I LEFT ART AGNOS’S DISTRICT OFFICE IN THE OLD STATE BUILDING IN Civic Center and decided to walk the couple miles home to the Castro. Walking past the Twin Peaks bar I heard a sharp rap on the window and turned to see Hank Wilson, grinning his usual broad smile and motioning me to come in.
“Cleve, have you met Bobbi Campbell?” Bobbi and I nodded at each other. We’d never spoken before but I’d seen him at the Stud, and frequently at the Club Baths at 8th and Howard. I also knew him as part of a circle of guys I sometimes hung out with who were starting to wear nun’s habits with whiteface and adopting hilarious sister names.
“Hi, how are you?” I asked.
Bobbi looked anxious and I noticed an odd discolored patch of skin on his forehead. He saw my glance and said, “Shingles. Hurt like a motherfucker but stopped before it affected my eyes. It’s better now.”
Hank looked at Bobbi with an expression I’d not seen before on the ever-enthusiastic Hank. “I think you should show Cleve.”
Bobbi looked at the floor and stretched his legs out. I guessed what was coming and felt my stomach clench. I’d been waiting for this moment since I read the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report a few weeks earlier. I’d tried to keep it out of my mind but in my heart I understood that something mysterious and dangerous and new was here. And now I was going to see it for the first time.
Bobbi slowly unlaced his sneakers and took off his shoes and socks. It was a bit anticlimactic. Hank and I looked at the bottom of his right foot and saw the small, slightly raised blue-grey spots.
“At first I thought they were bruises,” Bobbi said. “I’d been on a hike and thought maybe I’d stepped on a rock too hard or had a pebble in my boot.” The spots didn’t look menacing at all.
“It’s Kaposi’s sarcoma,” Bobbi said matter-of-factly as he relaced his shoes.
Hank and I exchanged a look. We were rarely at a loss for words, but neither of us knew what to say.
Bobbi was the 16th person diagnosed with KS in San Francisco and one of the first publicly identified people living with AIDS. He wrote a column called “Gay Cancer Journal” for the Sentinel.
Dr. Marcus Conant was a dermatologist at the University of California, San Francisco. He’d written to Assemblyman Art Agnos shortly after the MMWR report to ask for help. He took me out to dinner at the Zuni Café on Market Street and leaned forward as he told me what he thought was happening. “We’re seeing more of these cases every week. I think it is something new, a virus we don’t know, even though it may have been around for decades or longer. I think it’s sexually transmitted. It takes down the body’s natural immune system. I think it kills most, maybe everyone who is infected.”
I took in what he had said and believed it. “Well. Then we’re all going to die,” I said.
Conant took me up to the University of California Medical Center in Parnassus Heights, the foggy neighborhood about two miles west of Eureka Valley and Castro Street. We were there to visit a patient named Simon Guzman, a young Mexican American man. He was terribly gaunt, and the sight of all the tubes and wires made me take a few deep breaths as I walked towards his bed.
Then I saw the blue-grey lesions, the same color as the spots on Bobbi’s feet, but large and raised and covering most of his body. I had already heard and believed Dr. Conant’s urgent message. But here was the evidence before us, drawing the life from the once-vigorous body now unmoving but for the little jerks of breath into his wasted lungs.
Afterward, I called Hank Wilson and we met at Badlands. I got there around 4:00 p.m. and saw that Hank was already on his second beer. He didn’t usually drink much. Outside on 18th Street, the sidewalks began to get busy as the after-work cocktail hour began. Across the street the Pendulum, San Francisco’s only black gay bar, was filling up. I sat next to Hank and ordered a vodka tonic. Hank looked out the window silently as the guys walked by in their tight jeans.
“I think this could be really bad.” Hank offered an attempt at his usual broad smile but it fell short. “I think we’re in trouble and we may lose everything.”
I nodded. “I’m scared too.”
Hank finished off his beer and waved to the bartender for another. “What if it’s an epidemic?”
That word rose up and hung over us like a tendril of smoke in a closed room.
“If it is an epidemic, then what happens to all this?” Hank pointed to the street. “Everything we’ve gained has come out of this neighborhood and the others we have built across the country. We lose our political power. We lose our culture, our safety.”
I lit a cigarette and nodded. “Right now, thousands of gay boys are moving here every year to be part of this.” Outside it was dark and the sidewalks were crowded with young men of all races. The DJ turned up the music and the dance floor filled with boys. “The religious nuts are going to have a field day.”
Hank shook his head. “They may lock us all up.”
I stubbed out my Marlboro. “They may not need to; we may just all die.”
Hank was always the first to laugh at me when I was melodramatic, but he didn’t say anything as we headed for the door.
Bobbi pushed open the door to Star Pharmacy, calling out, “Hey Jackie, you look great, girl, I was wondering if you would let me put this up in your window? Right here on the corner maybe?”
Bobbi air-kissed the middle-aged woman with cat’s-eye glasses and a grey/blonde bouffant who managed Star Pharmacy on the northwest corner of Castro and 18th Streets, the heart of the gay neighborhood. Jackie beamed back. “What you got there? Are we having a march? A street fair?”
Bobbi unrolled the poster he’d made with Polaroid photos of the lesions on his feet and the words “Gay Cancer” printed at the top. Jackie’s smile froze for a moment as she read the poster, but then she reached for Bobbi and hugged him close.
“Yes, darling, let me get some tape and we’ll put it up right here by the front door.” Within minutes, a dozen or so men had stopped on the sidewalk to read the poster.