HTLV-III
JUNE 25, 1985
COURTROOM 3, BUILDING I
THIRTY-SECOND STREET NAVAL STATION
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
With his thick brown hair and chiseled features, Hospitalman Third Class Byron Kinney had been handsome once, but by that balmy morning in San Diego the purple lesions of Kaposi’s sarcoma had stained his face and his Navy uniform hung loosely on his wasted body. Kinney was also terribly tired. He had been sick for fourteen months, always getting worse, never better. The doctors said perhaps he had four months to live—at Most, ten months. But no matter how close to death he might be, the Navy appeared to have only one purpose: to punish Byron Kinney for being gay. That was why he was here that day, for the administrative board to separate him from the Navy.
This official posture came at a time when the armed forces could no longer procrastinate in deciding how they would cope with the growing numbers of AIDS sufferers. Three months earlier, the Food and Drug Administration had licensed the first blood tests for antibodies to the virus believed to cause AIDS. Scientists called it human T-cell lymphotropic virus—variant type III—or HTLV-III for short. Since the HTLV-III antibody test kits were only now coming off the production line, the test’s use was largely restricted to blood banks, but, once it became more widely available in a few months, its presence could have staggering social implications, not the least of which was for the Department of Defense.
Already there were calls for screening all 2 million active-duty service members. This proposal led to the next question: What would the services do with soldiers who tested positive for HTLV-III? Military doctors had already pressed their case: If medical testing revealed a soldier was stricken with cancer or heart disease, that soldier was medically retired and allowed a pension and use of military medical facilities. This tradition dated back generations and reflected a covenant between the military and its members.The military was a family, according to this covenant, and it took care of its own. It did not dump people when they needed help most.
But Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome would never be treated like just another disease in the United States, given the fact that its first cases were detected among gay men. Questions of how to handle AIDS would always merge with questions of how to handle homosexuals. Since this was not a nation that dealt with gay people kindly, it was not likely to deal with AIDS sufferers kindly, either. In the early years of the epidemic, this was certainly the case within the institution that had most formally codified society’s attitudes against gays. Though the military’s medical people called for compassion, some officers in the more conservative branches, especially in the personnel commands, would hear nothing of it. And as the civilian leadership of the Defense Department still floundered for official policies, individual commands began implementing their own. Which was why Byron Kinney stood, exhausted, before a separation hearing in San Diego that morning, and also why he was fighting his separation, so that other sick and tired people would not have to suffer as he was.
The crescendo had been building for the past year. Naturally, the service most dedicated to punishing homosexuals took the hardest line against service members with AIDS. In March, Hospitalman Second Class Bernard “Bud” Broyhill was diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma at his duty station in Puerto Rico. His Navy doctor insisted that it was essential for his diagnosis to know whether Broyhill had ever engaged in homosexual conduct. When the corpsman was reluctant to answer, the physician assured him that any answer would be held in the strictest confidence. Broyhill said he was gay. A few days later, the Naval Investigative Service informed Broyhill he was being charged with sodomy and homosexuality.
At about the same time, another San Diego-based sailor newly diagnosed with AIDS, Daniel Abeita, answered his doctors’ inquiries about his sexuality by confiding that he, too, was gay. Rather than moving for a medical retirement, the Navy began processing Abeita for separation under the gay regulations. Without a medical retirement, Abeita’s future would be seriously compromised. When Abeita said he would fight the discharge, the Navy put him on medical hold and refused even to give him leave to go home to Texas to see his parents. He would have to stay in San Diego until the Navy decided what to do with him, however long that took. Near death, Abeita gave in. “I have to go home to my family,” he told military counselor Bridget Wilson, and she understood. He accepted his gay discharge and left.
The Navy had won, but one last affront remained. Navy regulations called for providing a separated sailor either a plane or bus ticket home. Though it was already mid-June and the weather was fiercely hot, the Navy would not buy Dan a seat on an airplane; he got a nonrefundable Greyhound ticket. In the end, Abeita’s volunteer gay lawyer, Tom Homann, took money out of his own pocket to buy a plane ticket for the dying man.
For Byron Gary Kinney, his final skirmish with the Navy proved to be the last act of his short life. He had joined the Navy in 1977 at the age of twenty-one and trained as a medical corpsman. Not long after that, he came to grips with the fact that he was gay and made his first sorties to the gay scene of Washington, D.C., not far from his duty at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. After his first enlistment ended in April 1981, he worked a few laboratory jobs around Bethesda, but the economy was weak and he was soon unemployed. In December 1981, Kinney joined the Navy again. Question 35f on his enlistment form asked: “Have you ever engaged in homosexual activity?” Byron did what everyone else he knew did and responded no.
