And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts
Fumento, Michael
Hudson. An openly homosexual writer for the San Francisco Chronicle and the nation's first full-time AIDS reporter, Shilts names names, slams reputations, and yet poignantly testifies to those few...
...Thatmay be how some homosexuals will view Reagan's presidency, but most historians, with the help of Shilts's book, will conclude that, although many share the blame for the AIDS epidemic, those primarily responsible were its prime victims, the homosexuals themselves...
...This is something that Shilts can't establish, even with the hundreds of memos he obtained through the Freedom of Information Act...
...A Seattle study of gay men suffering from shigellosis [a parasitic disease most efficiently transmitted by ingestion of feces], for example, discovered 69 percent culled their sexual partners from bathhouses...
...The bathhouse owners...
...Even before 1 AIDS, notes Shills, "the bathhouses were a horrible breeding ground for disease...
...The ar- -ü gument that public health officials and the Reagan Administration shortchanged AIDS research until it was perceived as a national, and not just a homosexual and drug addict, problem is much more contestable...
...All of which prompted one doctor in 1980 to remark, "If something new gets loose here, we're going to have hell to pay...
...As one callous owner explained to Dr...
...by mid-1982 the CDC had reported that hemophiliacs had contracted AIDS through clotting factor...
...It's not that there was no way to screen blood...
...it's easy to see now that much more money should have been spent much more quickly on AIDS...
...Already," writes Shilts, "some said Ronald Reagan would be remembered in history books for one thing beyond all else: He was the man who had let AIDS rage through America, the leader of the government that when challenged to action had placed politics above the health of the American people...
...The issue is not and never has been, as Konstantin Berlandt contends (in Shilts's paraphrase), "society's responsibility to find the medical technology to prevent all sexually transmitted diseases rather than the gay community's responsibility to keep sexuality in line with what medical technology can cure...
...Hindsight is always 20-20...
...Another method was to ask members of high risk groups to exclude themselves voluntarily...
...A Denver study found that an average bathhouse patron having his typical 2.7 sexual contacts risked a 33 percent chance of walking out of the tubs with syphilis or gonorrhea...
...But hindsight also tells us that those same public health authorities strongly overreacted to the Swine Flu scare in the mid-1970s...
...Dublic Health Authorities...
...But at a meeting of all the major blood banking organizations it was announced that no such screening wouldbe tolerated...
...It wasn't until 1987 that the last bathhouse closed its doors...
...Instead, they treated the AIDS epidemic in the way Amity businessmen treated news of the shark in the movie Jaws—the less said, the better...
...In his epilogue Shilts writes, "An estimated 12,000 Americans were infected from transfusions largely administered after the CDC had futilely begged the blood industry for action to prevent the spread of the disease...
...Berlandt also used his column to make a pitch for "rimming," known in other circles as oral-anal contact and then considered to be a high-risk activity for contracting AIDS...
...Some homosexuals racked up as many as a mind-boggling 20,000 sexual partners, engaging in high-risk (receptive anal) acts long after it became apparent that a fatal illness was spreading through the homosexual populations of New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles...
...Yet in December 1982 an officer of the American Association of Blood Banks went on network television to say flatly that there still was no evidence that transfusions spread AIDS...
...An openly homosexual writer for the San Francisco Chronicle and the nation's first full-time AIDS reporter, Shilts names names, slams reputations, and yet poignantly testifies to those few who fought desperately to get the band's attention and those who died horribly while it continued to play...
...Other homosexuals saw profit in the epidemic, as did the San Mateo doctor who promised to cure AIDS with massive doses of—you guessed it—Vitamin C. Still others made desperate efforts to pretend that the syndrome was not sexually transmitted, such as the homoAND THE BAND PLAYED ON: POLITICS, PEOPLE AND THE AIDS EPIDEMIC Randy Shilts/St...
...Like the bathhouse owners, blood bank operators faced the AIDS problem by ignoring it...
...According to Berlandt, the practice could be "spiritually uplifting...
...Homosexual leaders such as Konstantin Berlandt, a columnist for the Bay Area Reporter, shed new light on the debate over whether homosexuality is genetic or acquired by stating, "I didn't become a homosexual so I could use condoms...
...The San Francisco Health Department, which recently forbade all smoking in government offices on public health grounds, delayed putting restrictions on the bathhouses for several years so as to not offend the homosexual lobby...
...Homosexual Rights Groups and the Media...
...We've preserved not just gay rights," he said, "but the human right to privacy and individual choice...
...Shilts is not shy about going after his own...
...Direct or indirect questions about a donor's sexual preference are inappropriate," read the official statement...
...The book is replete with examples of callousness, overcaution, and sheer idiocy on the part of so-called gay rights organizations which consistently fought efforts to save homosexual lives—including such efforts as voluntary testing—alleging such measures were but the first step toward slapping pink triangles onto homosexuals and marching them off to the gas chambers...
...Money...
...Shifts can't resist a parting shot at President Reagan...
...Roger Enlow, a New York homosexual physician and a leader of the American Association of Physicians for Human Rights, praised the policy...
...Scoffing at advice to limit partners and avoid such activity, many homosexuals continued going to bathhouses, readily infecting themselves with the AIDS virus and passing it on to others...
...Would funding have been substantially different if the afflicted had been, to use one congressman's comparison, tennis players instead of homosexuals...
...You make money from them on the other end when they come out...
...Martin's Press/$24.95 Michael Fumento 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 sexual psychologist who wrote a series of articles maintaining that AIDS victims all had suffered an "emotional emergency" as children that was now manifesting itself as fatal immune suppression...
...Yet even after hell broke loose, bathhouse owners refused to close up shop or even display safe-sex posters...
...Later Berlandt wrote: "Advice on safe sex, while perhaps well-meaning, is actually collaboration with the death regime that delights in blaming ourselves and would pin the blame on us...
...Shilts has told one writer that the press's lack of AIDS coverage—until, that is, the disease appeared to threaten heterosexuals and until the death of Rock Hudson—makes it the "one institution with the most blood on its hands...
...Except, of course, for those who chose not to die of a horrible disease simply because they needed blood products...
...Introducing the members of the band: "Fast lane" homosexuals...
...By late 1981 there was reason to believe that AIDS was a bloodborne virus like hepatitis B and that it would turn up in blood transfusions...
...We make money at one end when they come to the baths...
...Paul Volberding, "We're both in it for the same thing...
...One method, rejected as too expensive, was to test for antibodies to the core of the hepatitis B virus, antibodies ubiquitous in the blood of AIDS patients...
...Blood bank operators...
Vol. 21 • February 1988 • No. 2
