And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition by Randy Shilts
Authors: Randy Shilts
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UKE’S -R OOSEVELT H OSPITAL, N EW Y ORK C ITY
Enno Poersch put Nick’s hand in his own strong grip, hoping his optimism might course into the vacant man’s eyes.
“This is great,” said Enno. “They finally know what you have. Now they’ll be able to cure you and you’ll be fine.”
Nick was still so exhausted from the surgery he could barely manage a smile. The white gauze still capped most of his head. The exploratory surgery had been most indelicate. The doctors had simply taken off the top of Nick’s skull to try to figure out what had created the three massive lesions. The effort had at last produced a diagnosis. Nick, they said, had toxoplasmosis; yes, it could be treated.
“Everything’s gonna be fine,” Enno said.
November 25
S AN F RANCISCO
Ken Home had always wanted to be a dancer, performing a dazzling array of pirouettes, entrechats, and arabesques before a rapt audience that would nod approvingly at his grace and beauty. A glowingly optimistic sort, he loved everything about the theater, with its romance and costumes and fairy-tale happy endings. Maybe he could even be a star, the guy people cheered and wrote about. That’s why he had left his blue-collar family in Oregon and moved to San Francisco in 1965, when he was twenty-one, to study at the San Francisco Ballet School. A nose job had complemented an otherwise delicate face, and his body was hard and muscular from years of training. The sheer contrast between his childhood plainness and his adult beauty made Ken’s introduction to San Francisco gay life rewarding. All these men liked him so much, and he so desperately wanted to be liked. Sometimes, he confided to friends, he felt like a Cinderella who had finally arrived at the ball.
Maybe that’s why it was easier to let go of the dancer’s dream in the late 1960s. Ken told friends a vague story about the ballet director decreeing that all the single men had to get married or engaged to stay in the company, something about hating to be embarrassed by all the dancers’ arrests in gay bar raids. In any event, Ken dropped out of the ballet school, assuring friends he would get back into it once he got his finances straightened out. In 1969, he took a clerical job at the Bay Area Rapid Transit system and found he liked the regular paycheck as well as a work week that was a dream compared to the regimen of 6 A.M. to 9 P.M. he’d followed with the ballet. He had more time to go out at night now. “This isn’t so bad after all,” he told a friend. “I’m having fun.”
Ken soon fell in love with a German sign painter and lost touch with his early San Francisco friends, who recalled a sweet young kid who loved romance. They were surprised five years later to happen into Ken at the Folsom Prison, a leather bar. His hair was cut severely and he sported a close-cropped, narrow beard that followed the line of his jaw like a chin strap on some Nazi helmet. His old friends were floored, not only because he was so thoroughly the prototype of the black leather machismo then sweeping San Francisco, but also because he looked so wasted. His hair had gone gray and his eyes looked glazed. Ken complained about how tough it was in this “city of bottoms” to find a man who would screw him.
His friends decided that Ken had fallen into the trap that had snared so many beautiful gay men. In his twenties, he had searched for a husband instead of a career. When he did not find a husband, he took the next best thing—sex—and soon sex became something of a career. It wasn’t love but at least it felt good; for all his time at the Cinderella ball, the prince had never arrived.
As the focus of sex shifted from passion to technique, Ken learned all the things one could do to wring pleasure from one’s body. The sexual practices would become more esoteric; that was the only way to keep it from getting boring. The warehouse district alleys of both Manhattan and San Francisco had throughout the 1970s
Enno Poersch put Nick’s hand in his own strong grip, hoping his optimism might course into the vacant man’s eyes.
“This is great,” said Enno. “They finally know what you have. Now they’ll be able to cure you and you’ll be fine.”
Nick was still so exhausted from the surgery he could barely manage a smile. The white gauze still capped most of his head. The exploratory surgery had been most indelicate. The doctors had simply taken off the top of Nick’s skull to try to figure out what had created the three massive lesions. The effort had at last produced a diagnosis. Nick, they said, had toxoplasmosis; yes, it could be treated.
“Everything’s gonna be fine,” Enno said.
November 25
S AN F RANCISCO
Ken Home had always wanted to be a dancer, performing a dazzling array of pirouettes, entrechats, and arabesques before a rapt audience that would nod approvingly at his grace and beauty. A glowingly optimistic sort, he loved everything about the theater, with its romance and costumes and fairy-tale happy endings. Maybe he could even be a star, the guy people cheered and wrote about. That’s why he had left his blue-collar family in Oregon and moved to San Francisco in 1965, when he was twenty-one, to study at the San Francisco Ballet School. A nose job had complemented an otherwise delicate face, and his body was hard and muscular from years of training. The sheer contrast between his childhood plainness and his adult beauty made Ken’s introduction to San Francisco gay life rewarding. All these men liked him so much, and he so desperately wanted to be liked. Sometimes, he confided to friends, he felt like a Cinderella who had finally arrived at the ball.
Maybe that’s why it was easier to let go of the dancer’s dream in the late 1960s. Ken told friends a vague story about the ballet director decreeing that all the single men had to get married or engaged to stay in the company, something about hating to be embarrassed by all the dancers’ arrests in gay bar raids. In any event, Ken dropped out of the ballet school, assuring friends he would get back into it once he got his finances straightened out. In 1969, he took a clerical job at the Bay Area Rapid Transit system and found he liked the regular paycheck as well as a work week that was a dream compared to the regimen of 6 A.M. to 9 P.M. he’d followed with the ballet. He had more time to go out at night now. “This isn’t so bad after all,” he told a friend. “I’m having fun.”
Ken soon fell in love with a German sign painter and lost touch with his early San Francisco friends, who recalled a sweet young kid who loved romance. They were surprised five years later to happen into Ken at the Folsom Prison, a leather bar. His hair was cut severely and he sported a close-cropped, narrow beard that followed the line of his jaw like a chin strap on some Nazi helmet. His old friends were floored, not only because he was so thoroughly the prototype of the black leather machismo then sweeping San Francisco, but also because he looked so wasted. His hair had gone gray and his eyes looked glazed. Ken complained about how tough it was in this “city of bottoms” to find a man who would screw him.
His friends decided that Ken had fallen into the trap that had snared so many beautiful gay men. In his twenties, he had searched for a husband instead of a career. When he did not find a husband, he took the next best thing—sex—and soon sex became something of a career. It wasn’t love but at least it felt good; for all his time at the Cinderella ball, the prince had never arrived.
As the focus of sex shifted from passion to technique, Ken learned all the things one could do to wring pleasure from one’s body. The sexual practices would become more esoteric; that was the only way to keep it from getting boring. The warehouse district alleys of both Manhattan and San Francisco had throughout the 1970s
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