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Speaker 1: Hey, this is Leon Napok. I'm the host of Fiasco,

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Speaker 1: but you may also know me from the podcasts Slowburn,

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Speaker 1: Think Twice, Michael Jackson, and Backfired the Vaping Wars. I'm

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Speaker 1: excited to be sharing with you the next season of Backfired,

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Speaker 1: titled Attention Deficit, which is now available exclusively on Audible.

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Speaker 1: Backfired is a podcast about the business of unintended consequences.

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Speaker 1: In the first season, my co host Ril Pardess and

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Speaker 1: I dove deep into the world of vaping and how

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Speaker 1: the well intentioned quest for a safer cigarette went awry.

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Speaker 1: Now we're tackling ADHD and how the push to destigmatize

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Speaker 1: this hard to define childhood diagnosis has led to an

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Speaker 1: explosion of stimulant use in kids as well as adults.

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Speaker 1: It's a story about the promise of psychiatry to fix

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Speaker 1: our brains and the power of the pharmaceutical industry to

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Speaker 1: shape how we and our doctors think about what's wrong

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Speaker 1: with us. To hear both seasons of Backfired, go to

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Speaker 1: audible dot com slash Backfired and start a free trial

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Speaker 1: that's audible dot com slash backfired. Fiasco is intended from

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Speaker 1: a sure audiences for a list of books, articles, and

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Speaker 1: documentaries we used in our research. Follow the link in

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Speaker 1: the show notes Previously on Fiasco.

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Speaker 2: It's mysterious, it's deadly, and it's baffling medical science. Every

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Speaker 2: time you'd hear about the epidemic, it was inevitably fatal,

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Speaker 2: dread disease, no survivors, no cure, terminal illness.

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Speaker 3: I'm sick of everyone in this community who tells me

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Speaker 3: to stop creating a panic.

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Speaker 4: I am got scare.

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Speaker 1: If I can't join another man's body to mind, then

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Speaker 1: how am I gay? Liking Bet Midler isn't enough the

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Speaker 1: rights of people with AIDS to as full and satisfying

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Speaker 1: sexual and emotional lives as anyone else. As a kid,

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Speaker 1: Cleave Jones routinely skipped jim class to avoid getting beaten

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Speaker 1: up by his classmates in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona.

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Speaker 1: Being gay made Jones stick out, even though he kept

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Speaker 1: it to himself.

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Speaker 5: I understood at a very early age that I was

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Speaker 5: different from the other kids because they made it very

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Speaker 5: clear that they saw me as being different in a

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Speaker 5: way that was often pretty violent.

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Speaker 1: In high school, Jones grew so desperate that he stole

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Speaker 1: sedatives and pain pills from his parents and hid them

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Speaker 1: under a rug in his room.

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Speaker 5: I was very frightened because I just didn't see any

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Speaker 5: possibility of there being any joy or happiness in my life,

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Speaker 5: and I was getting ready to kill myself.

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Speaker 1: At one point, Jones tried to do some research on

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Speaker 1: what it meant to be gay, but all he could

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Speaker 1: find was scientific literature that classified homosexuality as a mental illness.

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Speaker 5: It was through these really outdated old psychology textbooks that

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Speaker 5: were in my father's library, which talked about prefrontal lobotomy

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Speaker 5: and electroconvulsive shock treatment and things like that. So it

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Speaker 5: was quite a revelation sitting in the high school library

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Speaker 5: one day reading magazines during gym class when I read

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Speaker 5: about the gay liberation movement.

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Speaker 1: It was nineteen seventy one and Jones was in his

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Speaker 1: junior year of high school. He had faked an illness

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Speaker 1: and gotten a doctor's note so he could spend his

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Speaker 1: gym period in the library. It was there that he

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Speaker 1: came across an article and Life magazine titled Homosexuals in Revolt.

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Speaker 1: The piece was accompanied by photos of men with long

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Speaker 1: hair and raised fists marching through the streets of far

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Speaker 1: off American cities.

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Speaker 2: Mcgay liberation movement, the drive for legal and civil rights,

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Speaker 2: and for freedom of expression of the homosexual lifestyle.

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Speaker 3: We are just as viable a lifestyle, just as happy

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Speaker 3: a type human being as any other.

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Speaker 1: In this country. Jones stole the magazine, went home and

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Speaker 1: flushed the pills he had been hiding down the toilet.

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Speaker 1: After graduating from high school, he began making his way

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Speaker 1: towards San Francisco.

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Speaker 6: After hundreds of years of people hating quote fags and queers,

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Speaker 6: a city has emerged where homosexuality is not only tolerated,

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Speaker 6: but thrives.

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Speaker 5: I remember coming across the Bay Bridge for the first time,

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Speaker 5: and there used to be a coffee roasting plant right

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Speaker 5: there at the base of Market Street, and I would

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Speaker 5: smell the coffee and the fog, and I thought it

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Speaker 5: was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen.

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Speaker 6: Today, fully fifteen percent of the city is estimated to

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Speaker 6: be gay.

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Speaker 1: In fact, there are.

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Speaker 6: More homosexuals per capita in San Francisco than any other

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Speaker 6: city in the world.

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Speaker 5: The environment was electric. Every single day. More of us

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Speaker 5: were arriving, hundreds a day, young kids, boys and girls

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Speaker 5: from all over the country that had come to San Francisco.

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Speaker 5: Most of us, just a few years prior to that,

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Speaker 5: had really thought we were the only people on the

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Speaker 5: whole planet that felt this way. So it was just

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Speaker 5: this incredible excitement in this sense of anything is possible.

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Speaker 5: Now anything is possible. Look how many of us there

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Speaker 5: are who?

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Speaker 1: When Jones moved to San Francisco in nineteen seventy three,

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Speaker 1: sodomy laws that made gay sex illegal were still on

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Speaker 1: the books in California, as they were across much of

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Speaker 1: the country. When the state finally repealed it sodomy laws

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Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy five, a city that was already one

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Speaker 1: of the freest places on earth for gay people became

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Speaker 1: a little freer.

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Speaker 2: The gay subculture has come up with its own conventions,

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Speaker 2: and since no rules exist from the outside, there's a

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Speaker 2: freedom about gay bars.

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Speaker 1: As the seventies War on a world historical nightlife scene

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Speaker 1: flourished and expanded in San Francisco as gay men flooded

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Speaker 1: into bars and dance clubs.

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Speaker 2: When you ask why a person goes to a gay bar,

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Speaker 2: here's what you get.

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Speaker 5: I'm so comfortable there. I like to have my high

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Speaker 5: filled with smoke, and I like to get d drunk

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Speaker 5: and I like to meet pepole, which I usually don't.

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Speaker 7: My atmosphere's my life whouse.

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Speaker 1: The city also saw a proliferation of a very specific

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Speaker 1: kind of establishment, the gay bathouse.

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Speaker 2: While many gays patronized there bar as in search of

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Speaker 2: an all night companion, the gay baths of San Francisco

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Speaker 2: offer what should be a more certain solution to other

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Speaker 2: men similarly inclined, a safe and conducive atmosphere for uninhibited

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Speaker 2: sensuality and the expectation that even if your fantasy is

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Speaker 2: enough fulfilled, something will be.

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Speaker 1: For decades, gay men have been having sex in secret,

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Speaker 1: often in public spaces like parks and restrooms, where they

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Speaker 1: risked arrest and assault by anti gay vigilantes. Bath Houses,

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Speaker 1: by comparison, were safe and private. In exchange for a

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Speaker 1: modest cover charge, gay men could walk in and do

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Speaker 1: whatever they wanted. By the late nineteen seventies, the bathhouses

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Speaker 1: dotted San Francisco's gay neighborhoods. Many of them featured live

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Speaker 1: DJs working in a new American art form, disco. The

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Speaker 1: music of Sylvester, the hometown hero known as the Queen

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Speaker 1: of Disco, could be heard all over town at establishments

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Speaker 1: like the handball Express, the cornhole, and the barracks.

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Speaker 5: A lot of people have I think a very skewed

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Speaker 5: impression of what bathhouses were at the time. People imagine

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Speaker 5: them as being dark and scary. They were anything but

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Speaker 5: the bathhouse I used to go to was I think

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Speaker 5: it was three floors. There was an enormous swimming pool,

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Speaker 5: a huge chacuzzi. There were saunas and steam rooms, and

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Speaker 5: cafe sort of place, a sandwich shop, a rooftop deck.

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Speaker 1: The bathhouses hosted all kinds of events, dance parties as

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Speaker 1: you might expect, but also voter registration drives and clinics

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Speaker 1: for STD testing. Some were known for their thematic flourishes,

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Speaker 1: like the Bulldog Baths, which were designed to look like

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Speaker 1: San Quentin pre and others were known for their sheer size.

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Speaker 1: The Club Baths, which Cleve Jones liked to frequent, was

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Speaker 1: big enough to host eight hundred visitors at a time.

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Speaker 5: What drew me to the baths originally was, you know,

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Speaker 5: if you live in a cramped, old, drafty, cold Victorian

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Speaker 5: apartment with five other boys, you each get maybe, if

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Speaker 5: you're lucky, four minutes in this shower a day. It

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Speaker 5: was just so luxurious to go there and take a long,

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Speaker 5: hot shower, and then of course one could have a

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Speaker 5: lot of sex, and we did.

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Speaker 1: There was a brief window when bathhouses were some of

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Speaker 1: the safest places in San Francisco for gay men to

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Speaker 1: meet and have sex that was about to come to

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Speaker 1: an abrupt end. I'm Leon Nafok from Audible Originals and

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Speaker 1: Prologue Projects. This is fiasco.

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Speaker 3: Age continues as epidemic spread in San Francisco.

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Speaker 8: Ninety six percent that catch this thing are gonna die.

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Speaker 4: Prevent fallout.

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Speaker 9: You've called for the closing of bath houses.

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Speaker 10: We pay the price when we violate the.

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Speaker 11: Laws of God.

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Speaker 3: Gay community leaders worry about such a dangerous legal precedent.

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Speaker 5: We're on the road to recriminalizing sodomi politically, it's like

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Speaker 5: a simple solution. It's a problem.

