And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition (60 page)

The man made the appointments but never showed up. Eight months later he was diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma. By that time, he had donated blood at all the major Bay Area blood banks, including the two largest, Irwin Memorial Blood Bank in San Francisco and the San Jose Red Cross. In fact, between 1981 and 1984, the man had donated blood thirteen times in Bay Area blood banks. The man’s blood had antibodies to the core of the hepatitis B virus, and would have been eliminated had blood banks instituted the test the CDC had sought in January 1983. But he did not display visible symptoms of AIDS in those years, nor did he fit into any of the categories covered by the FDA’s deferral guidelines. (In San Francisco, in fact, the first five months of donor deferral had weeded out only 16 donors of the 50,000 screened.) After repeated questioning, the man had conceded that he had had three to five different male sexual contacts over the past several years.

Only at Stanford, where blood was tested, was this man’s blood discarded; eleven recipients of blood transfusions provided by other blood centers were not so fortunate.

S
AN
F
RANCISCO

The same day that Dr. Dale Lawrence went to Miami, Gary Walsh found himself staring into a television monitor at the face of Rev. Jerry Falwell, live via satellite hookup from his headquarters in Lynchburg, Virginia. The local ABC affiliate had put together an hour-long show called “AIDS: The Anatomy of a Crisis.”

The fundamentalist minister had recently entered into the AIDS debate. He didn’t hate homosexuals, he said, just their “perverted life-style.” Gay bathhouses, the sites of “sub-animal behavior,” should be shut down, Falwell said, and blood donors should be required to fill out questionnaires about their sexual orientation. “If the Reagan administration does not put its full weight against this,” he said, “what is now a gay plague in this country, I feel that a year from now, President Ronald Reagan, personally, will be blamed for allowing this awful disease to break out among the innocent American public.”

Falwell began his televised discussion with Dr. Merv Silverman and Gary Walsh by citing Galatians. “When you violate moral, health, and hygiene laws, you reap the whirlwind,” he said. “You cannot shake your fist in God’s face and get by with it.”

“My God is not a vengeful God,” Gary Walsh countered. “When those children died of polio in the fifties, they were not punished by God. One of the most perverted uses of religion is to use religion to justify hatred for your fellowman.”

Falwell smiled benevolently. “Gary has nothing but my compassion, love, and prayers,” he said.

“I appreciate your prayers,” Gary responded. “I’m quite a sensitive person. I have a hard time feeling that you do have that compassion, that caring, and that love for me, given that I’m gay. That does not come across. What comes across is your anger, your hysteria, and your pointing a finger. That comes across, but your compassion doesn’t.”

“I do have compassion for you,” Falwell replied, “but I’d be less than honest if I told you that I find the homosexual life-style acceptable.”

Falwell went on to say that his church had seven psychiatrists and counselors on call to help cure homosexuals. Gary said that his homosexuality wasn’t what he wanted cured.

“I would publicly and personally like to invite Jerry [Falwell] to fly to San Francisco and spend a day with me,” Gary said. “I would like to open my heart to him. Maybe we could learn from each other. I’ll pay your way even.”

Falwell didn’t bat an eyelash. “I’d love to do that,” he said. “Gary wouldn’t have to pay my way. I’d love to come to San Francisco, pray with him, and read the Gospel, and show that kind of love.”

Falwell changed the subject to blood transfusions, but Gary interrupted.

“When are you coming?” Gary asked.

Falwell ignored him and kept talking about blood transfusions.

“I’d like to know when you could do this,” said Gary. “Let’s set up a time.”

“Gary,” Falwell said. “I’d like to do that. Just write me, Jerry Falwell, Lynchburg, Virginia. Mark it personal. I will get it. I will be in touch with you. I will do everything I can to help you in every way possible.”

That ended the show. Gary wrote Falwell and reminded the pastor that he had promised on television to come and spend a day with him in San Francisco. He was not surprised, however, that Falwell never answered his letter.

V
ANCOUVER

Gaetan Dugas loved slipping back into his navy-blue flight attendant’s uniform for Air Canada. Although he was growing weaker and his health appeared to be slipping, he needed to return to work to keep his travel benefits. Other attendants were enraged at being forced to work with an AIDS victim and complained to management. Air Canada, however, was a government airline and found itself to be in no position to discriminate. Gaetan was kept on short flights, usually from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Calgary, Alberta, where he wouldn’t get worn out. Sometimes at night, terror stalked his thoughts and he would call up friends to spend the night on the couch, just so he wouldn’t have to be alone.

One evening, another steward was over at Gaetan’s watching the news when Jerry Falwell came on, bellowing about AIDS and God’s wrath. Gaetan grew sullen. His friend was surprised he didn’t have some smart-ass comment.

“Maybe Falwell is right,” said Gaetan. “Maybe we are being punished.”

On July 26, 1983, the CDC reported that 1,922 Americans had been stricken with AIDS. The disease had spread to thirty-nine states and twenty nations. The average age of the typical AIDS victim was thirty-five. Although only 39 percent of the total caseload was dead, the new figures did not offer a hopeful prognosis. Of all the people diagnosed with AIDS on or before July 26, 1982, at least two-thirds were dead. Few survived among the people who had suffered from the disease two years before.

