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

and sex clubs. The hundreds of such institutions were a $100-million industry across America and Canada, and bathhouse owners were frequently gay political leaders as well, helping support the usually financially starved gay groups. The businesses serviced men who had long been repressed, gay activists told themselves, and were perhaps now going to the extreme in exploring their new freedom. It would all balance out later, so for now, sex was part and parcel of political liberation. The popular bestseller The Joy of Gay Sex, for example, called rimming the “prime taste treat in sex,” while a leftist Toronto newspaper published a story on “rimming as a revolutionary act.”
    It was interesting politics, David Ostrow thought. From a purely medical standpoint, however, the bathhouses were a horrible breeding ground for disease. People who went to bathhouses simply were more likely to be infected with a disease—and infect others—than a typical homosexual on the street. A Seattle study of gay men suffering from shigellosis, for example, discovered that 69 percent culled their sexual partners from bathhouses. A Denver study found that an average bathhouse patron having his typical 2.7 sexual contacts a night risked a 33 percent chance of walking out of the tubs with syphilis or gonorrhea, because about one in eight of those wandering the hallways had asymptomatic cases of these diseases.
    Doctors like David Ostrow and Dan William did not consider themselves prudish, even if they were cut from a more staid mold than the people whose pictures were in the newspaper coverage of the Gay Freedom Day Parade. But they were uneasy about the health implication of the commercialization of sex. In a 1980 interview with a New York City gay magazine, Christopher Street, William noted, “One effect of gay liberation is that sex has been institutionalized and franchised. Twenty years ago, there may have been a thousand men on any one night having sex in New York baths or parks. Now there are ten or twenty thousand—at the baths, the back-room bars, bookstores, porno theaters, the Rambles, and a wide range of other places as well. The plethora of opportunities poses a public health problem that’s growing with every new bath in town.”
    Such comments were politically incorrect in the extreme, and William suffered criticism as a “monogamist.” Self-criticism was not the strong point of a community that was only beginning to define itself affirmatively after centuries of repression.
    Altogether, this generation of gay men was blessed by good health. Being a gay doctor was fun, William often told himself. Physical fitness was a community ritual with tens of thousands of gay men crowding Nautilus centers and weight rooms. He rarely had to go to a hospital because none of his patients ever got very sick.
    David Ostrow too was haunted by forebodings as he left the parade. Between the bathhouses and the high levels of sexual activity, there would be no stopping a new disease that got into this population. The likelihood was remote, of course. Modern science had congratulated itself on the eradication of infectious disease as a threat to humankind. But the specter sometimes haunted Ostrow because he wondered where all the sexually transmitted disease would end. It couldn’t continue indefinitely. He had already noticed that some Chicago gay men were having immune problems. Dan William was seeing strange inflammation of the lymph nodes among his most promiscuous patients. The swelling was curious because it did not seem to be in response to any particular infection but was generalized, all over; maybe it was the effect of overloading the immune system with a variety of venereal diseases.
    Years later, Dan William would recall that it was during the days of early 1980 that he saw a man in his mid-forties recovering from a bad bout with hepatitis B. He had strange purplish lesions on his arms and chest. William referred him to Memorial