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Speaker 12: Close it down.

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Speaker 1: In this episode, aids threatens gay life in San Francisco

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Speaker 1: and the city's bathhouses spark a confrontation over public health

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Speaker 1: and civil liberties. In nineteen seventy seven, Cleave Jones started

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Speaker 1: volunteering for the campaign to elect Harvey Milk as San

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Speaker 1: Francisco's city supervisor.

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Speaker 4: My name is.

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Speaker 8: Harvey Milk, and I'm here Jimmy Kuciuney.

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Speaker 1: After Milk won and took office, Jones worked with him

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Speaker 1: as an intern at City Hall. Less than a year later,

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Speaker 1: on November twenty seventh, nineteen seventy eight, Milk was shot

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Speaker 1: and killed by an assassin along with the city's mayor,

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Speaker 1: George Moscone immers author Harvey.

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Speaker 2: Milk, a city supervisor, was shot there the city Hall

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Speaker 2: this morning.

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Speaker 1: Jones had left the building to run an errand when

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Speaker 1: he got back he saw his boss's wing tip shoes

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Speaker 1: on the floor sticking out of his office.

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Speaker 5: There's his body right out the doorway. That. It was

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Speaker 5: pretty surreal, pretty horrible.

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Speaker 1: This is the body of Supervisor Harvey Milk because it

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Speaker 1: was taken from City Hall. That night, Jones took part

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Speaker 1: in a spontaneous candlelight vigil, which was attended by more

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Speaker 1: than twenty five thousand people.

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Speaker 2: They filled the place the straight and the gay of

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Speaker 2: the unknown and the well known Governor Brown was.

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Speaker 1: Here just later as Jones was there when Milk's assassin

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Speaker 1: was spared a murder conviction and was instead found guilty

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Speaker 1: of manslaughter and sentenced to just over seven years in prison.

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Speaker 1: Jones joined a crowd in the streets of San Francisco

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Speaker 1: to protest the verdict, but began as a peaceful demonstration

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Speaker 1: gave way to violent clashes between police and protesters.

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Speaker 13: In the Castro district, a group of what some called

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Speaker 13: rogue cops broke into a gay bar.

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Speaker 3: Several people were bloodied there and on the sidewalks.

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Speaker 1: It became known as the White Knight Riot. It served

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Speaker 1: as a dramatic reminder that for all its advances, the

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Speaker 1: gay liberation movement remained under threat.

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Speaker 5: It's a very crazy night. And then the police attacked

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Speaker 5: Castro Street and destroyed some of the bars and beat

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Speaker 5: a lot of people up before they were driven out

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Speaker 5: of the neighborhood.

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Speaker 10: What do you things have gone.

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Speaker 1: From good to bad to very bad.

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Speaker 10: Every once in a while, demonstrator a protester will come

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Speaker 10: out of the crowd, throw a piece of burning material

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Speaker 10: into a police car and started on fire.

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Speaker 1: Cleave Jones continued working in politics after Harvey Milk's death.

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Speaker 1: By the nineteen eighties, his years as an activist had

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Speaker 1: propelled him to a job as a legislative consultant in

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Speaker 1: the California State Assembly. One of his responsibilities was to

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Speaker 1: examine bills coming out of the Assembly's Health Committee. Jones

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Speaker 1: didn't know much about public health policy, so the first

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Speaker 1: thing he did was subscribe to a stack of medical journals.

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Speaker 5: And among them was the MMWR, the Morbidity Immortality Weekly

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Speaker 5: Report out of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

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Speaker 1: This CDC report was the same one you heard about

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Speaker 1: earlier in our series, the one that put forward the

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Speaker 1: very first scientific findings on what would turn out to

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Speaker 1: be AIDS.

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Speaker 5: I remember quite clearly the first week of June, forty

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Speaker 5: years ago, nineteen eighty one, reading these first few paragraphs

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Speaker 5: describing clusters of homosexual man with capasi sarcoma and numasistus pneumonia,

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Speaker 5: and I clipped it out, and I put it on

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Speaker 5: my bulletin board, and I just had this very bad

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Speaker 5: feeling that this was something serious.

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Speaker 1: Not long after Cleve Jones read the CDC report, a

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Speaker 1: doctor named Marcus Conant asked to meet him for dinner.

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Speaker 1: Conant was a forty five year old dermatologist at the

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Speaker 1: University of California, San Francisco. He was originally from Jacksonville, Florida,

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Speaker 1: and like Jones, he had chosen to launch his career

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Speaker 1: in the Bay Area. In no small part because he

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Speaker 1: was a gay man.

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Speaker 8: Most gay men coming from Jacksonville, Florida, knew that if

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Speaker 8: you were going to be a gay man and not

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Speaker 8: live a lot, you know, get married and have kids

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Speaker 8: and snink away two or three times a year to

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Speaker 8: go pursue a gay lifestyle, that you had to live

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Speaker 8: in a major city, and that would probably be New

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Speaker 8: York or San Francisco.

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Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty one, Conan began seeing cases of rare

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Speaker 1: skin cancer in his patients. Capus's sarcoma or CHAS for short.

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Speaker 8: Now it was and still is, an extremely rare disease.

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Speaker 8: The average dermatologist in a lifetime could be expected to

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Speaker 8: see one case.

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Speaker 1: Soon, Conant opened a clinic devoted to capusi's sarcoma and

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Speaker 1: quickly became the city's go to doctor for CHAS patients.

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Speaker 1: Conant was on the front lines of what he believed

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Speaker 1: was an unfolding epidemic, but hardly anyone seemed to be

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Speaker 1: paying attention. It was out of frustration with this state

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Speaker 1: of affairs that Conant sought out Cleave Jones, with his

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Speaker 1: political connections and his work with the Health Committee. Maybe

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Speaker 1: Jones could help Conant get funding for research, and just

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Speaker 1: as urgently, maybe he could help raise awareness in the

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Speaker 1: gay community of what was going on. Before dinner, Conant

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Speaker 1: took Jones to dead see one of his chaos patients

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Speaker 1: in person. The young man showed Jones a photo of

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Speaker 1: what he had looked like before he got sick, handsome,

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Speaker 1: smooth skinned, and muscular. Now his emaciated body was covered

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Speaker 1: in purple lesions.

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Speaker 8: He had multiple lesions of CAPSI sarcoma, but then had

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Speaker 8: a terrible, terrible infectious disease causing intractable diarrhea with you know,

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Speaker 8: twenty or thirty bowel movements a day, and he deteriorated

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Speaker 8: very rapidly.

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Speaker 1: Cleave. Jones was terrified by what he saw. Afterwards, he

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Speaker 1: and Conant left the hospital and went to the Zuni Cafe,

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Speaker 1: a restaurant not far from City Hall. There, Conan explained

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Speaker 1: his theory of the case.

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Speaker 5: He told me that he thought it was a new

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Speaker 5: or previously unrecognized virus and that did something that crippled

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Speaker 5: the immune system, leaving the body vulnerable to a whole

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Speaker 5: range of opportunists confections.

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Speaker 1: At this early point, there was no consensus among doctors

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Speaker 1: as to what exactly was causing people to get sick,

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Speaker 1: But Conan told Jones what he believed, that the disease

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Speaker 1: was primarily sexually transmitted, and that gay men were at

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Speaker 1: special risk.

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Speaker 5: There was no drama, there was no theatrics about He's

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Speaker 5: got a slight Southern cadence to his voice, and he

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Speaker 5: just kind of laid it out to me over dinner,

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Speaker 5: and I thought, well, my goodness, were all dead.

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Speaker 1: After the dinner, Jones was convinced that the gay community

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Speaker 1: was in trouble, and he agreed to help Conant start

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Speaker 1: a foundation that would raise money for research. Soon, the

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Speaker 1: two men were both working towards another more controversial goal

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Speaker 1: as well, convincing their fellow gay men to change how

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Speaker 1: they had sex.

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Speaker 2: I was worried today that a new and frightening disease,

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Speaker 2: a quiet immune deficiency syndrome, destroys the body's ability to

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Speaker 2: fight certain illnesses.

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Speaker 1: By the summer of nineteen eighty two, the mysterious disease

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Speaker 1: causing KS and various opportunistic infections had become known as AIDS.

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Speaker 1: The number of diagnosed AIDS patients was doubling every five months.

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Speaker 2: There is no known cause, no known cure, and more

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Speaker 2: than forty percent of the victims have died.

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Speaker 1: As the numbers swored, Marcus Conant grew increasingly frustrated that

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Speaker 1: the gay community was not taking the crisis more seriously.

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Speaker 1: She was especially worried about the city's booming circuit of

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Speaker 1: bath houses.

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Speaker 8: What was going on in the community was denial. I

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Speaker 8: had people telling me that, oh, it's okay to go

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Speaker 8: to the bath houses as long as you take a

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Speaker 8: shower after you have sex. I had one guy claim

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Speaker 8: that he just changed the sheets on the bed in

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Speaker 8: his stall at the bath house every time he had sex.

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Speaker 8: So just change the sheets and you'll be fine. Now,

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Speaker 8: as long as you have a belief, something that you

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Speaker 8: can hold on to, whether it's scientifically valid or not,

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Speaker 8: is often more valid for people than scientific evidence.

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Speaker 1: It wasn't just that seemingly healthy men were putting themselves

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Speaker 1: at risk. Conan was also seeing patients with visible symptoms

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Speaker 1: of AIDS who were still flatly refusing to modify their

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Speaker 1: sexual routines.

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Speaker 8: I had a patient he had a couple of pleasions

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Speaker 8: of capsis sarcoma, and he said, in the course of

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Speaker 8: the interview, he said, hurry up, doctor, you know I

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Speaker 8: want to go to the baths tonight. And I said,

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Speaker 8: you're still going to the bass And he said, sure,

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Speaker 8: I'm going to the bass. And I said, but you've

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Speaker 8: got CAPSI sarcoma, and you know everyone thinks that it's transmissible.

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Speaker 8: Let's get going from one person or another. And he said,

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Speaker 8: you know everybody knows that, so they can take their

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Speaker 8: risk too, But I'm going to the bass.