July 26, 1983, was a warm and sunny Tuesday in most parts of the country. It was a day of scientific jealousies, academic intrigue, and funding shortages roundly ignored by reporters. Brushfires of hysteria flared, died away, and flared again. New computers spit out death tolls, doctors wondered when people would start caring, and thousands of Americans watched their lives slip away. In the history of the AIDS epidemic, it was just another day.

C
ENTERS FOR
D
ISEASE
C
ONTROL
,
A
TLANTA

Don Francis had heard of Robert Gallo’s legendary temper, but the meeting that morning was the first time he had seen the famed scientist’s churlishness in full force. The gathering had been called to try to coordinate the search for the retrovirus responsible for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. The CDC had spent the past two years gathering specimens from cases and controls in their various AIDS studies. The National Cancer Institute had the technology and expertise to explore the CDC specimens for an answer to the epidemic. At this point, however, neither agency was sure of what the other was doing; it was time they started working together.

Earlier, Don Francis had explained the status of CDC lab work to Robert Gallo as he drove the retrovirologist from the airport to the CDC’s Clifton Road headquarters. Francis had been searching for more than a year for a major retrovirology lab for AIDS work. Given the problems he faced in setting up a CDC retrovirus lab, Francis was relieved that, at last, the National Cancer Institute seemed genuinely interested in doing research on the epidemic of immune deficiency.

For the meeting, the key CDC people involved in AIDS studies assembled in Director Walter Dowdle’s office at the Center for Infectious Diseases with Dowdle’s assistant John Bennett, Jim Curran, and Bruce Evan. Harvard researcher Dr. Max Essex and an associate, fresh from research on links between AIDS and HTLV-I, had flown in from Boston. The talks broke down when Dr. Essex’s associate mentioned their work on cell line CT-1114. For some reason, this CDC cell line, which had been infected with blood from AIDS patients, had burst forth with viral activity. The CDC had sent it to Essex’s lab so the Harvard doctor could perform tests to see whether HTLV-I or HTLV-II was present, perhaps giving an indication of whether the viruses caused AIDS. Essex was using monoclonal antibodies in the studies.

Gallo interrupted and asked sharply where the antibodies came from.

Essex’s younger associate said that they had come from samples Gallo had previously sent to him. Gallo exploded.

“How can you collaborate with me and you’re doing stuff behind my back?” he shouted. “If you’re using my materials on anything, I need to know about it in advance. You need my approval.”

Gallo spent the next forty-five minutes berating Essex and his colleague. The CDC doctors were aghast. This guy came all the way to Atlanta so he could spend all this time abusing some junior researcher? This was the ugly side of the National Cancer Institute that the CDC researchers sometimes talked to each other about. To the more socially conscious CDC staffers, the NCI was a repository for researchers concerned with little more than personal glory. For their part, the NCI scientists tended to view the CDC researchers as naive do-gooders who needed to move over for the “big boys” when a serious crisis evolved. The outburst confirmed the CDC’s darkest suspicions about the NCI and left the CDC officials visibly embarrassed by Gallo when the meeting was over.

Robert Gallo seemed embarrassed himself as Don Francis drove him back to the airport after the conference.

“I got carried away,” Gallo confided. “My Italian style.”

Francis was forgiving. He understood what Gallo knew about himself: that his greatest strength was also his major fault. The temper and arrogance were what made Gallo a formidable enemy to disease.

Momentum propelled news coverage of the AIDS epidemic, and six months of growing media movement peaked in late July, bringing camera crew after camera crew to a simulated lab in a corner of the CDC headquarter’s gym. The bogus lab was used to minimize interruptions in the real CDC work going on in labs. Here sundry teams from all the Eyewitness News and Instant Eye shows enthused that the CDC was on the trail of the killer, and that this or that “breakthrough” heralded a possible end to the disease. In early July,
Time
magazine had done a CDC cover, entitled “Disease Detectives: Tracking the Killers,” and by July 26,
Newsweek
reporters walked the CDC hallways in preparation for their cover story due out in two weeks. Between July and September, the nation’s major print media churned out 726 stories on AIDS, more than would appear in any other single quarter for another two years. In Washington, the Public Health Service issued regular bulletins to the press, making specious claims that “large [NIH] awards have already been made” for AIDS studies and that the CDC had embarked on “intensive laboratory investigations to identify the infectious agent of AIDS.” The CDC’s efficient media relations staff also provided videotapes of CDC scientists actually performing real AIDS research for the various Ken-and-Barbie television news teams.

Despite the reporters’ optimistic chatter, personnel at the CDC’s AIDS Activities Office recall these months as the most frustrating in the course of the epidemic. A new computer surveillance system was set up to monitor national AIDS trends more efficiently. Two months before, the CDC had made AIDS a reportable disease, requiring state and territorial health officials to report all known cases to Atlanta. Most state health officials, by now, had issued similar requirements to their county health authorities. The earlier dark predictions segued to reality, with the numbers mounting quickly. During the first six months of 1983, there were as many new AIDS cases as had been reported in all of 1981 and 1982 combined. One in six of all the nation’s AIDS cases had been reported in just the past six weeks. The rapid increases in AIDS cases, however, revealed no new trends among victims. AIDS was not breaking new ground in the United States; instead, it was on its way to wiping out the people who had been identified for more than a year as the high-risk groups.

