BY THE EARLY 1980s Harvey was still a vivid memory, a memory that seemed to grow with each passing year (a local play, a documentarty, an opera by the Houston Grand Opera, and much, much more to come). I subscribed to the New York Native to keep track of the gay scene in New York (as far as gays were concerned, there were only two cities that mattered—San Francisco and New York; Los Angeles was just a suburb).
The paper covered a lot more than just the gay scene, and it was there I first read of a growing disaster, one that would become the greatest health disaster to ever hit the United States. The paper reported a short news item from the “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report,” the newsletter from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Five young gay men in Los Angeles had been diagnosed as having pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), a disease that commonly affected young infants or the immunosuppressed. Two of them had died.
Faint alarm bells rang in the back of my head. A follow-up article in a CDC item reported twenty-six hemophiliacs with Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS), six in California. Eight of the patients had died within two years of diagnosis. And ten more cases of PCP were reported in addition to the five original. Four of the KS patients had both KS and PCP.
The article did not state why only gays were involved.
I was both interested and worried. Gays never came down with anything that a quick trip to the med center and a shot wouldn’t cure. You waited in line to get your shot and maybe meet your next bed partner. It was as much a social affair as a medical one.
The previous mystery disease—Legionnaire’s disease—had the doctors and medical researchers all over it and was squelched within a few weeks. Everybody apparently thought it would be the same this time.
The technical journals. The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the victims were young gay men who traveled in the fast lane and were addicted to “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.” (Major media such as the daily newspapers had yet to give it much coverage.)
There was no mention of immediate cures or what was causing it. With time, more groups were involved than just gays—hemophiliacs, Haitians, and drug abusers made up the rest of the “4H Club.”
I followed it in the Native, and coverage became more and more puzzling and gloomy. I didn’t know anybody who had it but suspected it that was just a matter of time.
Some months later I met my first KS patient.
One morning Tom Youngblood and I drove over to pick up his friend Reid and take him to the AIDS clinic (the disease had a variety of names before the doctors settled on “AIDS”). Reid’s apartment was in the middle of Haight-Ashbury. He was the sole occupant of a second-floor railroad flat (one with all the rooms strung along the side of the main corridor).
Tom asked me to stay in the car while he went up to get Reid, who was sensitive about strangers seeing his lesions.
I had never seen any KS lesions.
Tom was gone a long time and returned looking worried. Reid didn’t have the energy to go to the hospital right then. Tom didn’t think Reid would make it to Thanksgiving—or even Halloween. He swore to me that he would sit with Reid and read to him “until the end.” Nobody should die alone like this. He climbed back into the car and said we should take Reid to the hospital that afternoon.
I had known Reid for a far shorter time than Tom, meeting him during a tour of Ward 5B, the “AIDS” ward at San Francisco General Hospital. He was blond, blue-eyed, and personable despite his illness—he could still crack a joke and wink at the nurses. He was thirty-four years old and before he got sick was considered a “hot number” in San Francisco’s gay community.
He was smart—he had a degree in Slavic languages and literature from Princeton. He had been a member of one of Princeton’s “eating clubs”—fraternities. Once he and a male friend had danced together all night. Other members thought that was a little much and asked for Reid’s resignation. He refused.
He moved to San Francisco and got a job as a bartender—a job that pays handsomely in San Francisco and makes you a minor celebrity, one very much in demand.
He was diagnosed as having AIDS in April of ’83. He’d had all the standard symptoms—night sweats, swollen lymph glands, fevers, weight loss, and thrush (whitish patches on the mucous membranes of the mouth). Later, he was diagnosed with a few small, reddish marks on his upper arms.
The diagnosis was KS, usually found in elderly Italian and Jewish men. It’s a slow disease, and they usually died of something else. In gay men, you can die of it in a short length of time.
Later, Reid was admitted to Ward 5B with a case of pneumocystis pneumonia—as final a death sentence as medical science knows, hands down.
Tom and I came back early that afternoon to Reid’s flat. He was sleeping again. Tom went to get him out of bed, and I looked over the apartment. It was stripped—Reid’s roommates had taken most of what might have been there.
The kitchen was clean—no dirty dishes in the sink. In the fridge was a carton of milk, a few eggs, a plastic bowl of orange Jell-O, a half-eaten sandwich. Reid hadn’t been eating; the garbage can was as empty as the sink. I offered to scramble some eggs, but Reid wanted a bowl of dry cereal, nothing really solid.
