Word: gay
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...moaning stopped, the young man rolled over on his back for a cigarette. Gaetan Dugas reached up for the lights, turning up the rheostat slowly so his partner's eyes would have time to adjust. He then made a point of eyeing the purple lesions on his chest. "Gay cancer," he said, almost as if he were talking to himself. "Maybe...
...first time in a stunning new book on the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On (St. Martin's Press; 630 pages; $24.95). Zero, says Author Randy Shilts, was Gaetan Dugas, a handsome blond steward for Air Canada, who used to survey the men on offer in gay bars and announce with satisfaction, "I'm the prettiest one." Using airline passes, he traveled extensively and picked up men wherever he went. Dugas developed Kaposi's sarcoma, a form of skin cancer common to AIDS victims, in June 1980, before the epidemic had been perceived by physicians. Told later...
...many vivid and shocking stories in Shilts' impressively researched and richly detailed narrative. The author has been covering AIDS full time for the San Francisco Chronicle since 1983. Most of his tales underscore a theme that is painfully ; familiar to AIDS researchers: both the Federal Government and the gay community squandered lives and let the disease rage out of control by focusing on ideological preaching instead of public health...
Shilts, who is openly gay, is equally tough on the gay community, which, he says, transformed its civil rights movement in the '70s into "omnipresent carnality." In the face of rampant disease, he says, gay leaders resisted calling for sexual restraint, fearing that it would threaten their hard-won liberation. He adds that the owners of gay "back room" bars and bathhouses were prominent contributors to gay political groups and major advertisers in gay newspapers, and thus unduly influenced the debate. In one grim scene, a bathhouse owner tells a doctor at San Francisco General Hospital, "We're both...
...cool jazz notes into the crisp autumn air. But only 60 or so supporters were seated on folding chairs. An additional 400 were expected but didn't show, and the candidate's tranquil TV tableau was quickly transformed into bedlam in Bed-Stuy. Several dozen demonstrators, many of them gay activists, waved derisive placards that proclaimed such unglad tidings as HITLER IN 1939. ROBERTSON IN 1988. As Robertson volunteers distributed bumper stickers, a grandmotherly black woman snapped, "Does he really think he can come back here after 20 years and get our vote...