He was assigned to the Oakland Naval Hospital, across the Bay from San Francisco. It was a very bad time to be a gay sailor on leave in San Francisco. Since neither the government nor the media talked much about “gay cancer,” there was little warning of the deadly new disease. Byron took the virus with him to Okinawa in February 1984 when he was assigned as a senior corpsman with the First Marine Division. About two months later, he began having diarrhea.
By the time he reported to the base hospital in October, he had lost 10 percent of his weight, his mouth was spotted with lesions of oral candidiasis, and all his lymph nodes were swollen. His diarrhea was bloody now, and when doctors did a CT scan of his abdominal track they saw that his lower intestines and rectum were covered with lesions of Kaposi’s sarcoma.
The first references to Kinney’s sexuality were scrawled on his chart on October 23, 1984. “The patient became sexually active with men at age 21,” the doctor wrote. Two weeks later when the AIDS diagnosis was made, another doctor noted, “The patient has a history of homosexuality and has had several partners.” These notes did not prejudice the Navy captain and lieutenant commander who comprised the medical board that in December ruled Kinney qualified for medical retirement. They also deemed that Kinney was entitled to his base pay and continued medical treatment from the Navy. The entire matter might have ended there but for Rear Admiral David L. Harlow at the Naval Personnel Command. He insisted that Kinney not be medically retired but separated for homosexuality instead. Kinney’s offense was not only that he was gay, but also that he had perpetrated an act of fraud against the Navy with his answer to question 35f. Because of the fraudulent enlistment charge, Harlow wanted Kinney to receive a general discharge rather than an honorable one.
By now, Kinney had been evacuated to San Diego. Though military personnel are not guaranteed confidentiality in their relationships with service physicians, the Navy doctors whose notes indicated that Kinney was gay were appalled at the Navy’s moves against the dying man. Lieutenant Commander Fred Millard furnished a blistering memo for Byron’s lawyers. “The information … was obtained from Byron with the understanding that it would be used purely for purposes of medical diagnosis and treatment,” Millard wrote. “Any attempt to use this information for other purposes without Byron’s permission represents an unconscionable breach of the principle of confidentiality between patient and caregiver.”
Navy spokesman Lieutenant Stephen Pietropaoli countered: “Homosexuality is incompatible with military life. It is the Navy policy that all homosexuals be separated from the Navy. No punitive action is taken when someone has AIDS, that is a medical diagnosis.… There is only punitive action when a person is homosexual.” For all their denials, admirals in the Pentagon were not reviewing the records of medical retirement boards for sailors with heart conditions or diabetes for evidence of homosexuality or fraudulent enlistment. They were doing so only for sailors with AIDS.
The Navy was signaling how it would treat sailors with HTLV-III by its treatment of sailors with AIDS, Bridget Wilson and other military counselors believed, which was what made Byron Kinney’s case so crucial. Bridget and two key allies from the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild, attorney Ted Burner and counselor Kathy Gilberd, went to work on Kinney’s case with every intention of pushing the matter into federal court if they lost the separation board hearing. It was not just Kinney’s career but thousands of careers that were at stake that morning.
The Navy was aware of the stakes, as well. Lieutenant Nels Kelstrom was brought aboard to serve as the recorder, or prosecutor, for the hearing. A full commander, Joseph Vrbancic, served as legal adviser; they were not taking any chances.
At 9:12 A.M., with reporters and television cameras clustered outside, the hearing was called into session.
The conflict between Navy doctors and the admirals in the Navy personnel command reflected a larger dispute being argued throughout the military. A principal battle zone in this confrontation lay behind the solemn redbrick walls of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. Within the military, medical chores are divided among the services. The Navy specialized in tropical medicine; the Air Force handled aerospace medicine. The Army was responsible for infectious diseases, which now included AIDS.
The Army’s emphasis dated back to the days when Dr. Walter Reed performed the crucial epidemiological work that determined that mosquitoes spread yellow fever. The discovery had led to measures to prevent the deadly disease, an accomplishment of military significance given the new U.S. colonies in Cuba and the Philippines. In the years since, the United States Army had accumulated one of the world’s most impressive but underappreciated rosters of medical achievements. The Army had developed more vaccines than any other institution, so it was only natural that the primary responsibility for dealing with AIDS fell to the Army and to its leading medical research facility, Walter Reed; and so it happened that the doctors in charge of AIDS would be men uncommonly dedicated to the welfare of their patients.