The change from when I had seen him in the hospital before was appalling. His face was puffy, his left eye swollen shut, and the other a mere slit. His blond hair was sticking out at all angles, the purple bruises of KS scattered randomly across his neck and face. His flannel shirt and Levi’s had become far too large for his shrunken frame. We had to help him put on his boots.
He didn’t want any help in descending the stairs but wanted us to be close in case he fell. Once outside, he sat on the steps to rest while Tom drove over in his car. A young man with hair to his shoulders was working on his motorcycle on the sidewalk, with two young boys as an audience. None of them looked at Reid. I was sure they had seen him before, and once was enough.
In the car, Tom and I worked hard at making small talk. Reid was animated only when I mentioned some of the volunteers in Ward 5B. “They’re beautiful,” he said in a fadeaway voice. “They’re the most beautiful people I’ve ever met.”
It was old home week on the sixth floor, where the clinic was located. Tracy, a young nurse, hustled over to talk to Reid. Jeremy, a worker for Shanti, a support group for AIDS patients, kissed him on the cheek and said, “How ya doin’, gorgeous?” Reid brightened; he was among friends. A moment later they took him away to weigh him and draw blood and start him through the clinic routine.
It was a shadow show, I thought. There was nothing to be done for Reid. It was psychological—for the few weeks he had left, he could feel that at least somebody gave a shit.
We couldn’t locate a social worker. It might be another day before arrangements could be made with Shanti for a volunteer. The only solution was to have Reid readmitted to the hospital.
Dr. Connie Wofsy, one of the doctors on duty, was sympathetic, but Reid hadn’t been her patient. She said she didn’t know much about him from the clinical aspect. I suspected that the ward was full, that Dr. Wofsy was practicing AIDS triage, and sick as he was, Reid wasn’t sick enough.
Half an hour after Reid had disappeared into the treatment room, Dr. Paul Volberding, the young oncologist who had been treating him, came out to talk to us.
Reid was dying. The only treatment for his lesions was more Vinblastine, a chemotherapy drug. If that didn’t work—it hadn’t so far—there was other experimental chemotherapy they could try, but the side effects were severe. It would be up to Reid if he wanted to try it. In the meantime, we should take him home.
But Reid couldn’t go back to his apartment; there was nobody there to take care of him. Dr. Volberding didn’t understand. Reid said he didn’t want to be admitted to the hospital, he wanted to go home.
Then it was time for Reid to leave. One of us would stay overnight with him until we could make arrangements for a Shanti volunteer.
I stayed with Reid while we waited for an elevator. He suddenly said he had to sit down. Just then the elevator arrived and I helped Reid inside.
As we passed the fourth floor, Reid collapsed, hitting his head against the elevator wall. I had broken his fall, but it had been like catching an armful of sticks. He lay quietly on the floor, exhausted. He had done his share—he had said he wanted to sit down; now it was up to somebody else. I hit the button for the sixth-floor clinic.
When the door opened the clerk at the desk spotted us and shouted for help. They got Reid into a wheelchair and took his blood pressure. Tracy asked him what he had been eating and he said Cheerios and Jell-O and some tuna fish sandwiches that friends had brought him. She decided that he hadn’t been drinking enough liquids, that his heart hadn’t been pumping enough volume of blood to keep him from blacking out. She said they would readmit him to the hospital.
But Dr. Volberding had been right. Reid didn’t want to go back to the hospital despite his friendship with the volunteers in the ward. Dr. Wofsy said if he stayed at least a little while they could get some nutrition into him. Reid said, “Do you really think so? I’ve eaten here before.”
He meant it as a joke, more a commentary on the food than on his condition. Somewhere inside, Reid was still functioning.
Outside in the car, I told Tom what had happened. “I didn’t think it would be like this,” he said. He confessed having a mental image of Reid gradually fading away like the heroine in Camille. He hadn’t suspected that death would come as a puffy-faced, emaciated man with purple splotches covering his arms and face and with his shirt and Levi’s hanging on him like laundry on a clothesline.
Reid had been unable to dress himself without help, unable to feed himself without assistance, unable to walk down a flight of stairs without aid.
His well-meaning friends and the doctors and nurses at the AIDS clinic had been even more helpless. In the things that really mattered, there was nothing any of us could do for him anymore.
Reid was going to spend the rest of his life, however long or short it might be, struggling against the side effects of chemotherapy, trying to keep down what little food he could eat, mustering enough concentration so he could follow the intricacies of the afternoon soap operas he watched from his bed, trying to work up enough enthusiasm for meaningless conversations with the few friends who dropped by to see him. Reid knew better than anybody else that he was never going to get well.
