Speaker 1: Hey, this is Leon Napok. I'm the host of Fiasco,
Speaker 1: but you may also know me from the podcasts Slowburn,
Speaker 1: Think Twice, Michael Jackson, and Backfired the Vaping Wars. I'm
Speaker 1: excited to be sharing with you the next season of Backfired,
Speaker 1: titled Attention Deficit, which is now available exclusively on Audible.
Speaker 1: Backfired is a podcast about the business of unintended consequences.
Speaker 1: In the first season, my co host Ril Pardess and
Speaker 1: I dove deep into the world of vaping and how
Speaker 1: the well intentioned quest for a safer cigarette went awry.
Speaker 1: Now we're tackling ADHD and how the push to destigmatize
Speaker 1: this hard to define childhood diagnosis has led to an
Speaker 1: explosion of stimulant use in kids as well as adults.
Speaker 1: It's a story about the promise of psychiatry to fix
Speaker 1: our brains and the power of the pharmaceutical industry to
Speaker 1: shape how we and our doctors think about what's wrong
Speaker 1: with us. To hear both seasons of Backfired, go to
Speaker 1: audible dot com slash Backfired and start a free trial
Speaker 1: that's audible dot com slash backfired. Fiasco is intended from
Speaker 1: a sure audiences for a list of books, articles, and
Speaker 1: documentaries we used in our research. Follow the link in
Speaker 1: the show notes Previously on Fiasco.
Speaker 2: It's mysterious, it's deadly, and it's baffling medical science. Every
Speaker 2: time you'd hear about the epidemic, it was inevitably fatal,
Speaker 2: dread disease, no survivors, no cure, terminal illness.
Speaker 3: I'm sick of everyone in this community who tells me
Speaker 3: to stop creating a panic.
Speaker 4: I am got scare.
Speaker 1: If I can't join another man's body to mind, then
Speaker 1: how am I gay? Liking Bet Midler isn't enough the
Speaker 1: rights of people with AIDS to as full and satisfying
Speaker 1: sexual and emotional lives as anyone else. As a kid,
Speaker 1: Cleave Jones routinely skipped jim class to avoid getting beaten
Speaker 1: up by his classmates in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona.
Speaker 1: Being gay made Jones stick out, even though he kept
Speaker 1: it to himself.
Speaker 5: I understood at a very early age that I was
Speaker 5: different from the other kids because they made it very
Speaker 5: clear that they saw me as being different in a
Speaker 5: way that was often pretty violent.
Speaker 1: In high school, Jones grew so desperate that he stole
Speaker 1: sedatives and pain pills from his parents and hid them
Speaker 1: under a rug in his room.
Speaker 5: I was very frightened because I just didn't see any
Speaker 5: possibility of there being any joy or happiness in my life,
Speaker 5: and I was getting ready to kill myself.
Speaker 1: At one point, Jones tried to do some research on
Speaker 1: what it meant to be gay, but all he could
Speaker 1: find was scientific literature that classified homosexuality as a mental illness.
Speaker 5: It was through these really outdated old psychology textbooks that
Speaker 5: were in my father's library, which talked about prefrontal lobotomy
Speaker 5: and electroconvulsive shock treatment and things like that. So it
Speaker 5: was quite a revelation sitting in the high school library
Speaker 5: one day reading magazines during gym class when I read
Speaker 5: about the gay liberation movement.
Speaker 1: It was nineteen seventy one and Jones was in his
Speaker 1: junior year of high school. He had faked an illness
Speaker 1: and gotten a doctor's note so he could spend his
Speaker 1: gym period in the library. It was there that he
Speaker 1: came across an article and Life magazine titled Homosexuals in Revolt.
Speaker 1: The piece was accompanied by photos of men with long
Speaker 1: hair and raised fists marching through the streets of far
Speaker 1: off American cities.
Speaker 2: Mcgay liberation movement, the drive for legal and civil rights,
Speaker 2: and for freedom of expression of the homosexual lifestyle.
Speaker 3: We are just as viable a lifestyle, just as happy
Speaker 3: a type human being as any other.
