LAV for months.

June 26

S
AN
F
RANCISCO

A contingent of people with AIDS led the 1983 Gay Freedom Day Parade, but police had received so many death threats that plainclothes officers circulated among their ranks to provide extra protection. Some of the uniformed patrolmen diverting traffic around the parade wore rubber gloves. After the festivities, four of the city employees assigned to sweep up the trash showed up in surgical masks and disposable paper suits. They were afraid they might get AIDS from the litter strewn on the streets.

Gay Freedom Day fell on Bill Kraus’s thirty-sixth birthday, and that evening his friends held a small birthday party for him at his home above the Castro. Bill was less than ebullient. The onslaught of criticism over his push for a redefinition of the gay movement had disheartened him. He had figured that once the gay community realized that the AIDS epidemic posed serious perils, everyone would rally around the life-style changes that needed to be made. Instead, they were yelling at the people who proposed them.

At the party, Cleve Jones told Bill Kraus that he was leaving the country for a while. The last year of organizing the KS/AIDS Foundation had taken its toll, and the past weeks of insults and haranguing because he had signed Bill’s essay had been devastating. Old friends from his street radical days called him a sexual fascist and homophobe. Cleve considered himself a gay libber, not a homophobe; he didn’t know how to handle the criticism. The fight against the disease itself was also exhausting. This wasn’t some political campaign that could be confronted and won. Every day was a battle, and the disease was so relentless it was hard to cull any success from his efforts, much less victory. Cleve needed to get away.

Everybody was going crazy, Bill and Cleve agreed.

In New York City, Mayor Ed Koch also had assigned extra police officers to the gay parade, fearing some outbreak of violence. In the days before the march, columnist Patrick Buchanan had released a new anti-gay diatribe calling on Mayor Koch or Governor Mario Cuomo to cancel the parade. The column quoted liberally from Anthony Fauci’s discredited “routine household contact” editorial in the previous month’s
journal of the American Medical Association.
Also
dung JAMA
fears were two doctors who held a press conference on the steps of the city’s Health Department building to demand the cancelation of the parade and the closure of all gay bars and bathhouses. The pair, from a group calling itself the Morality Action Committee, proposed screening all food handlers for signs of disease, and requiring airtight seals on the coffins of AIDS victims.

As in San Francisco and New York, the gay parade in Washington drew the largest turnout in history. After a day of speeches, volleyball, and music, about 650 participants took candles and marched to Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House. A light rain fell as speakers denounced the president’s silence on the epidemic and the federal government’s sloth.

Gesturing toward the White House, AIDS sufferer Arthur Bennett said, “I think in the beginning of this whole syndrome, that they, over there, and a lot of other people said, ‘Let the faggots die. They’re expendable.’ I wonder if it would have been 1,500 Boy Scouts, what would have been done.”