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Speaker 1: For years, Conan had enjoyed going to the baths himself,

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Speaker 1: but after encounters like that, he not only stopped going,

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Speaker 1: he stopped having sex all together. One weekend in nineteen

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Speaker 1: eighty three, Conant and his boyfriend took a trip to

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Speaker 1: Santa Cruz, where they wandered around an amusement park on

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Speaker 1: the boardwalk.

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Speaker 8: We walked up and down the boardwalk and did all

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Speaker 8: those sorts of things, and we finally got to the

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Speaker 8: roller coaster. And there's this old rickety roller coaster at

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Speaker 8: the end. It's a nightmare because it's still a wooden structure.

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Speaker 8: It rattles, it sounds like it's coming apart when the

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Speaker 8: cars go by.

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Speaker 1: It was while Conant was on the roller coaster that

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Speaker 1: he had an epiphany about the baths.

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Speaker 8: So we get on this thing, and you know, typical

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Speaker 8: roller coaster. We're slowly climbing up to the peak of

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Speaker 8: the high point. You can see out over the Pacific Ocean.

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Speaker 8: It's just great. And then suddenly, you know, the bottom

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Speaker 8: drops out from under you and the car goes greening down.

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Speaker 8: And my only thought at that point is the things

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Speaker 8: was rattling and sounded like it was going to come apartments.

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Speaker 8: If this thing weren't safe, they meaning the authorities, will

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Speaker 8: close it down. It must be safe, because otherwise they

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Speaker 8: just wouldn't let this thing happen. And as we reached

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Speaker 8: the bottom of the loop, I realized, wait a minute,

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Speaker 8: that's true of the bathhouses.

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Speaker 1: Conant realized that people were going to the bathhouses because

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Speaker 1: the bathhouses were open. If the bath houses weren't safe,

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Speaker 1: these people figured someone would have surely closed them down.

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Speaker 8: And of course that's when I realized I've got to

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Speaker 8: get out of my ivory tower, quit plupling the doctor

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Speaker 8: and the white coat, and get out there and start

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Speaker 8: saying no, no, We've got to go public and say

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Speaker 8: those of us at the university who are seeing these patients,

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Speaker 8: who are looking at this thing every day, who know

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Speaker 8: something about this disease, feel like you need to close

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Speaker 8: down the bathhouses.

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Speaker 1: Of course, Marcus Koenant was just a doctor. He didn't

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Speaker 1: have the power to shut down the bathhouses. That would

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Speaker 1: be up to the city government, specifically the director of

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Speaker 1: public Health.

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Speaker 12: I'm Mervyn Silverman, former director of Health in the City

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Speaker 12: and County of San Francisco from nineteen seventy seven to

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Speaker 12: nineteen eighty five.

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Speaker 1: Working for the San Francisco Health Department was a dream

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Speaker 1: come true for doctor Mervyn Silverman, who moved to the

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Speaker 1: city after years of holding a similar position in which

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Speaker 1: a tak Kansas. In San Francisco, Silverman found a health

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Speaker 1: department that was well funded, well respected, and free to

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Speaker 1: implement progressive new programs other cities might have discouraged.

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Speaker 12: I had about I think five thousand employees and a

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Speaker 12: huge budget, so we did everything from a brain surgery

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Speaker 12: to bath house inspection.

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Speaker 1: The bathhouse inspections were basically like hotel or restaurant inspections.

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Speaker 1: They were mostly about making sure that rooms and other

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Speaker 1: facilities were clean before aids. Looking after the bathhouses was

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Speaker 1: not exactly Silverman's top priority.

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Speaker 12: Honestly didn't just I didn't pay that much attention to it.

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Speaker 12: I think they were regularly attended by probably five or

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Speaker 12: ten percent of the whole gay community. So it wasn't

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Speaker 12: a major thing, but it was something that was symbolic.

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Speaker 1: It's hard to find reliable numbers on how many people

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Speaker 1: were actually visiting San Francisco's bathhouses. One informal survey taken

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Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty three indicates that it was more than

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Speaker 1: Silverman thought that one in four gay men went to

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Speaker 1: the baths once a week, while one in five went

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Speaker 1: once a month. In any event, as aids began to

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Speaker 1: spread in San Francisco, Silverman was reluctant to do anything

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Speaker 1: that might make gay people feel unfairly targeted or encourage

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Speaker 1: members of the general public to treat them like pariah's.

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Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty three, when Marcus Conan and others began

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Speaker 1: pressuring the city's health department to take action against the bathhouses,

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Speaker 1: Silverman was conflicted. He knew the baths were incredibly important

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Speaker 1: to the gay community, not only as gathering places, but

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Speaker 1: as symbols of liberation. As one bathhouse owner put it.

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Speaker 14: As an institution that's specifically designed to allow one to

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Speaker 14: be as free as they need to be.

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Speaker 1: But as the epidemiology of AIDS came into clearer view,

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Speaker 1: it seemed increasingly likely that the disease could be spread

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Speaker 1: through sex. And if that was true, then the bathhouses

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Speaker 1: were potential hotbeds for infection.

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Speaker 12: There were areas that were communal and dark, and sometimes

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Speaker 12: with a guy might have sex with five, ten, fifteen people,

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Speaker 12: maybe more, I don't know. In one evening.

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Speaker 1: From a purely scientific perspective, closing the bath seemed like

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Speaker 1: it would almost certainly slow the spread of AIDS. But

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Speaker 1: the Silverman the work of public health wasn't always as

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Speaker 1: simple as doing exactly what the science dictated.

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Speaker 12: I look at public health the way a doctor looks

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Speaker 12: at the patient. The community is my patient. I don't

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Speaker 12: want to do something in one part of the community

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Speaker 12: that will do damage in another parts, Like I don't

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Speaker 12: want to treat your heart as my patient and destroy

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Speaker 12: your liver in the process.

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Speaker 1: Silverman wanted to take action on the baths, but he

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Speaker 1: was not going to do it without buying from community

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Speaker 1: leaders like Cleave Jones. Jones, for his part, was torn

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Speaker 1: on the issue. He told Silverman that while the bathhouses

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Speaker 1: might be a problem, closing them could create an even

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Speaker 1: bigger one.

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Speaker 5: I think I can still articulately argue both sides of

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Speaker 5: this debate. The people who wanted the bathhouses closed said, look,

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Speaker 5: there's no other place you could look at where there

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Speaker 5: were more opportunities for transmission than a bath house. And

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Speaker 5: then the other side said, yes, but if you allow

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Speaker 5: the state to shut down bath houses, what's next. You

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Speaker 5: could look at gay bars and say, well, there's an

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Speaker 5: incredible opportunity for transmission in any gay bar that you

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Speaker 5: look at, and this will erode our civil liberties. At

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Speaker 5: the time, it was very fraught and a lot of

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Speaker 5: people were very very angry about it, and I'm not

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Speaker 5: sure what was the right thing to do.

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Speaker 1: Part of the difficulty was that doctors and public health

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Speaker 1: officials like Conan and Silverman weren't the only ones who

443
00:25:10,680 --> 00:25:14,520
Speaker 1: wanted the bathhouses closed, and some of the loudest voices

444
00:25:14,640 --> 00:25:18,280
Speaker 1: calling for closure weren't exactly friends of the gay community.

445
00:25:18,920 --> 00:25:21,159
Speaker 5: I think an important part of the context for this

446
00:25:21,400 --> 00:25:24,080
Speaker 5: is that you had the moral majority types and the

447
00:25:24,119 --> 00:25:27,639
Speaker 5: preachers who were calling for closure, and worse, this whole

448
00:25:27,640 --> 00:25:32,760
Speaker 5: debate was occurring in this context of many people from

449
00:25:32,840 --> 00:25:36,320
Speaker 5: the radical right, and not just the radical right, expressing

450
00:25:36,720 --> 00:25:41,440
Speaker 5: really extreme measures right up to quarantine and putting people

451
00:25:41,480 --> 00:25:45,880
Speaker 5: in camps and tattooing their HIV status on their bodies.

452
00:25:45,960 --> 00:25:50,800
Speaker 5: So it was not unreasonable for people to fear how

453
00:25:50,840 --> 00:25:52,520
Speaker 5: slippery that slope might be.

454
00:25:57,520 --> 00:26:00,480
Speaker 1: The backlash to gay liberation had helped fuel a new

455
00:26:00,560 --> 00:26:04,000
Speaker 1: kind of conservatism that had taken hold in American politics

456
00:26:04,600 --> 00:26:08,160
Speaker 1: that included the creation of the Moral Majority, a coalition

457
00:26:08,200 --> 00:26:12,080
Speaker 1: of religious groups opposed to abortion and gay rights. It

458
00:26:12,160 --> 00:26:15,040
Speaker 1: was started in nineteen seventy nine by the Virginia based

459
00:26:15,040 --> 00:26:17,479
Speaker 1: televangelist Jerry Folwell.

460
00:26:20,359 --> 00:26:22,920
Speaker 15: The high point of the week is an assembly conducted

461
00:26:22,920 --> 00:26:27,119
Speaker 15: by doctor Fowell himself. Is theme the need for Christians

462
00:26:27,160 --> 00:26:31,080
Speaker 15: to become active in politics by turning local congregations into

463
00:26:31,119 --> 00:26:34,440
Speaker 15: blocks of voters that were unseat politicians who are held

464
00:26:34,480 --> 00:26:36,439
Speaker 15: to undermine the American way of life.

465
00:26:37,080 --> 00:26:42,320
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty Fallwell barnstormed across America, delivering fiery sermons

466
00:26:42,359 --> 00:26:45,560
Speaker 1: to his followers and rallying them behind conservative candidates.

467
00:26:45,840 --> 00:26:49,040
Speaker 2: We have a three full primary responsibility. Number one, get

468
00:26:49,040 --> 00:26:51,000
Speaker 2: people saved. Number two, get them baptized.

469
00:26:51,080 --> 00:26:53,119
Speaker 10: Number three, get them registered to vote.

