Read And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition for Free Online

cars set aflame by rampaging gay crowds.
    By 1980, Cleve had helped fashion the story of Harvey and the 1970s, the Dan White trial, and the White Night Riot into one of the new legends of the fledgling gay movement, a story of assassinations and political intrigue, homophobic zealots and rioting in the streets. From it all, Cleve had emerged as the most prominent street activist in town, the most skillful media manipulator since Harvey Milk. Reporters loved the ever-so-militant pronouncements Cleve Jones was apt to make.
    In recent months, Cleve had traded his blue jeans and sneakers for Armani suits to work for the Speaker of the California Assembly. It was a time when the outsiders who once marched angrily on the government were becoming insiders learning how to use the power they had gained. Cleve had spent most of the spring organizing Democratic Assembly campaigns. He split his time between Sacramento and San Francisco, where he was dating a wonderful Mexican-American lawyer named Felix Velarde-Munoz. Both knew the key players in local politics, and both loved to talk politics and liberation movements and make love and dance to the ubiquitous disco music.
    That’s what the summer of 1980 was to Cleve Jones. The gay community was a burst of creative energy that emanated from San Francisco and spread across America. Gays had staved off challenges that ran from bigots’ ballot initiatives to political murder; now they could look forward to greater victories.
    Yet like many gay activists, Cleve was troubled by the amusement park rides at Civic Center Plaza. He knew that the gay revolution was, at best, half-completed. Its tenuous gains could be wiped away by some other strongly organized force. He could understand that to a gay refugee from Des Moines, the city represented freedom beyond anything imaginable. He also knew, however, that freedom to go to a gay bar was not real freedom.
    What was the right direction? Cleve asked himself. The gay movement had shifted from one of self-exploration, in which people moved through their own fears and self-alienation, to a movement of electoral politics, focused outward. Voter registration tables had replaced consciousness-raising groups as the symbol of liberation. Cleve sometimes wondered whether the new men crowding the Castro had already gone through this personal growth elsewhere or whether they had simply skipped it because being gay in San Francisco was so easy now that you didn’t need to plummet to your psychic depths to make a commitment to the life-style.
    Too many questions. It was nothing to dwell on today. When Cleve remembered the wonderful 1978 parade, and everything that had happened since, he felt like celebrating too. From his promontory on the Ferris wheel, he once more scanned the thousands stretched for miles around the City Hall rotunda where gay people had once marched and rioted, and where they now exerted so much power. The wheel jerked again, and slowly he began to return to the crowd, turning full circle.

    A new disease.
    It was never a formal topic of discussion, but on that weekend, when gay doctors from across the country gathered in San Francisco, it was discussed occasionally in hallways and over dinners. What would happen if some new disease insinuated itself into the bodies of just a few men in this community? The notion terrified Dr. David Ostrow; it was an idea he tried to put out of his mind as he wandered through the crowded rally site between the whirling amusement park rides with two other doctors from the convention, Manhattan’s Dan William and Robert Bolan of San Francisco.
    Ostrow grimaced as a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence sashayed by. The sight rankled his midwestern sensibilities. This was all too weird, he thought. The media would play up the open display of sexuality and once again drag queens and half-naked muscle boys would be presented as the emblems of homosexual culture. People like Ostrow, who leaned toward long, steady