Principal among them was Colonel Ed Tramont, chief of microbiology at the Walter Reed Army Institute for Research and the official adviser to the Army’s Surgeon General about infectious diseases. The forty-six-year-old physician had signed up to work at Walter Reed in 1968, shortly after he finished medical school at Boston University and just as he was about to be drafted. He set up an infectious disease training program at Walter Reed and launched a research program to develop a gonorrhea vaccine. By 1980, he was a colonel. If he had been willing to punch his ticket at other appropriate commands, he certainly would have been on his way to the rank of general, but he knew the Army was better served by his work in the laboratory. He knew that he could have pulled a much heftier income in the private sector, but the Army provided a “rich uncle” to finance his research into sexually transmitted diseases and he could operate without the distractions of academic politics and corporate profits.
Tramont proved a particularly important ally of Major Robert Red-field, who had been studying AIDS since 1983. Both Tramont and Dr. Redfield aggressively counseled Army generals who attempted to do to its soldiers what the Navy was doing to Byron Kinney. Though their work between 1983 and 1985 gained little public notice, both men found themselves on military transports to various bases in Europe to reassure jittery generals that the newly diagnosed AIDS patient among their troops represented no threat to the health of his colleagues and that he should be treated the same as any other sick soldier. And usually the generals heeded that advice once the scientific facts about AIDS were laid out.
As he began to observe more patients, Redfield had begun developing a staging system for the disease. Until then, AIDS had been defined solely by the criteria employed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which identified AIDS sufferers solely as those who had contracted one of the dozen fatal diseases associated with the most severe forms of immune suppression. At Walter Reed, however, Redfield could see that AIDS was not a dramatic terminal event but, rather, a long, gradual process of immunological deterioration. It was a realization that provided Redfield with one of the darkest moments he had experienced in his scientific career. Though some researchers optimistically predicted that perhaps only 5 or 10 percent of the HTLV-III infected would get AIDS, Redfield’s studies indicated that all would eventually become ill and die, given enough time.
Much of AIDS research was based on a fallacy, in Redfield’s opinion. By focusing only on those end-stage patients with deadly diseases, the CDC definition—accepted nationally as the gold standard of AIDS nomenclature—missed the great bulk of the AIDS cases. Every other chronic disease had been staged, or defined, in terms of levels of illness, beginning with infection and ending with death, except AIDS, until Redfield came long. Eventually, he separated the continuum of AIDS infection into six distinct stages, all measurable through blood assays and specific symptoms, thus defining AIDS as a continuum of immune dysfunction rather than as a single end-stage diagnosis.
The staging system aided researchers internationally on a number of fronts. For the first time, AIDS doctors could speak a common language in describing precisely the physical condition of a patient. Redfield was also concerned with finding new markers to determine the effectiveness of treatments for AIDS. At that time, a drug’s success was measured by how long it delayed the “end point” of the disease—meaning death. Redfield wanted to be able to assess a treatment’s effectiveness without having to wait for the patient to die. A medication that delayed patients’ going from Walter Reed Stage Three to Four, for example, would give researchers information much more quickly.
At first, the AIDS research establishment rejected Redfield’s radical new staging system. When he submitted his proposal for publication in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, for example, his paper was turned down as offering far too grim an assessment of the ultimate prognosis of the HTLV-III infected. Within two years, however, the Walter Reed Staging System had become the new gold standard by which all other definitions were judged. The staging system also offered the criteria for aiding the military to decide what to do with AIDS-infected soldiers. His staging system clearly delineated that HTLV-III infected troops could be useful to the military until they reached serious immune suppression in stages five or six. Before then, their service presented no risk either to the Army or themselves.