470
00:26:53,160 --> 00:26:56,960
Speaker 1: When Ronald Reagan was elected president in the landslide. Fallwell

471
00:26:57,000 --> 00:27:00,360
Speaker 1: and the Moral Majority claimed credit for his victory, and

472
00:27:00,400 --> 00:27:03,280
Speaker 1: in his first press conference as president, Reagan made it

473
00:27:03,320 --> 00:27:05,800
Speaker 1: clear that Fallwell and his ilk would have a receptive

474
00:27:05,840 --> 00:27:07,040
Speaker 1: audience in the White House.

475
00:27:07,480 --> 00:27:11,480
Speaker 11: I am going to be open to these people. I'm

476
00:27:11,480 --> 00:27:15,840
Speaker 11: not going to separate myself from the people who the

477
00:27:15,880 --> 00:27:18,320
Speaker 11: electedition and centers there.

478
00:27:18,760 --> 00:27:24,440
Speaker 1: Fallwell enthusiastically condemned homosexuality as a moral perversion. Speaking to

479
00:27:24,520 --> 00:27:27,560
Speaker 1: reporters in nineteen eighty one, he warned that if gay

480
00:27:27,600 --> 00:27:31,000
Speaker 1: people were allowed civil rights, it would become quote an

481
00:27:31,119 --> 00:27:37,080
Speaker 1: established bonafide minority, like women or blacks. Then, in nineteen

482
00:27:37,119 --> 00:27:40,040
Speaker 1: eighty three, as the bathhouse controversy was heating up in

483
00:27:40,080 --> 00:27:44,159
Speaker 1: San Francisco, Fallwell used his national platform to weigh in

484
00:27:44,240 --> 00:27:48,280
Speaker 1: on the issue. He described activity in gay bathhouses as

485
00:27:48,400 --> 00:27:51,720
Speaker 1: sub animal behavior, and he called for them to be

486
00:27:51,760 --> 00:27:53,360
Speaker 1: shut down across the country.

487
00:27:53,680 --> 00:27:56,680
Speaker 10: I believe that God does not judge people. God judges sin,

488
00:27:57,320 --> 00:28:00,680
Speaker 10: and I do believe that aids generally call them believed

489
00:28:00,720 --> 00:28:04,920
Speaker 10: to be caused by homosexual promiscuity as a violation both

490
00:28:04,920 --> 00:28:07,480
Speaker 10: of them of God's laws, laws of nature and decency,

491
00:28:07,520 --> 00:28:10,000
Speaker 10: and as a result, we pay the price when we

492
00:28:10,080 --> 00:28:11,120
Speaker 10: violate the laws of God.

493
00:28:11,880 --> 00:28:14,200
Speaker 1: Many in the gay community feared that if the moral

494
00:28:14,240 --> 00:28:17,440
Speaker 1: majority had its way, they would lose a lot more

495
00:28:17,480 --> 00:28:18,520
Speaker 1: than their bathhouses.

496
00:28:18,920 --> 00:28:21,960
Speaker 3: Gay community leaders worry about such a broad and dangerous

497
00:28:22,040 --> 00:28:25,240
Speaker 3: legal precedent used against one segment of the population.

498
00:28:25,600 --> 00:28:29,160
Speaker 5: It wasn't a huge leap in my view to say

499
00:28:29,240 --> 00:28:32,640
Speaker 5: that if we allow the government to close down this

500
00:28:32,680 --> 00:28:36,919
Speaker 5: set of businesses, what's next. Maybe now, with hindsight, that

501
00:28:37,359 --> 00:28:39,760
Speaker 5: feels like paranoia, but I don't think it was paranoia

502
00:28:39,800 --> 00:28:41,800
Speaker 5: at the time. We had just been decriminalized a few

503
00:28:41,840 --> 00:28:45,840
Speaker 5: years prior, so I think these were reasonable fears.

504
00:28:47,000 --> 00:28:49,800
Speaker 1: The idea of closing the bathhouses came to be seen

505
00:28:49,840 --> 00:28:54,200
Speaker 1: as a capitulation to reactionaries, people who cared less about

506
00:28:54,240 --> 00:28:57,320
Speaker 1: saving the lives of gay people than about rolling back

507
00:28:57,400 --> 00:29:05,440
Speaker 1: their civil rights. With opponents of gay liberation apparently rallying

508
00:29:05,480 --> 00:29:08,960
Speaker 1: around the bathhouse issue, those within the gay community who

509
00:29:09,000 --> 00:29:14,000
Speaker 1: supported closure were treated with special suspicion. One outspoken voice

510
00:29:14,080 --> 00:29:17,240
Speaker 1: was Randy Schiltz, a gay reporter for the San Francisco

511
00:29:17,320 --> 00:29:19,479
Speaker 1: Chronicle who would go on to write the book and

512
00:29:19,520 --> 00:29:22,640
Speaker 1: the Band Played on a seminal early history of the

513
00:29:22,640 --> 00:29:26,840
Speaker 1: AIDS crisis. With Marcus Conant as one of his key sources.

514
00:29:27,240 --> 00:29:30,000
Speaker 1: Schiltz wrote more than a dozen articles for the Chronicle

515
00:29:30,080 --> 00:29:33,320
Speaker 1: about the dangers of the bathhouses, and he was fairly

516
00:29:33,400 --> 00:29:36,320
Speaker 1: open about his belief that they should be shut down immediately.

517
00:29:36,760 --> 00:29:40,640
Speaker 2: Randy Schiltz went after the gay community for a lifestyle

518
00:29:40,720 --> 00:29:44,280
Speaker 2: it was leading to its own destruction That did not

519
00:29:44,440 --> 00:29:45,480
Speaker 2: make him very popular.

520
00:29:46,040 --> 00:29:49,040
Speaker 1: Even Cleve Jones was called a trader merely for suggesting

521
00:29:49,080 --> 00:29:51,600
Speaker 1: in an op ed that gay men practiced safe sex.

522
00:29:51,920 --> 00:29:56,400
Speaker 5: It was a pretty mild call for other sexually active

523
00:29:56,440 --> 00:30:01,920
Speaker 5: gay men to curtail our activities to reduce our number

524
00:30:01,960 --> 00:30:05,520
Speaker 5: of partners. And you know, I had people scream at

525
00:30:05,560 --> 00:30:07,040
Speaker 5: me on the street that I was a Nazi. I

526
00:30:07,120 --> 00:30:08,480
Speaker 5: had people spit on my face.

527
00:30:09,400 --> 00:30:12,840
Speaker 1: With all this pressure bearing down on him, Jones decided

528
00:30:12,880 --> 00:30:15,400
Speaker 1: he could not get behind the idea of city Hall

529
00:30:15,680 --> 00:30:19,640
Speaker 1: ordering the closure of the bathhouses. Jones reached out to

530
00:30:19,680 --> 00:30:21,680
Speaker 1: Mervin Silverman to explain his reasoning.

531
00:30:22,160 --> 00:30:23,720
Speaker 12: He called to me and he says, if you close

532
00:30:23,800 --> 00:30:25,440
Speaker 12: the bath houses, I'm going to be one of the

533
00:30:25,480 --> 00:30:28,920
Speaker 12: ones manning the barricades. And I said why, And he said, well,

534
00:30:28,920 --> 00:30:32,360
Speaker 12: because with a city like San Francisco, which is so

535
00:30:32,560 --> 00:30:38,040
Speaker 12: tolerant and so welcoming and so compassionate. To do something

536
00:30:38,120 --> 00:30:42,160
Speaker 12: like this will send a message across the country that

537
00:30:42,200 --> 00:30:48,480
Speaker 12: will have communities instituting or enforcing asrodomy laws and things

538
00:30:48,560 --> 00:30:52,640
Speaker 12: like this. The net effect would be worse than better.

539
00:30:53,560 --> 00:30:56,560
Speaker 1: Without the support of the gay community, Silverman felt he

540
00:30:56,560 --> 00:30:59,640
Speaker 1: couldn't close the bathhouses, no matter how uneasy it made

541
00:30:59,720 --> 00:31:03,080
Speaker 1: him to leave them open, and so for the time being,

542
00:31:03,240 --> 00:31:05,800
Speaker 1: Silverman looked for other ways to slow the spread of

543
00:31:05,840 --> 00:31:06,800
Speaker 1: AIDS in his city.

544
00:31:07,280 --> 00:31:09,840
Speaker 3: Don't attempt to test it by stretching or blowing it up.

545
00:31:10,120 --> 00:31:12,360
Speaker 13: Every condom you buy has been pre tested.

546
00:31:13,440 --> 00:31:17,440
Speaker 1: One approach was to distribute condoms. At the time, condoms

547
00:31:17,440 --> 00:31:20,040
Speaker 1: were seen primarily as the domain of straight people. Trying

548
00:31:20,040 --> 00:31:23,240
Speaker 1: to prevent pregnancy. Getting gay men to use them was

549
00:31:23,240 --> 00:31:27,120
Speaker 1: an uphill battle. As one bathouse proponent put it, I

550
00:31:27,160 --> 00:31:31,320
Speaker 1: didn't become a homosexual so I could use condoms. Under

551
00:31:31,360 --> 00:31:34,960
Speaker 1: Silverman's direction, the city health department tried to circulate information

552
00:31:35,040 --> 00:31:37,560
Speaker 1: about how AIDS was spread in hopes that it would

553
00:31:37,560 --> 00:31:39,440
Speaker 1: convince people to make safer choices.

554
00:31:39,960 --> 00:31:42,160
Speaker 12: All Right, this was the I think this was the

555
00:31:42,280 --> 00:31:46,360
Speaker 12: very first AIDS sign that was ever produced at all

556
00:31:47,200 --> 00:31:47,880
Speaker 12: in the country.

557
00:31:48,040 --> 00:31:50,960
Speaker 1: Actually, Silverman showed us one of the many posters the

558
00:31:51,000 --> 00:31:54,600
Speaker 1: city health department produced. They gave the posters to bathhouse

559
00:31:54,600 --> 00:31:57,040
Speaker 1: operators so they could post them in communal areas.