Speaker 1: In this country. Jones stole the magazine, went home and
Speaker 1: flushed the pills he had been hiding down the toilet.
Speaker 1: After graduating from high school, he began making his way
Speaker 1: towards San Francisco.
Speaker 6: After hundreds of years of people hating quote fags and queers,
Speaker 6: a city has emerged where homosexuality is not only tolerated,
Speaker 6: but thrives.
Speaker 5: I remember coming across the Bay Bridge for the first time,
Speaker 5: and there used to be a coffee roasting plant right
Speaker 5: there at the base of Market Street, and I would
Speaker 5: smell the coffee and the fog, and I thought it
Speaker 5: was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen.
Speaker 6: Today, fully fifteen percent of the city is estimated to
Speaker 6: be gay.
Speaker 1: In fact, there are.
Speaker 6: More homosexuals per capita in San Francisco than any other
Speaker 6: city in the world.
Speaker 5: The environment was electric. Every single day. More of us
Speaker 5: were arriving, hundreds a day, young kids, boys and girls
Speaker 5: from all over the country that had come to San Francisco.
Speaker 5: Most of us, just a few years prior to that,
Speaker 5: had really thought we were the only people on the
Speaker 5: whole planet that felt this way. So it was just
Speaker 5: this incredible excitement in this sense of anything is possible.
Speaker 5: Now anything is possible. Look how many of us there
Speaker 5: are who?
Speaker 1: When Jones moved to San Francisco in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: sodomy laws that made gay sex illegal were still on
Speaker 1: the books in California, as they were across much of
Speaker 1: the country. When the state finally repealed it sodomy laws
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy five, a city that was already one
Speaker 1: of the freest places on earth for gay people became
Speaker 1: a little freer.
Speaker 2: The gay subculture has come up with its own conventions,
Speaker 2: and since no rules exist from the outside, there's a
Speaker 2: freedom about gay bars.
Speaker 1: As the seventies War on a world historical nightlife scene
Speaker 1: flourished and expanded in San Francisco as gay men flooded
Speaker 1: into bars and dance clubs.
Speaker 2: When you ask why a person goes to a gay bar,
Speaker 2: here's what you get.
Speaker 5: I'm so comfortable there. I like to have my high
Speaker 5: filled with smoke, and I like to get d drunk
Speaker 5: and I like to meet pepole, which I usually don't.
Speaker 7: My atmosphere's my life whouse.
Speaker 1: The city also saw a proliferation of a very specific
Speaker 1: kind of establishment, the gay bathouse.
Speaker 2: While many gays patronized there bar as in search of
Speaker 2: an all night companion, the gay baths of San Francisco
Speaker 2: offer what should be a more certain solution to other
Speaker 2: men similarly inclined, a safe and conducive atmosphere for uninhibited
Speaker 2: sensuality and the expectation that even if your fantasy is
Speaker 2: enough fulfilled, something will be.
Speaker 1: For decades, gay men have been having sex in secret,
Speaker 1: often in public spaces like parks and restrooms, where they
Speaker 1: risked arrest and assault by anti gay vigilantes. Bath Houses,
Speaker 1: by comparison, were safe and private. In exchange for a
Speaker 1: modest cover charge, gay men could walk in and do
Speaker 1: whatever they wanted. By the late nineteen seventies, the bathhouses
Speaker 1: dotted San Francisco's gay neighborhoods. Many of them featured live
Speaker 1: DJs working in a new American art form, disco. The
Speaker 1: music of Sylvester, the hometown hero known as the Queen
Speaker 1: of Disco, could be heard all over town at establishments
Speaker 1: like the handball Express, the cornhole, and the barracks.
Speaker 5: A lot of people have I think a very skewed
Speaker 5: impression of what bathhouses were at the time. People imagine
Speaker 5: them as being dark and scary. They were anything but
Speaker 5: the bathhouse I used to go to was I think
Speaker 5: it was three floors. There was an enormous swimming pool,
Speaker 5: a huge chacuzzi. There were saunas and steam rooms, and
Speaker 5: cafe sort of place, a sandwich shop, a rooftop deck.