The announcement that American researchers had isolated HTLV-III in April 1984 made clear that mass screening of all Army recruits might be imminent, and an incident that occurred two weeks after the announcement showed why such screening might be necessary. In basic training, an otherwise-healthy nineteen-year-old recruit was inoculated for smallpox, using a vaccine that included live vaccinia virus. (The eradication of smallpox in the 1970s had ended large-scale smallpox vaccination of the general public. Since the affliction was considered a likely armament in germ warfare, however, the Army continued to protect its soldiers from the disease.) About three weeks later, the recruit developed a severe fever and night sweats. By the time he was transferred to Walter Reed, he had developed a constellation of AIDS symptoms and a potentially deadly case of cryptococcal meningitis. While he was being treated for meningitis, vaccinia sores began to break out all over his body. His doctors had never seen anything like it. Ultimately, the nation’s entire supply of vacciniaimmune globulin was pumped into the patient before the disease began to recede.
The case led Army doctors to support massive screening of new Army recruits for HTLV-III. Civil libertarians had the luxury of debating whether it was ethical to force AIDS testing on recruits as a condition of employment, but, as physicians, Redfield and Tramont saw no choice. Military recruits received vaccinations against as many as fourteen diseases. With so little known about AIDS, doctors could not predict what it would mean to inoculate an immune-compromised patient against so many ailments. Surely it was unethical to do nothing and hope that everything worked out in the end.
These debates did not become urgent until the HTLV-III antibody test was licensed in March 1985. Meanwhile, other events conspired to force the Army to come to grips with the problem. An early case of transfusion-related AIDS, for example, was diagnosed in the wife of an officer who was a favorite of the Army Chief of Staff. That brought the disease home. And the number of cases was mounting. By 1985, the military was treating 195 patients officially diagnosed with AIDS or its less severe manifestation of AIDS-related complex, ARC.
The FDA approval of the blood test demanded the first hard decisions in early spring. Military hospitals would now be vulnerable to huge liability lawsuits if they did not begin to screen all blood donations for HTLV-III. Since the largest proportion of the military’s blood supply was donated by active-duty personnel, this raised the question of what the Defense Department would do with donors of infected blood. On March 13, 1985, the Pentagon’s Military Blood Program Office, run out of the Army Surgeon General’s office, ordered all military blood programs to test for HTLV-III. As part of the program, the Army also ordered: “Military and civilian blood agencies collecting blood on military installations will provide positive test results for antibody to HTLV-III to the respective service military health agency.…”
Military blood was also collected by private agencies such as the Red Cross, which put civilian agencies in the uncomfortable position of turning over names of HTLV-III positive donors to the services. This undermined the blood banks’ tradition of protecting donor confidentiality at all costs. Blood banks also came under pressure from groups such as the National Gay Task Force, which noted that the results of blood tests could be used to harass suspected gay soldiers.
The executive director of San Francisco’s largest blood bank, the Irwin Memorial Blood Bank, was the first to announce that his facility would not comply with the Pentagon order. Blood bankers collecting donations in Maine and Massachusetts also said they would not turn names in to the military, and the two national blood banking associations announced they would launch negotiations to get the Pentagon to withdraw the order. Congresswoman Barbara Boxer and Senator Alan Cranston, both Californians with heavy gay constituencies, fired off a letter to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger asking him to rescind the order, noting that the release of test results “poses a risk of abuse of the information,” given the military’s policies on gays.
For its part, the Defense Department was indignant at the accusation that they would use the results of blood tests improperly. The Air Force announced it was seeking “mature, sensitive and assuring” doctors to counsel service members who tested positive. Pentagon spokesman Major Pete Wyro said no blood-test result would be used “for pointing a finger or initiating a disciplinary action. None of that information would go to a [service member’s] commanding officer.” Privately, Secretary Weinberger was said to be furious that blood banks would interfere with Pentagon policy.
Even as blood bankers balked at cooperating with the Defense Department, researchers such as Tramont and Redfield provided a powerful new argument against the summary dismissal of all HTLV-III positive soldiers: research. Because AIDS had been detected less than four years earlier, many of the most important facts about it remained unknown. What was its natural history? With a disease like diabetes or liver cancer, a doctor could explain every phase of the disease and express with some certainty what the patient’s prognosis would be. Even with the preliminary description of Redfield’s staging system, no such time line had been ascertained for AIDS. With the HTLV-III antibody test only weeks old, researchers were just about to get their first glimpse at the true extent of AIDS infection. Such a moment presented an ideal opportunity for study. It was not at all understood, for example, why some HTLV-III infected patients became sick very quickly while others appeared to live for years with no ill effects from the virus. Understanding what protected these patients could lead to medicines that might help all HTLV-III patients.