560
00:31:57,320 --> 00:32:01,440
Speaker 12: It says, AIDS is everyone's problem, Protect yourself and those

561
00:32:01,480 --> 00:32:04,680
Speaker 12: you love. And it had circle with AIDS in it

562
00:32:04,760 --> 00:32:07,920
Speaker 12: and a line through it, and it said use condoms,

563
00:32:08,080 --> 00:32:11,720
Speaker 12: avoid any exchange of body fluids, limit your use of

564
00:32:11,800 --> 00:32:16,680
Speaker 12: recreational drugs, enjoy more time with fewer partners. AIDS is

565
00:32:16,720 --> 00:32:20,920
Speaker 12: not spread through casual contact. For your information, contact the

566
00:32:20,960 --> 00:32:25,840
Speaker 12: San Francisco Department of Public Health. I mean pretty benign,

567
00:32:26,240 --> 00:32:28,680
Speaker 12: if you know when you look back at it, But

568
00:32:28,760 --> 00:32:30,880
Speaker 12: it was the first one of its kind.

569
00:32:35,560 --> 00:32:38,480
Speaker 1: Silverman's health department wasn't the only group trying to get

570
00:32:38,520 --> 00:32:42,400
Speaker 1: the information out. Organizers in the gay community created their

571
00:32:42,400 --> 00:32:46,480
Speaker 1: own public education campaigns, and they were broadly successful in

572
00:32:46,480 --> 00:32:50,200
Speaker 1: increasing knowledge of AIDS around the city. More and more

573
00:32:50,240 --> 00:32:52,880
Speaker 1: men were making the personal choice to limit their number

574
00:32:52,880 --> 00:32:58,920
Speaker 1: of sexual partners by avoiding the baths. Still, Silverman faced

575
00:32:58,960 --> 00:33:02,160
Speaker 1: mounting pressure to close the baths from San Francisco's straight

576
00:33:02,240 --> 00:33:06,080
Speaker 1: majority that included the most powerful person in the city,

577
00:33:06,760 --> 00:33:08,280
Speaker 1: Mayor Dianne Feinstein.

578
00:33:08,600 --> 00:33:11,800
Speaker 16: I don't believe that this city has any business permitting

579
00:33:12,000 --> 00:33:16,480
Speaker 16: businesses to operate whose sole source of being is the

580
00:33:16,600 --> 00:33:19,360
Speaker 16: very activity that communicates the disease.

581
00:33:20,120 --> 00:33:23,320
Speaker 1: Dianne Feinstein had been mayor of San Francisco since nineteen

582
00:33:23,400 --> 00:33:26,920
Speaker 1: seventy eight. She and Silverman had never butted heads on

583
00:33:26,960 --> 00:33:30,320
Speaker 1: public health issues, but the bathhouse situation was different.

584
00:33:31,280 --> 00:33:34,680
Speaker 12: In fact, she was riding with a political reporter from

585
00:33:34,680 --> 00:33:38,600
Speaker 12: the San Francisco Chronicle in Washington and said, I don't

586
00:33:38,640 --> 00:33:41,600
Speaker 12: know why Silverman doesn't close the bath houses. If they

587
00:33:41,640 --> 00:33:44,560
Speaker 12: were heterosexual bath houses, he would have closed them. And

588
00:33:44,600 --> 00:33:47,560
Speaker 12: of course that obviously got back to me from the reporter,

589
00:33:47,800 --> 00:33:48,720
Speaker 12: and I said, that's right.

590
00:33:49,320 --> 00:33:52,720
Speaker 1: Silverman would not move his line in the sand. He

591
00:33:52,840 --> 00:33:55,720
Speaker 1: was not going to shut down to bathhouses without broad

592
00:33:55,760 --> 00:33:58,040
Speaker 1: support from San Francisco's gay community.

593
00:33:58,480 --> 00:34:01,520
Speaker 12: I think if you stand back politically, it seemed like

594
00:34:01,520 --> 00:34:04,520
Speaker 12: a simple solution. It's a problem, close it down. The

595
00:34:04,560 --> 00:34:08,880
Speaker 12: restaurant is insanitary, close it down. But the difference is

596
00:34:09,280 --> 00:34:13,640
Speaker 12: this was dealing with human behavior. You were not closing

597
00:34:13,680 --> 00:34:17,719
Speaker 12: it down because of what the building was or whether

598
00:34:17,719 --> 00:34:19,880
Speaker 12: it was sanitary. You were closing it down because of

599
00:34:19,920 --> 00:34:21,319
Speaker 12: what people were doing in there.

600
00:34:23,920 --> 00:34:26,319
Speaker 1: The bathhouse debate came to a head in March of

601
00:34:26,400 --> 00:34:29,479
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four when a man named Larry little John

602
00:34:29,560 --> 00:34:33,719
Speaker 1: took matters into his own hands. Little John, a longtime

603
00:34:33,800 --> 00:34:36,840
Speaker 1: activist in the gay community, had become convinced that Silverman's

604
00:34:36,920 --> 00:34:39,839
Speaker 1: education push was not enough. He said that he had

605
00:34:39,880 --> 00:34:42,880
Speaker 1: personally inspected the largest bathhouse in the city and found

606
00:34:42,880 --> 00:34:45,759
Speaker 1: that none of Silverman's AIDS information posters were hanging in

607
00:34:45,760 --> 00:34:49,200
Speaker 1: the locker room. Little John was tired of waiting for

608
00:34:49,239 --> 00:34:52,359
Speaker 1: Silverman to act, and so he announced that he would

609
00:34:52,400 --> 00:34:56,040
Speaker 1: begin collecting signatures for a ballot initiative to officially ban

610
00:34:56,200 --> 00:34:57,480
Speaker 1: sex in the bathhouses.

611
00:34:57,719 --> 00:35:00,960
Speaker 4: The initiative states that, in order to prevent the spread

612
00:35:00,960 --> 00:35:05,120
Speaker 4: of AIDS and to protect the public health, sexual activities

613
00:35:05,160 --> 00:35:08,600
Speaker 4: among patrons of public bath houses should be prohibited.

614
00:35:10,200 --> 00:35:12,160
Speaker 1: The future of the baths would be placed in the

615
00:35:12,200 --> 00:35:15,160
Speaker 1: hands of San Francisco voters in the nineteen eighty four election.

616
00:35:15,960 --> 00:35:18,839
Speaker 1: Here's Little John speaking to a reporter that spring.

617
00:35:18,920 --> 00:35:21,160
Speaker 17: I prefer to see doctor Silverman get some courage and

618
00:35:21,200 --> 00:35:22,080
Speaker 17: deal with it today.

619
00:35:22,280 --> 00:35:23,200
Speaker 8: I prefer to see MARYA.

620
00:35:23,280 --> 00:35:24,200
Speaker 4: Feinstein deal with.

621
00:35:24,160 --> 00:35:24,800
Speaker 1: The issue today.

622
00:35:24,880 --> 00:35:26,200
Speaker 13: Before more people die.

623
00:35:26,320 --> 00:35:28,280
Speaker 4: But if we got to wait until November.

624
00:35:27,920 --> 00:35:29,600
Speaker 5: To deal with the issue, the people will deal with

625
00:35:29,640 --> 00:35:30,080
Speaker 5: the issue.

626
00:35:35,000 --> 00:35:37,640
Speaker 1: The thing about Little John's push for a citywide bout

627
00:35:37,640 --> 00:35:41,480
Speaker 1: initiative is that the overwhelming majority of San Francisco voters

628
00:35:41,520 --> 00:35:44,400
Speaker 1: were straight, and if it was up to them, the

629
00:35:44,440 --> 00:35:48,200
Speaker 1: bath houses would almost certainly be closed. People in the

630
00:35:48,239 --> 00:35:52,240
Speaker 1: gay community were outraged. Letters poured into The Bay Area Reporter,

631
00:35:52,440 --> 00:35:57,640
Speaker 1: the city's largest gay newspaper, calling Little John homophobic, slime, morality, cowboy,

632
00:35:57,920 --> 00:35:58,520
Speaker 1: and judas.

633
00:35:58,880 --> 00:36:02,080
Speaker 6: They say it's a civil right and closing down won't

634
00:36:02,120 --> 00:36:03,600
Speaker 6: slow the spread of AIDS.

635
00:36:03,920 --> 00:36:07,799
Speaker 9: They are no more responsible for multiple sexual activities than

636
00:36:07,880 --> 00:36:11,440
Speaker 9: our bars, where people can go and meet someone and

637
00:36:11,480 --> 00:36:14,000
Speaker 9: have a liaison later in a hotel or in the home.

638
00:36:14,640 --> 00:36:16,680
Speaker 1: It would be one thing if gay people decided to

639
00:36:16,680 --> 00:36:20,600
Speaker 1: shut down the bathhouses themselves. It would be entirely different

640
00:36:20,680 --> 00:36:23,920
Speaker 1: if the straight majority imposed the shutdown on them.

641
00:36:24,280 --> 00:36:26,759
Speaker 14: The danger of the initiative, as I see it, is

642
00:36:27,280 --> 00:36:30,920
Speaker 14: the opening possibility of creating a police state in San Francisco.

643
00:36:31,640 --> 00:36:36,239
Speaker 14: I would be appalled at the idea that police officers

644
00:36:36,280 --> 00:36:40,520
Speaker 14: could come into a private situation and inspect the activities

645
00:36:40,560 --> 00:36:41,720
Speaker 14: of my sexual life.

646
00:36:42,000 --> 00:36:44,399
Speaker 8: I think this is a worse mistake than the McCarthy era,

647
00:36:44,719 --> 00:36:46,640
Speaker 8: and I think that we're going to live to regret

648
00:36:46,680 --> 00:36:49,000
Speaker 8: this in San Francisco and throughout the.

649
00:36:49,000 --> 00:36:49,720
Speaker 13: Nation, in the world.

650
00:36:49,800 --> 00:36:50,399
Speaker 8: This all began.

651
00:36:51,360 --> 00:36:54,600
Speaker 1: Cleve Jones, who knew as well as anyone that reactionary

652
00:36:54,640 --> 00:36:58,319
Speaker 1: forces could still reverse the gains of gay liberation, saw

653
00:36:58,360 --> 00:36:59,400
Speaker 1: the writing on the wall.