Henry Fielding had been right when he wrote: “It is not death, but dying, which is terrible.”
Like everybody else, I was frightened—sticking my tongue out when I brushed my teeth in the morning, looking for the whitish splotches of thrush.
I was frightened but nowhere near as frightened as the people who had to work with AIDS patients every day—the doctors and nurses, who had no solid information yet on how HIV was transmitted. Could it be transmitted by water droplets, if the patient coughed or sneezed? Or even breathing the same air? What about bathroom sinks or clothes?
Some gays thought it could be transmitted by sitting on a wet bench in a bathhouse. For medical personnel, it was a lot more serious, and many began wearing masks and gloves when handling patients. And what about surgeons, cardiologists, and operating room teams? All high-risk jobs—who would want them? And ER personnel would have their own problems with patients with gunshot wounds or who had been in accidents. Lots of blood would be splashed around—and there were no reliable HIV tests for blood until the middle 1980s.
Some hospitals refused to admit new patients, claiming they were full. Most stayed open, and the doctors and nurses and interns stayed on the job—warriors in the front lines.
A doctor friend told me of his problems with an obese, middle-aged drug patient with a respiratory infection and high fever. The doctor finally got a syringe with needle through folds of fat when the patient suddenly bucked, throwing out the needle, which punctured the back of the doctor’s left hand. After sending the blood-filled syringe to the lab for an HIV test (the doctor forged the patient’s signature for permission), he spent the rest of the day scrubbing the back of his hand. The test came back negative, but there was a two-to-six-week window before he could be sure.
My doctor friend came back for anonymous testing every six weeks for a year before he was reasonably certain he was clean.
I didn’t ask him how close he thought he could get to his girlfriend. I knew the answer—not very.
The richest country in the world was no better than the poorest when it came to letting its citizens die for political and religious reasons. At the start, the only ones who stood between the country and medical catastrophe were those same citizens—their generosity and intelligence and in many cases being willing to put their own lives on the line to try to save the lives of others.
Checking my tongue every morning for the signs of thrush was small potatoes. I was frightened—but like a lot of gays, not nearly frightened enough. I picked up a kid at the Corner Grocery Bar and took him home. Dan Fuller was a handsome young man and showed me his model comp—like many handsome men he had wanted to be a model. The best photo was one that hadn’t been used in the comp and is currently hanging above my desk. A straight shot, not pretending to be a model—just himself. If you looked in his eyes you could see his whole life story. He probably had a lousy family life—especially if his parents had found out he was gay—and was looking for a better life out here.
Dan gradually drifted away from me—I should have held on to him, but I was too busy writing bad fiction. He was the most handsome kid I’d ever met, with a sweet personality to match. He was picked up by an “A” gay and passed around the circuit.
He never found the better life he’d been looking for. He died a year later.
The last one was one of the worst. Steven Wallace was a dancer—not good enough to be a star, but happy in the chorus line. We hit the sack and a short time later stared at each other for a good five minutes. I think each of us had been waiting for the other to show some real affection. I should have made the first move and have regretted it ever since.
He was my tenant for a while, along with his lover, finally moving into a nearby hospice to spend his time taking care of the sick and the dying. Then it was his turn, and somebody at the hospice had to take care of him until he, too, died.
I regretted losing both Daniel and Steven more than I can say. That’s one-sided—they might not have been interested in any event. But I should have tried. Love usually has two components—sex and concern. I should have showed that concern was what I really wanted. (Sex without concern and affection is fool’s gold.)
Shortly afterward a young Latin kid took to flirting with me. He liked me a lot and called me “Dad”—to him that was the role I was playing. One time David got behind in his rent and was about to be evicted, and I and a friend went over, packed him up, and put his belongings in storage. While tieing the drawers of his bureau shut so they wouldn’t slide open, I saw a photo and picked it up. A bathhouse group shot with all the customers lined up on one side of the pool, stark naked. I didn’t ask David which one he was.
He vanished for a while, then showed up at the door. I took one look at the panicked expression on his face and knew the whole story. He ended up in a nearby hospice, and I went over frequently to see him. One day he asked for some Disney films, and I brought him over my tapes. The next day I heard he was dying. His entire family came up to see him, but I didn’t go. I thought the family had seen enough of gays.
I wondered later if I should have said screw the family and gone over to see David. I wondered if he would have wanted to say good-bye to “Dad” if he were still conscious.