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

relationships, would never get the press. The bizarre, it seemed, would always overshadow the positive things going on in the gay community, like the doctors’ conference. Doctors weren’t flamboyant enough to get in the headlines. They were barely mentioned in the gay newspapers, counting themselves lucky to make it a page ahead of the latest gossip about the hottest leather bar.
    While strategists like Bill Kraus read the gay community’s future in voter registration rolls, and street activists like Cleve Jones heard it in ringing oratory, the gay doctors had spent that weekend reading the community’s prognosis from its medical chart. Like many physicians, Ostrow had been quite troubled when he left the medical conference, which had adjourned in time for the parade.
    The fight against venereal diseases was proving a Sisyphean task. Ostrow was director of the Howard Brown Memorial Clinic, which provided a sensitive alternative for gay men who wanted to avoid the sneers of staffers at the Chicago Public Health clinics. The screening in Ostrow’s clinic had revealed that one in ten patients had walked in the door with hepatitis B. At least one-half of the gay men tested at the clinic showed evidence of a past episode of hepatitis B. In San Francisco, two-thirds of gay men had suffered the debilitating disease. It was now proven statistically that a gay man had one chance in five of being infected with the hepatitis B virus within twelve months of stepping off the bus into a typical urban gay scene. Within five years, infection was a virtual certainty.
    Another problem was enteric diseases, like amebiasis and giardiasis, caused by organisms that lodged themselves in the intestinal tracts of gay men with alarming frequency. At the New York Gay Men’s Health Project, where Dan William was medical director, 30 percent of the patients suffered from gastrointestinal parasites. In San Francisco, incidence of the “Gay Bowel Syndrome,” as it was called in medical journals, had increased by 8,000 percent after 1973. Infection with these parasites was a likely effect of anal intercourse, which was apt to put a man in contact with his partner’s fecal matter, and was virtually a certainty through the then-popular practice of rimming, which medical journals politely called oral-anal intercourse.
    What was so troubling was that nobody in the gay community seemed to care about these waves of infection. Ever since he had worked at the New York City Department of Public Health, Dan William had delivered his lecture about the dangers of undiagnosed venereal diseases and, in particular, such practices as rimming. But he had his “regulars” who came in with infection after infection, waiting for the magic bullet that could put them back in the sack again. William began to feel like a parent as he admonished the boys: “I have to tell you that you’re being very unhealthy.”
    Promiscuity, however, was central to the raucous gay movement of the 1970s, and his advice was, as the Texans so charmingly put it, like pissing in the wind. At best, he tried to counsel the Elizabeth Taylor approach to sexuality and suggest serial monogamy, a series of affairs that may not last forever but that at least left you with a vague awareness of which bed you slept in most evenings.
    The crowd cheered the parade again when the Bulldog Baths float came rolling into Civic Center. The young musclemen, in black leather harnesses, the best and the most beautiful, jumped from the cages in which they had discoed down Market Street. That night they would be at the huge Cellblock Party at the bathhouse, one of a panoply of celebrations sponsored that day by San Francisco’s thriving sex industry.
    This commercialization of gay sex was all part of the scene, an aspect of the homosexual life-style in which the epidemics of venereal disease, hepatitis, and enteric disorders thrived. The gay liberation movement of the 1970s had spawned a business of bathhouses