654
00:36:59,800 --> 00:37:02,160
Speaker 5: The issue of the bathhouses was going to go on

655
00:37:02,200 --> 00:37:05,759
Speaker 5: the ballot, and the judgment from a whole lot of

656
00:37:05,760 --> 00:37:10,239
Speaker 5: people was that is too dangerous. We cannot have these

657
00:37:10,360 --> 00:37:18,600
Speaker 5: kinds of sensitive, nuanced, thorny issues of public health administration

658
00:37:18,760 --> 00:37:23,200
Speaker 5: be decided by a popular vote in such a negatively

659
00:37:23,360 --> 00:37:28,360
Speaker 5: charged atmosphere. And that was when the conversation shifted to

660
00:37:29,600 --> 00:37:31,359
Speaker 5: let's let Silverman shut it down.

661
00:37:32,200 --> 00:37:35,239
Speaker 1: Within days, an open letter was circulated and signed by

662
00:37:35,280 --> 00:37:38,640
Speaker 1: dozens of prominent figures in the gay community. The letter

663
00:37:38,719 --> 00:37:41,200
Speaker 1: gave Silverman the green light he had been waiting for.

664
00:37:42,080 --> 00:37:44,080
Speaker 1: He arranged for a press conference to be held the

665
00:37:44,120 --> 00:37:50,960
Speaker 1: next day, But then most of the people who had

666
00:37:50,960 --> 00:37:54,560
Speaker 1: signed the letter changed their minds, having apparently realized that

667
00:37:54,600 --> 00:37:57,239
Speaker 1: in the eyes of the gay community, they would own

668
00:37:57,280 --> 00:38:00,760
Speaker 1: the decision to close the bathhouses. Even more than Silverman would.

669
00:38:01,440 --> 00:38:03,920
Speaker 12: So they all signed this letter to me and said

670
00:38:04,200 --> 00:38:08,600
Speaker 12: they supported closing it. Within twenty four hours, most of

671
00:38:08,600 --> 00:38:10,480
Speaker 12: them had taken their names off of it.

672
00:38:10,880 --> 00:38:13,960
Speaker 1: Cleave Jones was among them. In the end, he was

673
00:38:14,160 --> 00:38:15,279
Speaker 1: just too conflicted.

674
00:38:15,920 --> 00:38:20,480
Speaker 5: Sometimes we approach issues where we just don't really know

675
00:38:20,680 --> 00:38:24,240
Speaker 5: what is the right thing to do, and that doesn't

676
00:38:24,280 --> 00:38:27,919
Speaker 5: make one a coward or dishonest. It means that one

677
00:38:28,000 --> 00:38:30,359
Speaker 5: doesn't know what to do.

678
00:38:34,000 --> 00:38:37,840
Speaker 1: Mervyn Silverman was back to square one. With no official

679
00:38:37,880 --> 00:38:40,360
Speaker 1: backing from the gay community, he felt he could not

680
00:38:40,480 --> 00:38:44,239
Speaker 1: follow through with his plan. The problem was reporters had

681
00:38:44,280 --> 00:38:46,200
Speaker 1: already been alerted that there was going to be a

682
00:38:46,239 --> 00:38:49,800
Speaker 1: major announcement. News trucks were lined up outside the Public

683
00:38:49,800 --> 00:38:52,799
Speaker 1: Health building. Silverman felt like he had to at least

684
00:38:52,880 --> 00:38:57,160
Speaker 1: show up and say something. Silverman met with Mayor Feinstein

685
00:38:57,239 --> 00:38:58,960
Speaker 1: and told her he could not go forward with a

686
00:38:59,040 --> 00:39:03,080
Speaker 1: decision to close the Then, right before the press conference,

687
00:39:03,320 --> 00:39:05,520
Speaker 1: he met with the city's police chief, who fitted him

688
00:39:05,560 --> 00:39:09,160
Speaker 1: with a bulletproof vest. As Silverman's car approached the Public

689
00:39:09,160 --> 00:39:12,600
Speaker 1: Health Building, he saw dozens of protesters gathered outside.

690
00:39:14,080 --> 00:39:16,239
Speaker 12: It was bizarre, it with something of I think a

691
00:39:16,239 --> 00:39:19,239
Speaker 12: Fellini movie or something like that. I walked in there

692
00:39:19,280 --> 00:39:22,680
Speaker 12: and was sort of like a haze, and through the haze,

693
00:39:22,719 --> 00:39:27,040
Speaker 12: I'm seeing people naked or sort of naked, with towels

694
00:39:27,080 --> 00:39:28,000
Speaker 12: wrapped around it.

695
00:39:28,440 --> 00:39:31,760
Speaker 1: Some of the protesters held signs that read today the tubs,

696
00:39:31,880 --> 00:39:35,720
Speaker 1: tomorrow your bedroom, and out of the baths into the ovens.

697
00:39:35,960 --> 00:39:39,080
Speaker 13: Protesters and many others worried and angry that after a

698
00:39:39,160 --> 00:39:42,400
Speaker 13: year of resisting the calls, Director of Public Health Mervyn Silverman,

699
00:39:42,480 --> 00:39:44,279
Speaker 13: had decided to close the baths down.

700
00:39:45,000 --> 00:39:49,160
Speaker 12: I saw all this stuff, and I didn't say Hi, Joe, Hi, Mary,

701
00:39:49,200 --> 00:39:52,560
Speaker 12: who the various reporters. I just went up, sat down

702
00:39:52,600 --> 00:39:55,000
Speaker 12: to the desk and basically said, all of you who

703
00:39:55,000 --> 00:39:57,920
Speaker 12: think I'm going to close the bath houses, you know,

704
00:39:58,080 --> 00:40:01,240
Speaker 12: sit down, forget. It could have happened.

705
00:40:01,360 --> 00:40:06,080
Speaker 7: Because of a number of issues, both legal and medical,

706
00:40:06,800 --> 00:40:08,080
Speaker 7: that are not resolved.

707
00:40:09,239 --> 00:40:10,799
Speaker 12: I am not going to be making a.

708
00:40:10,840 --> 00:40:14,800
Speaker 7: Comment discussing the opening or closing of the bath houses.

709
00:40:14,840 --> 00:40:22,560
Speaker 13: At this point, the decision was popular.

710
00:40:22,560 --> 00:40:22,759
Speaker 5: Here.

711
00:40:22,800 --> 00:40:25,440
Speaker 13: The crowd, ready to burst with anger, was greatly relieved.

712
00:40:25,719 --> 00:40:27,440
Speaker 13: Do you think that he decided not to do it

713
00:40:27,520 --> 00:40:29,560
Speaker 13: right away because of pressure from the gay communities?

714
00:40:29,680 --> 00:40:37,960
Speaker 1: Uncertainly, even though Silvermen had backed down, San Francisco's gay

715
00:40:37,960 --> 00:40:41,560
Speaker 1: community was shaken. Word had gotten out about the leaders

716
00:40:41,560 --> 00:40:43,880
Speaker 1: who had initially signed the letter in support of closure.

717
00:40:44,640 --> 00:40:48,080
Speaker 1: The editor of the Bay Area Reporter labeled them collaborators.

718
00:40:49,280 --> 00:40:52,560
Speaker 1: The gay liberation movement, the editor wrote, was almost killed

719
00:40:52,560 --> 00:40:55,040
Speaker 1: off last Friday morning by a group of gay men

720
00:40:55,120 --> 00:40:58,560
Speaker 1: and one lesbian. This group gave their names to give

721
00:40:58,600 --> 00:41:00,920
Speaker 1: the green light to the annihilation and of gay life.

722
00:41:01,680 --> 00:41:05,399
Speaker 1: The gay community should remember those names well. The role

723
00:41:05,400 --> 00:41:16,959
Speaker 1: of names became known around the city as the Trader's List.

724
00:41:17,360 --> 00:41:20,799
Speaker 1: On April ninth, nineteen eighty four, ten days after his

725
00:41:20,840 --> 00:41:24,680
Speaker 1: anti climactic press conference, Silverman took a half measure that

726
00:41:24,800 --> 00:41:29,360
Speaker 1: seemed to please nobody. Rather than closed down the bathhouse's outright,

727
00:41:29,840 --> 00:41:32,960
Speaker 1: he issued a strict new set of rules that mandated

728
00:41:33,000 --> 00:41:36,960
Speaker 1: increased lighting, the removal of doors from private rooms, and

729
00:41:37,239 --> 00:41:41,960
Speaker 1: most importantly, a ban on sex inside the venues. It

730
00:41:42,040 --> 00:41:45,600
Speaker 1: was enough to convince Larry Littlejohn to withdraw his ballot initiative,

731
00:41:45,760 --> 00:41:50,160
Speaker 1: which had called for similar restrictions, But unsurprisingly, when the

732
00:41:50,160 --> 00:41:53,720
Speaker 1: city sent in undercover health inspectors, they found that people

733
00:41:53,719 --> 00:41:56,920
Speaker 1: were not abiding by the new rules, and so the

734
00:41:56,960 --> 00:42:00,759
Speaker 1: bathhouses remained in limbo, with the mayor continuing to call

735
00:42:00,800 --> 00:42:03,920
Speaker 1: for their closure and gay leaders continuing to make the

736
00:42:03,960 --> 00:42:05,080
Speaker 1: case for safe sex.

737
00:42:05,960 --> 00:42:09,600
Speaker 17: We as a community are not exactly slouches when it

738
00:42:09,640 --> 00:42:14,279
Speaker 17: comes to sexual creativity. That is not absolutely essential to

739
00:42:14,360 --> 00:42:16,400
Speaker 17: go to the baths and stick your butt up in

740
00:42:16,440 --> 00:42:19,759
Speaker 17: the air in order to get erotic pleasure as a

741
00:42:19,760 --> 00:42:20,319
Speaker 17: gay man.

742
00:42:21,000 --> 00:42:23,440
Speaker 1: The problem was that, according to the bath house owners,

743
00:42:23,719 --> 00:42:26,120
Speaker 1: even when they tried to give out condoms, most of

744
00:42:26,120 --> 00:42:30,080
Speaker 1: their customers didn't seem to want them. Marcus Conant, the

745
00:42:30,160 --> 00:42:33,520
Speaker 1: doctor who had started ringing the alarm about AIDS years earlier,

746
00:42:33,800 --> 00:42:35,360
Speaker 1: found this infuriating.