Reporters were routinely given bloated numbers about how many CDC researchers were working on AIDS, but in truth, the AIDS disease detectives numbered only between twenty-five and thirty, and they were nearly always behind in their work. Every new lead meant an old lead could not be followed. That summer, the hottest new lead sprang from all the European medical journal reports on the Zairian connection with AIDS. A CDC team was dispatched to Zaire to investigate.

A staff harried by pressing new demands barely had time to analyze even the old research. Only in August, nearly two years after it was launched, was the original case-control study slated to be published in
the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Difficulties in getting computer time for statistical analysis, and the business-as-usual publication schedules of medical journals, conspired to stall the dissemination of this essential AIDS information.

It seemed the CDC doctors were always on the phone with one or another local health official, or delivering the same old reassurances to the reporters. Later, dispirited AIDS staffers at the CDC complained they spent more time in July 1983 controlling AIDS hysteria than controlling AIDS.

On July 26, 1983, in Reno, Nevada, the National Gay Rodeo was only days away from opening. The Pro-Family Christian Coalition had organized opposition to the annual rodeo, which routinely drew 50,000 gays, for fear that all those homosexuals would spread AIDS throughout Nevada. The group took out full-page ads in local papers, urging the county government to cancel the contract allowing the gay organization to use the Washoe County Fairgrounds for the event. To buttress their arguments, the group recruited Dr. Paul Cameron, a longtime homophobe from Nebraska, who described the gay community as a “living, breathing cesspool of pathogens.” Cameron also said, “Here is a subclass of people, who, as a function of their sexuality, are consuming prodigious amounts, from a medical standpoint, of fecal material. Any community that allows thousands of these people to congregate will run a considerable risk, not only from AIDS but other disease such as viral hepatitis.” Cameron cited
the Journal of the American Medical Association
on “routine household contacts” as ample evidence for his views.

The Reverend Walter Alexander of Reno’s First Baptist Church went one step further by telling reporters that, “I think we should do what the Bible says and cut their [homosexuals’] throats.” The man who ran the anti-rodeo ads in the local newspapers opined that he didn’t want to see anybody actually murdered because of the ads, although he wouldn’t criticize Alexander’s comments directly because the minister clearly had authority to speak on matters “biblical.”

Few regions were immune to the AIDS anxiety sweeping the United States. In New York City, a bank robber used that fear, handing tellers a note demanding cash. “I have AIDS,” the note read, “and I have less than 30 days to live.” The strategy worked. One bank employee later admitted she could have dropped behind her bandit barrier and called for help, but she said she was so worried that she might have contracted AIDS from touching the note that she handed the man all $2,500 in her till. At a Chemical Bank branch, a teller broke out laughing when she read the note, thinking it was a joke. She was showing the note to other tellers and was still laughing as the disgruntled bandit made his way out the door empty-handed. By the time police captured the robber in mid-August, he had used the tactic in robbing ten banks of $18,000. He did not have AIDS.

Rumors spread that this or that celebrity had AIDS, often fostered by gay activists convinced that the epidemic would not get serious government attention until it hit somebody famous. In New York, Calvin Klein gave an interview to deny the widespread rumors that he had AIDS. He was “ridiculously healthy,” he maintained. Apparently, rumor-mongers confused Klein with designer Perry Ellis, who died of AIDS three years later.

The Alert Citizens of Texas inflamed local fears with their brochure “The Gay Plague,” which provided detailed descriptions of bathhouses, rimming, and golden showers. A nationally distributed
Moral Majority Report
also explored every unsavory aspect of gay life in gory full-color detail. And Rev. Jerry Falwell now told concerned Americans that they could fight the spread of AIDS by giving money to him.

In Seattle, gay-bashing was less figurative that week, as gangs of youths roved Volunteer Park, a local gay cruising spot, and beat up gay men with baseball bats, shouting invectives about “plague-carrying faggots” and “diseased queers.” One gang raped two men with a crowbar. Once arrested, one attacker told police, “If we don’t kill these fags, they’ll kill us with their fucking AIDS disease.”

Nationally, the response was less severe, although the marked lack of hysteria among most Americans received very little press. A Gallup poll conducted in late June reported that 77 percent of Americans had heard or read about AIDS. A second survey of adults quizzed on July 20 and 21, found that 91 percent had been exposed to AIDS information. Of these, 25 percent thought there was a chance they could get AIDS from casual contact with an AIDS sufferer. Of the one-quarter of respondents who said they had gay friends, only 21 percent said they were less comfortable in a homosexual’s company. Although gay activists across the country defended such institutions as bathhouses on the belief that Americans were ready to confine gays to concentration camps, the poll revealed that support of gay rights had grown in the past year, with 65 percent of Americans supporting equal job opportunities for gays. This represented a 6 percent increase in gay rights support since 1982.