There were other unanswered questions. New evidence suggested that HTLV-III somehow affected the central nervous system, perhaps leading to brain damage. At what stage during the disease did this happen? This was no small issue for the Navy or Air Force, which had to decide how to handle HTLV-III positive pilots. The HTLV-III positive personnel presented unparalleled opportunities for research precisely because they were military. Once they had volunteered for studies, subjects would not disappear, as they so often did in civilian research. The Army knew exactly where their soldiers were every minute of every day. The Army also knew every intimate detail of their medical treatment, since soldiers went to Army hospitals. There would never be problems about getting time off from work to take a blood test or answer a questionnaire. Moreover, it was likely that many HTLV-III positive men would be detected early in the course of infection, certainly much earlier than in the civilian sector. No other population offered the chance to view the full course of HTLV-III infection, from start to end, than the military.
The argument that HTLV-III positive patients represented a chance for groundbreaking medical research aroused the vanity of the military’s medical officials and ultimately helped enlist a powerful ally in the Pentagon, Dr. William “Bud” Mayer, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs. As the top civilian Pentagon official for health matters, Mayer soon became a spokesman both for military AIDS research and for a humane approach to dealing with HTLV-III infected soldiers. By May 1985, he was waxing eloquently to congressional committees about the research opportunities.
In his briefings with the Army Surgeon General, and ultimately the Army Chief of Staff and the Secretary of the Army, Dr. Tramont made the same case. There was a great potential for research—but, he stressed, it was also crucial that the information doctors collected be used for medical purposes only. If the military used a soldier’s data collected for “inappropriate reasons,” it would detract from the doctors’ ability to do their job. Moreover, it would scare potentially sick and at-risk soldiers away from the medical system when they needed it most. Tramont found support among his medical colleagues and opposition from the line officers in the Pentagon. The matter was far from resolved on the morning of Byron Kinney’s hearing in San Diego.
Kinney could sit up for only some of his separation hearing. For much of the procedure, he lay on a bench in the rear of the courtroom while the lawyers argued among themselves. In his opening argument, Lieutenant Nels Kelstrom, acting on behalf of the Navy, announced that he would present no witnesses, because he did not have to. Kinney’s records spoke for themselves, he said. “I believe that the evidence presented today will firmly establish that Petty Officer Kinney absolutely has no place in the Navy and should be discharged and that should be the vote of this Board,” Kelstrom said.
Kinney’s attorney, Ted Burner, attempted to present the objections of the physicians to the use of their records in the hearing. Kelstrom argued against it, saying, “In the military, the patient-physician privilege [of confidentiality] does not exist.” When Burner pressed further, the matter was taken out of earshot of the board to the legal adviser. “They obviously want members [of the board] to hear that their doctor is outraged by the fact of the use of those statements,” Kelstrom complained. Such statements are “irrelevant and inflammatory,” he argued. Commander Vrbancic, the Navy legal adviser, ruled against Burner and for the Navy.
Burner brought in AIDS experts from the University of California at San Diego to testify how long they thought Kinney could be expected to live. Burner’s intent was to show that the Navy had little to lose in the way of good order, discipline and morale by allowing Kinney to have a medical retirement. Kelstrom was angered by the line of questioning and asked it be halted. “That is irrelevant; it is nothing but a confusion tactic,” he said. “We’re here to decide whether or not he engaged in homosexual acts and a fraudulent enlistment, and that’s all we’re here to decide at this juncture.” Again, the Navy legal adviser ruled for the Navy.
Back in the courtroom, Lieutenant Kelstrom delivered his final summation. The errant behavior, he argued, might continue if the board did not move immediately to kick Kinney out of the Navy. “I don’t know; I can’t tell you whether the likelihood of continued homosexual practices exists, but I know that it continued for a five- or six-year period,” Kelstrom said. “It continued even after he had denied previous homosexual practices when he joined the Navy, and he knew good and well what the Navy’s policy was regarding homosexuals or he wouldn’t have lied when he signed the enlistment application and contract. So what is the likelihood for continuation? Well, I submit that under the circumstances of this case it is probably unlikely, but should we take a chance? … I think that we cannot speculate that it won’t happen; if anything, I think we should speculate that it would perhaps continue. Will he be a disruptive or undesirable influence in present or future duty assignments? I submit he will be.”
Though Navy regulations called for an honorable discharge for gay sailors, Kelstrom argued against mercy for Kinney, saying the “fraudulent enlistment” charge outweighed “the positive aspects of his performance” while a Navy corpsman.