747
00:42:35,920 --> 00:42:38,960
Speaker 18: And so this year the group that we have to

748
00:42:39,000 --> 00:42:41,920
Speaker 18: criticize is not the fads, and is not the state,

749
00:42:41,960 --> 00:42:46,480
Speaker 18: and it's not the city. It's the gay community. Because

750
00:42:46,520 --> 00:42:49,640
Speaker 18: the rationalization that is going on in the gay community

751
00:42:49,760 --> 00:42:51,480
Speaker 18: is absolutely terrifying.

752
00:42:52,680 --> 00:42:55,080
Speaker 1: This is Conan speaking in April of eighty four at

753
00:42:55,120 --> 00:42:56,719
Speaker 1: a public forum on bathhouses.

754
00:42:58,000 --> 00:43:00,399
Speaker 18: I will tell you the story of two pensions. One

755
00:43:00,480 --> 00:43:03,160
Speaker 18: is a man that I saw today who continues to

756
00:43:03,160 --> 00:43:05,759
Speaker 18: go to the bath houses and have sex. He has

757
00:43:05,840 --> 00:43:10,600
Speaker 18: CAPTUSI sarcone. Another man is a PhD who has idiopathic

758
00:43:10,640 --> 00:43:14,560
Speaker 18: tromocytopenic purple and goes to the bath houses. And when

759
00:43:14,600 --> 00:43:17,200
Speaker 18: I said to him, do you tell your sexual contacts

760
00:43:17,200 --> 00:43:20,560
Speaker 18: that you have AIDS? He says no. And I said,

761
00:43:20,560 --> 00:43:24,720
Speaker 18: how do you morally live with that? And he says,

762
00:43:26,239 --> 00:43:28,760
Speaker 18: anybody that knows the bath house is a damned fool.

763
00:43:29,120 --> 00:43:34,400
Speaker 18: And I think, thank God, what's coming to them. Nothing

764
00:43:34,440 --> 00:43:38,400
Speaker 18: that we, as physicians or epidemiologists or nurses or patients

765
00:43:38,400 --> 00:43:42,080
Speaker 18: with AIDS have done today has slowed down the instance

766
00:43:42,120 --> 00:43:46,680
Speaker 18: of this disease. Whatsoever should we ask the mayor every

767
00:43:46,800 --> 00:43:50,400
Speaker 18: time we have an aide's patient to die in San Francisco,

768
00:43:51,000 --> 00:43:54,320
Speaker 18: to set off the earthquake sireene for twenty seconds.

769
00:43:55,080 --> 00:43:56,600
Speaker 8: It'll go off every other day.

770
00:43:58,840 --> 00:44:02,400
Speaker 18: Maybe people will be begin to understand the magnitude of

771
00:44:02,480 --> 00:44:05,520
Speaker 18: the problem. And then by Christmas, when it's going off

772
00:44:05,640 --> 00:44:08,279
Speaker 18: twice a day, and by this time next year, when

773
00:44:08,280 --> 00:44:11,680
Speaker 18: it's going off three times a day, everybody will begin

774
00:44:11,800 --> 00:44:13,840
Speaker 18: to understand what we're dealing.

775
00:44:15,320 --> 00:44:18,200
Speaker 1: Looking back, Conan says, he gets or people who opposed

776
00:44:18,200 --> 00:44:19,520
Speaker 1: closure were coming from.

777
00:44:19,760 --> 00:44:22,840
Speaker 8: I mean I could understand their point of view. I

778
00:44:22,880 --> 00:44:25,000
Speaker 8: can still understand their point of view. I mean they

779
00:44:25,000 --> 00:44:28,319
Speaker 8: had fought for years for the rights of gay men,

780
00:44:28,360 --> 00:44:31,239
Speaker 8: and here we were coming along saying you fought for

781
00:44:31,280 --> 00:44:33,440
Speaker 8: it and now you can't have it.

782
00:44:33,520 --> 00:44:36,520
Speaker 1: Still, Conan says that he has no second thoughts about

783
00:44:36,560 --> 00:44:37,919
Speaker 1: taking the position that he did.

784
00:44:39,000 --> 00:44:42,640
Speaker 8: It's very much like, what is the more important thing?

785
00:44:43,239 --> 00:44:47,960
Speaker 8: Is it people dying or is it the economy? Wells

786
00:44:48,280 --> 00:44:51,440
Speaker 8: as with that argument, it's both. But you can't have

787
00:44:51,480 --> 00:44:54,520
Speaker 8: an economy if too many people are frightened and dying.

788
00:44:55,800 --> 00:44:58,799
Speaker 8: Ninety six percent of them that catch this thing are

789
00:44:58,840 --> 00:45:04,040
Speaker 8: gonna die. So you need to be almost raconian in

790
00:45:04,120 --> 00:45:07,160
Speaker 8: how you approach this thing. You can't just let people

791
00:45:07,239 --> 00:45:10,120
Speaker 8: make up their own mind when they're not just putting

792
00:45:10,120 --> 00:45:13,439
Speaker 8: themselves at risk, they're putting the whole society at risk,

793
00:45:13,480 --> 00:45:14,880
Speaker 8: at least the whole gays aside.

794
00:45:16,840 --> 00:45:20,319
Speaker 1: Four decades later, Conan still finds the idea of using

795
00:45:20,360 --> 00:45:23,760
Speaker 1: bathhouses as sites for safe sex education to be laughable.

796
00:45:25,360 --> 00:45:27,920
Speaker 8: Why do people go to the bath house. They go

797
00:45:28,040 --> 00:45:30,799
Speaker 8: to get laid. They don't go for a lecture for

798
00:45:30,920 --> 00:45:35,399
Speaker 8: God's sake, I mean quite honest. I mean, you take

799
00:45:35,480 --> 00:45:38,319
Speaker 8: a bunch of horny guys and they're going there to

800
00:45:38,360 --> 00:45:41,880
Speaker 8: get laid, and you want you want some doctor to

801
00:45:41,920 --> 00:46:03,880
Speaker 8: give them a talk about hygiene. Sorry.

802
00:46:04,680 --> 00:46:09,320
Speaker 1: Eventually all the controversy took its toll. Venues, including the Hothouse,

803
00:46:09,440 --> 00:46:12,640
Speaker 1: the Liberty Baths, and the Bulldog Baths all made the

804
00:46:12,640 --> 00:46:15,040
Speaker 1: decision to voluntarily close their doors.

805
00:46:15,360 --> 00:46:20,000
Speaker 17: What's happening is without them actually legislating the closing of the.

806
00:46:19,920 --> 00:46:24,359
Speaker 1: Bath houses, the politicians are closing us down slowly by

807
00:46:24,360 --> 00:46:25,400
Speaker 1: discouraging people.

808
00:46:25,120 --> 00:46:25,600
Speaker 5: To come here.

809
00:46:25,840 --> 00:46:28,520
Speaker 1: Sutro Baths, one of the largest bathhouses in the city,

810
00:46:29,000 --> 00:46:32,520
Speaker 1: hosted a three day farewell party where five employees stood

811
00:46:32,520 --> 00:46:35,120
Speaker 1: on stage and threw AIDS bursures into a barbecue.

812
00:46:35,360 --> 00:46:38,839
Speaker 4: Tonight, they burned those pamphlets to protest being driven out

813
00:46:38,840 --> 00:46:41,879
Speaker 4: of business by what they call AIDS hysteria.

814
00:46:42,360 --> 00:46:44,320
Speaker 1: If we can't pass them out, the owner of Sutro

815
00:46:44,400 --> 00:46:46,520
Speaker 1: Baths said, we might as well burn them.

816
00:46:46,840 --> 00:46:49,960
Speaker 14: We take away the tower, was take away the keys.

817
00:46:50,280 --> 00:46:53,320
Speaker 9: We don't need education to fight the streat disease.

818
00:46:53,719 --> 00:46:56,200
Speaker 18: We're closing down the baths and the other.

819
00:46:56,040 --> 00:46:59,520
Speaker 9: Private clubs gets out of the showers, sending.

820
00:47:04,200 --> 00:47:05,800
Speaker 7: You can sing along in the cars city.

821
00:47:12,080 --> 00:47:16,040
Speaker 1: On October ninth, nineteen eighty four, Mervyn Silverman made a

822
00:47:16,080 --> 00:47:18,080
Speaker 1: decisive move fourteen.

823
00:47:17,719 --> 00:47:20,839
Speaker 4: Gay bathhouses and sex shops in San Francisco were ordered

824
00:47:20,880 --> 00:47:23,000
Speaker 4: shut down by the city's public health director.

825
00:47:23,120 --> 00:47:26,239
Speaker 3: Through the morning, city health officials posted notices clothes or

826
00:47:26,280 --> 00:47:27,200
Speaker 3: face legal action.

827
00:47:27,520 --> 00:47:30,799
Speaker 1: Silverman had found that fourteen of the city's remaining bathhouses

828
00:47:30,800 --> 00:47:33,839
Speaker 1: and sex clubs were in violation of his rules, so

829
00:47:33,920 --> 00:47:35,280
Speaker 1: he shut them down completely.

830
00:47:35,600 --> 00:47:39,919
Speaker 7: Today, I have ordered the closure of fourteen commercial establishments

831
00:47:40,040 --> 00:47:43,520
Speaker 7: which promote and profit from the spread of AIDS.

832
00:47:44,160 --> 00:47:47,200
Speaker 1: At the time of Silverman's announcement, it was estimated that

833
00:47:47,280 --> 00:47:50,480
Speaker 1: forty percent of the gay male population in San Francisco

834
00:47:50,760 --> 00:47:51,360
Speaker 1: was infected.