Speaker 1: The bathhouses hosted all kinds of events, dance parties as
Speaker 1: you might expect, but also voter registration drives and clinics
Speaker 1: for STD testing. Some were known for their thematic flourishes,
Speaker 1: like the Bulldog Baths, which were designed to look like
Speaker 1: San Quentin pre and others were known for their sheer size.
Speaker 1: The Club Baths, which Cleve Jones liked to frequent, was
Speaker 1: big enough to host eight hundred visitors at a time.
Speaker 5: What drew me to the baths originally was, you know,
Speaker 5: if you live in a cramped, old, drafty, cold Victorian
Speaker 5: apartment with five other boys, you each get maybe, if
Speaker 5: you're lucky, four minutes in this shower a day. It
Speaker 5: was just so luxurious to go there and take a long,
Speaker 5: hot shower, and then of course one could have a
Speaker 5: lot of sex, and we did.
Speaker 1: There was a brief window when bathhouses were some of
Speaker 1: the safest places in San Francisco for gay men to
Speaker 1: meet and have sex that was about to come to
Speaker 1: an abrupt end. I'm Leon Nafok from Audible Originals and
Speaker 1: Prologue Projects. This is fiasco.
Speaker 3: Age continues as epidemic spread in San Francisco.
Speaker 8: Ninety six percent that catch this thing are gonna die.
Speaker 4: Prevent fallout.
Speaker 9: You've called for the closing of bath houses.
Speaker 10: We pay the price when we violate the.
Speaker 11: Laws of God.
Speaker 3: Gay community leaders worry about such a dangerous legal precedent.
Speaker 5: We're on the road to recriminalizing sodomi politically, it's like
Speaker 5: a simple solution. It's a problem.
Speaker 12: Close it down.
Speaker 1: In this episode, aids threatens gay life in San Francisco
Speaker 1: and the city's bathhouses spark a confrontation over public health
Speaker 1: and civil liberties. In nineteen seventy seven, Cleave Jones started
Speaker 1: volunteering for the campaign to elect Harvey Milk as San
Speaker 1: Francisco's city supervisor.
Speaker 4: My name is.
Speaker 8: Harvey Milk, and I'm here Jimmy Kuciuney.
Speaker 1: After Milk won and took office, Jones worked with him
Speaker 1: as an intern at City Hall. Less than a year later,
Speaker 1: on November twenty seventh, nineteen seventy eight, Milk was shot
Speaker 1: and killed by an assassin along with the city's mayor,
Speaker 1: George Moscone immers author Harvey.
Speaker 2: Milk, a city supervisor, was shot there the city Hall
Speaker 2: this morning.
Speaker 1: Jones had left the building to run an errand when
Speaker 1: he got back he saw his boss's wing tip shoes
Speaker 1: on the floor sticking out of his office.
Speaker 5: There's his body right out the doorway. That. It was
Speaker 5: pretty surreal, pretty horrible.
Speaker 1: This is the body of Supervisor Harvey Milk because it
Speaker 1: was taken from City Hall. That night, Jones took part
Speaker 1: in a spontaneous candlelight vigil, which was attended by more
Speaker 1: than twenty five thousand people.
Speaker 2: They filled the place the straight and the gay of
Speaker 2: the unknown and the well known Governor Brown was.
Speaker 1: Here just later as Jones was there when Milk's assassin
Speaker 1: was spared a murder conviction and was instead found guilty
Speaker 1: of manslaughter and sentenced to just over seven years in prison.
Speaker 1: Jones joined a crowd in the streets of San Francisco
Speaker 1: to protest the verdict, but began as a peaceful demonstration
Speaker 1: gave way to violent clashes between police and protesters.
Speaker 13: In the Castro district, a group of what some called
Speaker 13: rogue cops broke into a gay bar.
Speaker 3: Several people were bloodied there and on the sidewalks.
Speaker 1: It became known as the White Knight Riot. It served
Speaker 1: as a dramatic reminder that for all its advances, the
Speaker 1: gay liberation movement remained under threat.