In his closing argument, Burner begged the board to consider the impact a separation would have on the military’s ability to deal with AIDS. Sailors would be afraid to talk to their doctors; doctors would be afraid to talk to their patients. Before Burner could get far into his closing argument, however, Kelstrom objected. AIDS was not the issue, he said, only homosexuality and fraudulent enlistment. None of this was relevant, he stated. And the Navy legal adviser ruled against Kinney and for the Navy.
Byron Kinney was allowed to make an unsworn statement before the board. “I feel I’ve given seven years of service,” he barely whispered, “and this wouldn’t be happening if I wasn’t sick.” And then he was too exhausted to speak any longer.
The board recessed to consider its decision at 4:45 P.M. Kinney shuffled down the hall and found an empty room where he shoved several chairs together and put his head on his backpack. It was not sleep he wanted so much as an escape from the voices, the noise.
At 5:14 P.M., the board’s senior member, Lieutenant Commander Nancy Price, read the panel’s unanimous decision: “By a vote of three to zero, the Board recommends that the Respondent be discharged from the naval service due to procurement of a fraudulent enlistment by knowing false representations and deliberate concealment of pre-service homosexual activity and homosexuality … and that the discharge be a general discharge.
“The Board will be adjourned,” she said.
Byron’s lawyers shielded him from reporters, but when one journalist shouted, “What’s he going to do now?” Kinney turned and said simply, “I’ll continue to fight.”
The Kinney case did not generate much publicity outside the gay press and the immediate San Diego area, but the bad publicity made the Pentagon cringe, as did the mounting protests over the Defense Department plan to force blood banks to provide names of HTLV-III positive military donors. Inside the Pentagon, the conflict between line officers and military doctors continued.
A week after the Kinney hearing, Assistant Defense Secretary Mayer announced that the Defense Department would delay implementation of its order to civilian blood banks. Mayer wanted to “review concerns expressed by civilian blood collection agencies” centering on privacy issues, a spokesman said. After the Kinney hearing, it was no longer meaningful for the Pentagon to argue that it would never use medical tests to punish service personnel.
Before Kinney’s separation became final—and before it could be legally challenged—the board’s conclusion had to be accepted by the Naval Personnel Command. Bridget Wilson, who had been advising Kinney, hoped that Byron might win at that level, forgoing the need to drag him through a long court fight. Just how much longer Byron might live was a major concern for Wilson, Burner, and Kathy Gilberd. When Wilson talked to Byron and heard the betrayal he felt, and his worry as well as his fear that the Navy would betray thousands more if he did not win, she realized that Byron was not about to expire. He was angry and he was determined, and he was not going to die until this thing was won.
JULY 1985
THE PENTAGON
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
Pete Randell’s last day at the Air Force Board for the Correction of Military Records came in July 1985, after more than twenty years of continuous service to the United States government in the Army, at the White House, and in the Air Force. By now, the gossip had reached his office.
And then two agents of the Office of Special Investigations appeared in his office, flashing their badges and announcing they were following up on reports that he was homosexual. Who else in the Air Force was gay? they asked. What other homosexuals held government jobs? They had been following him for weeks, they added, and began listing some of the gay bars he had been to. One had go-go boys that danced on the bar. Did Randell want his parents to know that he went to such bars? What would his children think?
Pete did not tell the investigators anything, but now he knew he could not fight them. He did not want his children involved; he did not want his name in the newspaper. He understood now what gay-rights activists had been fighting for all those years. Suddenly, the United States did not seem to be the free country he had always believed it to be. The prospect of serving as a clerk/typist in an agency he had once run was too humiliating to contemplate, so Pete resigned, officially citing other career opportunities.
Along with losing his job, Pete had lost his home and virtually all his possessions in a bitter divorce with his wife. Soon he declared bankruptcy. His two children no longer spoke to him.
The only solace he had came from an affair he had begun with a young Chicano man he had met on one of his last official Air Force trips to San Antonio. He moved the young man to the Washington area, much to the chagrin of Pete’s handful of gay friends, who warned him the youth was a hustler. Pete thought that a hustler was someone who played pool. Besides, he was in love for the first time and would hear nothing of it. Being new to gay life, Pete also did not hear the talk about safe sex that was spreading through the gay community. Ultimately, he found out that his friends were right and that his lover was a male prostitute. The youth pleaded he would change, and Pete believed him for a while. But ultimately, he ordered the young man out of his house. By then, it was too late.