835
00:47:51,560 --> 00:47:54,920
Speaker 3: AIDS continues its epidemic spread in San Francisco, more cases

836
00:47:54,960 --> 00:47:57,480
Speaker 3: reported already in the first three quarters of nineteen eighty

837
00:47:57,560 --> 00:48:01,359
Speaker 3: four than all of nineteen eighty three. Even thousands more

838
00:48:01,440 --> 00:48:03,960
Speaker 3: may have the disease and still not know it. Some

839
00:48:04,040 --> 00:48:06,439
Speaker 3: in the gay communities say those who use bath house

840
00:48:06,440 --> 00:48:09,680
Speaker 3: as for sex will simply go somewhere else, that today's

841
00:48:09,719 --> 00:48:13,240
Speaker 3: action by the city will bring much controversy, not much cure.

842
00:48:14,280 --> 00:48:17,279
Speaker 1: That December, three and a half years after AIDS had

843
00:48:17,320 --> 00:48:21,280
Speaker 1: first emerged in San Francisco in nineteen eighty one, Silverman

844
00:48:21,400 --> 00:48:25,520
Speaker 1: resigned as Public Health commissioner. A reporter questioned him on

845
00:48:25,560 --> 00:48:28,520
Speaker 1: his way out, how did the public health director feel

846
00:48:28,560 --> 00:48:30,800
Speaker 1: about leaving his job in the middle of an epidemic.

847
00:48:31,680 --> 00:48:34,280
Speaker 1: I'd like to believe this is the middle, Silverman answered,

848
00:48:35,040 --> 00:48:45,920
Speaker 1: My fear is that this is the beginning. By the

849
00:48:46,000 --> 00:48:48,960
Speaker 1: end of nineteen eighty four, the total number of confirmed

850
00:48:49,000 --> 00:48:52,719
Speaker 1: AIDS cases in the US was pushing eight thousand. More

851
00:48:52,760 --> 00:48:56,560
Speaker 1: than half of those patients had already died. Cleave Jones

852
00:48:56,600 --> 00:48:59,160
Speaker 1: found out he was HIV positive in nineteen eighty five

853
00:48:59,400 --> 00:49:03,279
Speaker 1: when a blood as finally became available. To this day,

854
00:49:03,520 --> 00:49:06,960
Speaker 1: he's still torn about the bathhouses, which it's worth noting

855
00:49:07,160 --> 00:49:09,040
Speaker 1: ended up staying closed for decades.

856
00:49:09,719 --> 00:49:14,200
Speaker 5: You know, I was ambivalent then, I'm ambivalent today. Did

857
00:49:14,280 --> 00:49:19,520
Speaker 5: the bathhouse closures result in and across the board sweeping

858
00:49:20,280 --> 00:49:21,640
Speaker 5: denial of civil rights?

859
00:49:22,040 --> 00:49:22,239
Speaker 13: No?

860
00:49:23,400 --> 00:49:27,200
Speaker 5: Did the closure of the bathhouses slow the spread of

861
00:49:27,239 --> 00:49:32,560
Speaker 5: the pandemic? Probably not. With you know, twenty twenty hindsight,

862
00:49:33,120 --> 00:49:35,600
Speaker 5: I wish what could have happened is that the community

863
00:49:36,800 --> 00:49:40,640
Speaker 5: could have rallied enough and found enough unity to impose

864
00:49:40,719 --> 00:49:45,360
Speaker 5: our own restrictions and guidelines on how these places would operate.

865
00:49:46,080 --> 00:49:49,759
Speaker 5: But with hindsight, I would say to you that the

866
00:49:49,800 --> 00:49:53,560
Speaker 5: behavior that had gone on in the bath houses continued,

867
00:49:53,960 --> 00:49:56,760
Speaker 5: and it went underground, It went out of the county.

868
00:49:57,719 --> 00:49:59,880
Speaker 5: It did not go away.

869
00:50:00,360 --> 00:50:03,840
Speaker 1: Eventually, the bathhouse controversy was no longer top of mind

870
00:50:03,920 --> 00:50:07,399
Speaker 1: for people like Cleave Jones and his friends. They were

871
00:50:07,440 --> 00:50:10,400
Speaker 1: now too busy going to funerals and taking care of

872
00:50:10,440 --> 00:50:11,080
Speaker 1: the sick.

873
00:50:12,239 --> 00:50:14,840
Speaker 5: And within just five years, almost everyone I knew was

874
00:50:14,880 --> 00:50:17,960
Speaker 5: dead or dying or home caring for someone who was dying.

875
00:50:18,000 --> 00:50:23,760
Speaker 5: It ultimately would kill over twenty thousand people in my neighborhood.

876
00:50:24,400 --> 00:50:26,960
Speaker 1: Among the thousands of San Francisco's who would die from

877
00:50:27,000 --> 00:50:30,400
Speaker 1: AIDS in the ensuing years were Randy Schiltz, the Chronicle reporter,

878
00:50:30,840 --> 00:50:35,320
Speaker 1: and Sylvester the Queen of Disco. Jones remembers losing friends,

879
00:50:35,680 --> 00:50:39,440
Speaker 1: making new ones, and then losing them too. He remembers

880
00:50:39,480 --> 00:50:43,680
Speaker 1: familiar faces around the neighborhood vanishing one by one.

881
00:50:43,920 --> 00:50:46,879
Speaker 5: There was a male carrier, a guy I never knew

882
00:50:46,880 --> 00:50:51,560
Speaker 5: his name, but he always wore shorts. He had muscular legs,

883
00:50:51,560 --> 00:50:54,200
Speaker 5: and he always would wear shorts. And we, you know,

884
00:50:54,280 --> 00:50:58,320
Speaker 5: we make little jokes about the male guy that always

885
00:50:58,320 --> 00:51:03,000
Speaker 5: wore shorts. Of course, he disappeared and the bus drivers disappeared,

886
00:51:03,040 --> 00:51:06,799
Speaker 5: in the bakers and the bank tellers, and just aw

887
00:51:06,800 --> 00:51:12,759
Speaker 5: the familiar face as your favorite bartenders. Everybody died, and

888
00:51:13,880 --> 00:51:15,280
Speaker 5: those who did not were.

889
00:51:16,600 --> 00:51:17,000
Speaker 8: Just so.

890
00:51:18,880 --> 00:51:23,040
Speaker 5: Locked down in grief and the incredibly hard work of

891
00:51:23,280 --> 00:51:26,239
Speaker 5: caring for people in the absolute vacuum of any kind

892
00:51:26,280 --> 00:51:27,600
Speaker 5: of government response.

893
00:51:31,120 --> 00:51:34,560
Speaker 1: About a year after the bathhouses were shut down, Jones

894
00:51:34,600 --> 00:51:38,600
Speaker 1: began planning an AIDS memorial. He had an idea for

895
00:51:38,640 --> 00:51:42,160
Speaker 1: something visual and striking, something that might wake up the

896
00:51:42,200 --> 00:51:45,920
Speaker 1: country to the enormity of the death toll. He imagined

897
00:51:45,960 --> 00:51:49,520
Speaker 1: a giant patchwork quilt. On each square would be the

898
00:51:49,560 --> 00:51:53,799
Speaker 1: name of someone lost to AIDS. Someday the quilt would

899
00:51:53,840 --> 00:51:56,760
Speaker 1: be big enough to blanket the Mall on Washington.

900
00:52:10,080 --> 00:52:12,760
Speaker 14: Running only Sylvester.

901
00:52:17,280 --> 00:52:26,640
Speaker 8: Who this Siscott Stormy with.

902
00:52:31,239 --> 00:52:34,880
Speaker 5: Simpson Anti Ken.

903
00:52:35,280 --> 00:52:40,040
Speaker 1: On the next episode of Fiasco, AIDS threatens America's blood supply.

904
00:52:40,200 --> 00:52:43,040
Speaker 3: Blood banks and plasma centers may be spreading a new

905
00:52:43,080 --> 00:52:45,480
Speaker 3: and mysterious ailment called Age.

906
00:52:46,600 --> 00:52:50,640
Speaker 1: Fiasco is presented by Audible Originals and Prologue Projects. The

907
00:52:50,680 --> 00:52:54,640
Speaker 1: show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Sam Graham, Felsen, Madelin Kaplan,

908
00:52:54,880 --> 00:52:59,800
Speaker 1: Ulla Kulpa and Me leon Nyfock. Our researcher is Francis Carr,

909
00:53:00,440 --> 00:53:05,000
Speaker 1: Editorial support from Jessica Miller and noor waswas archival research

910
00:53:05,000 --> 00:53:10,240
Speaker 1: by Michelle Sullivan. This season's score is composed by Edith Mudge.

911
00:53:10,320 --> 00:53:13,920
Speaker 1: Additional music by Nick Sylvester of God Mode, Alexis Squadrado,

912
00:53:14,239 --> 00:53:17,800
Speaker 1: Joel Saint, Julian and Dan English, Noah hect and Joe Vali.

913
00:53:18,440 --> 00:53:21,719
Speaker 1: Our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Our credits song

914
00:53:21,760 --> 00:53:25,279
Speaker 1: this week is Stormy Weather, performed by Sylvester. You also

915
00:53:25,320 --> 00:53:29,279
Speaker 1: heard Sylvester's You Make Me Feel. Music licensing courtesy of

916
00:53:29,320 --> 00:53:33,280
Speaker 1: Anthony Roman. Audio mix by Erica Wong, with additional support

917
00:53:33,320 --> 00:53:37,320
Speaker 1: from Selina Urabe. Our artwork is designed by Teddy Blanks

918
00:53:37,360 --> 00:53:40,560
Speaker 1: at Chips and Y. David Blum is the editor in

919
00:53:40,640 --> 00:53:44,200
Speaker 1: chief of Audible Originals. Mike Charzik is the vice president

920
00:53:44,200 --> 00:53:47,600
Speaker 1: of Audible Studios. Zach Ross is head of acquisition and

921
00:53:47,640 --> 00:53:52,720
Speaker 1: Development for Audible. Thanks to the Vanderbilt Television Archive, Joshua Gampson,

922
00:53:52,960 --> 00:53:57,840
Speaker 1: Louis Knieber, and Bryant Erstad. Additional archival material courtesy of

923
00:53:57,920 --> 00:54:02,760
Speaker 1: KGO TV in San Francisco. Special thanks to Peter Yasi.

924
00:54:03,400 --> 00:54:06,080
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. Next week, episode four,