And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition by Randy Shilts Page B
Authors: Randy Shilts
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tests. He persuaded Ken to let him do a biopsy of a lymph node, which would show whether there was some kind of lymph cancer. The doctor also drew extra blood and sent it to the lab with special instructions to scan the serum for every exotic viral disease they could imagine.
There is an answer to this, Groundwater thought. There always is.
December 9
L OS A NGELES
“What are we doing to ourselves?”
It was the question that Dr. Joel Weisman felt compelled to ask himself as he checked out the nervous, thirty-year-old advertising manager. The guy was sick. He had a painful eczema, persistent diarrhea, and endless fevers. Even worse, he’d been sick for six weeks now and was seeing Dr. Weisman on a referral from his normal internist. After ordering up tests, Weisman wrote his tentative diagnosis on the patient’s chart: “Patient has problems that appear to be secondary to immune deficiency.”
Mysteriously ill people aren’t all that rare in a medical practice, Weisman knew, but this was not isolated. In October, another young gay man had gone to Weisman’s associate with a strikingly similar disarray in his immune system. The constellation of diseases was startling. White fungi grew around the man’s fingernails, fluffy candidiasis was sprouting all over his palate, and he too was suffering from rashes, prolonged fevers, swollen lymph glands, and low white blood counts. Hospitalization brought a brief respite from the skin problems, but by early December, the patient’s nightsweats were soaking through the sheets of his bed and the rashes had returned. Weisman’s partner first thought the man’s blood had been bombarded with both bacterial and viral infections, but by December he also diagnosed “immune deficiency.”
On top of these two cases, another twenty men had appeared at Weisman’s office that year with strange abnormalities of their lymph nodes. That’s how the ailments of these two more seriously ill patients had started. Weisman had half-expected something more serious when he started seeing the lymphadenopathy, or abnormal enlargement of the lymph glands. New studies were showing that 93 percent of gay men were infected with cytomegalovirus, a herpes virus that had been linked to cancer. The gay sexual revolution had also made the Epstein-Barr virus, a microbe also linked to cancers, pandemic among homosexual men. There were only so many viruses a body could battle before something went horribly awry. Now Weisman worried that he was seeing what could happen in the frightened eyes of the advertising manager who had been far too young and healthy last year to be so sick today.
The dean of southern California gay doctors, Weisman had pondered how to start telling gay men to slow down, that all this sex might end up being hazardous to their health. This was not a community that took kindly to stern reprimands, especially about sex, the doctor knew. These men had often been bruised by the painful proddings of parents and priests. This was not a time or place to be judgmental, because most of these men had fled their homes for cities like Los Angeles precisely to escape judgment. Yet the strange mix of taboos and newfound freedom had created a social climate that was wonderfully tailored for aggressive little viruses. So, as Weisman reassured this young man that they’d give him back his health, he was wondering to himself, “What are we doing to ourselves?”
It was the end of 1980, a year when the top movies were Coal Miner’s Daughter and the second Star Wars fantasy, The Empire Strikes Back. The top musical album was The River by Bruce Springsteen, filled with sad songs of economic dislocation and moral confusion about where a once-secure America was going. Meanwhile, a new virus was now well-entrenched on three continents, having moved easily from Africa to Europe and then to North America. Later surveys would show that in the United States fifty-five young men had been diagnosed with some
There is an answer to this, Groundwater thought. There always is.
December 9
L OS A NGELES
“What are we doing to ourselves?”
It was the question that Dr. Joel Weisman felt compelled to ask himself as he checked out the nervous, thirty-year-old advertising manager. The guy was sick. He had a painful eczema, persistent diarrhea, and endless fevers. Even worse, he’d been sick for six weeks now and was seeing Dr. Weisman on a referral from his normal internist. After ordering up tests, Weisman wrote his tentative diagnosis on the patient’s chart: “Patient has problems that appear to be secondary to immune deficiency.”
Mysteriously ill people aren’t all that rare in a medical practice, Weisman knew, but this was not isolated. In October, another young gay man had gone to Weisman’s associate with a strikingly similar disarray in his immune system. The constellation of diseases was startling. White fungi grew around the man’s fingernails, fluffy candidiasis was sprouting all over his palate, and he too was suffering from rashes, prolonged fevers, swollen lymph glands, and low white blood counts. Hospitalization brought a brief respite from the skin problems, but by early December, the patient’s nightsweats were soaking through the sheets of his bed and the rashes had returned. Weisman’s partner first thought the man’s blood had been bombarded with both bacterial and viral infections, but by December he also diagnosed “immune deficiency.”
On top of these two cases, another twenty men had appeared at Weisman’s office that year with strange abnormalities of their lymph nodes. That’s how the ailments of these two more seriously ill patients had started. Weisman had half-expected something more serious when he started seeing the lymphadenopathy, or abnormal enlargement of the lymph glands. New studies were showing that 93 percent of gay men were infected with cytomegalovirus, a herpes virus that had been linked to cancer. The gay sexual revolution had also made the Epstein-Barr virus, a microbe also linked to cancers, pandemic among homosexual men. There were only so many viruses a body could battle before something went horribly awry. Now Weisman worried that he was seeing what could happen in the frightened eyes of the advertising manager who had been far too young and healthy last year to be so sick today.
The dean of southern California gay doctors, Weisman had pondered how to start telling gay men to slow down, that all this sex might end up being hazardous to their health. This was not a community that took kindly to stern reprimands, especially about sex, the doctor knew. These men had often been bruised by the painful proddings of parents and priests. This was not a time or place to be judgmental, because most of these men had fled their homes for cities like Los Angeles precisely to escape judgment. Yet the strange mix of taboos and newfound freedom had created a social climate that was wonderfully tailored for aggressive little viruses. So, as Weisman reassured this young man that they’d give him back his health, he was wondering to himself, “What are we doing to ourselves?”
It was the end of 1980, a year when the top movies were Coal Miner’s Daughter and the second Star Wars fantasy, The Empire Strikes Back. The top musical album was The River by Bruce Springsteen, filled with sad songs of economic dislocation and moral confusion about where a once-secure America was going. Meanwhile, a new virus was now well-entrenched on three continents, having moved easily from Africa to Europe and then to North America. Later surveys would show that in the United States fifty-five young men had been diagnosed with some
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