Speaker 5: It's a very crazy night. And then the police attacked
Speaker 5: Castro Street and destroyed some of the bars and beat
Speaker 5: a lot of people up before they were driven out
Speaker 5: of the neighborhood.
Speaker 10: What do you things have gone.
Speaker 1: From good to bad to very bad.
Speaker 10: Every once in a while, demonstrator a protester will come
Speaker 10: out of the crowd, throw a piece of burning material
Speaker 10: into a police car and started on fire.
Speaker 1: Cleave Jones continued working in politics after Harvey Milk's death.
Speaker 1: By the nineteen eighties, his years as an activist had
Speaker 1: propelled him to a job as a legislative consultant in
Speaker 1: the California State Assembly. One of his responsibilities was to
Speaker 1: examine bills coming out of the Assembly's Health Committee. Jones
Speaker 1: didn't know much about public health policy, so the first
Speaker 1: thing he did was subscribe to a stack of medical journals.
Speaker 5: And among them was the MMWR, the Morbidity Immortality Weekly
Speaker 5: Report out of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
Speaker 1: This CDC report was the same one you heard about
Speaker 1: earlier in our series, the one that put forward the
Speaker 1: very first scientific findings on what would turn out to
Speaker 1: be AIDS.
Speaker 5: I remember quite clearly the first week of June, forty
Speaker 5: years ago, nineteen eighty one, reading these first few paragraphs
Speaker 5: describing clusters of homosexual man with capasi sarcoma and numasistus pneumonia,
Speaker 5: and I clipped it out, and I put it on
Speaker 5: my bulletin board, and I just had this very bad
Speaker 5: feeling that this was something serious.
Speaker 1: Not long after Cleve Jones read the CDC report, a
Speaker 1: doctor named Marcus Conant asked to meet him for dinner.
Speaker 1: Conant was a forty five year old dermatologist at the
Speaker 1: University of California, San Francisco. He was originally from Jacksonville, Florida,
Speaker 1: and like Jones, he had chosen to launch his career
Speaker 1: in the Bay Area. In no small part because he
Speaker 1: was a gay man.
Speaker 8: Most gay men coming from Jacksonville, Florida, knew that if
Speaker 8: you were going to be a gay man and not
Speaker 8: live a lot, you know, get married and have kids
Speaker 8: and snink away two or three times a year to
Speaker 8: go pursue a gay lifestyle, that you had to live
Speaker 8: in a major city, and that would probably be New
Speaker 8: York or San Francisco.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty one, Conan began seeing cases of rare
Speaker 1: skin cancer in his patients. Capus's sarcoma or CHAS for short.
Speaker 8: Now it was and still is, an extremely rare disease.
Speaker 8: The average dermatologist in a lifetime could be expected to
Speaker 8: see one case.
Speaker 1: Soon, Conant opened a clinic devoted to capusi's sarcoma and
Speaker 1: quickly became the city's go to doctor for CHAS patients.
Speaker 1: Conant was on the front lines of what he believed
Speaker 1: was an unfolding epidemic, but hardly anyone seemed to be
Speaker 1: paying attention. It was out of frustration with this state
Speaker 1: of affairs that Conant sought out Cleave Jones, with his
Speaker 1: political connections and his work with the Health Committee. Maybe
Speaker 1: Jones could help Conant get funding for research, and just
Speaker 1: as urgently, maybe he could help raise awareness in the
Speaker 1: gay community of what was going on. Before dinner, Conant
Speaker 1: took Jones to dead see one of his chaos patients
Speaker 1: in person. The young man showed Jones a photo of
Speaker 1: what he had looked like before he got sick, handsome,
Speaker 1: smooth skinned, and muscular. Now his emaciated body was covered
Speaker 1: in purple lesions.
Speaker 8: He had multiple lesions of CAPSI sarcoma, but then had
Speaker 8: a terrible, terrible infectious disease causing intractable diarrhea with you know,
Speaker 8: twenty or thirty bowel movements a day, and he deteriorated
Speaker 8: very rapidly.
Speaker 1: Cleave. Jones was terrified by what he saw. Afterwards, he
Speaker 1: and Conant left the hospital and went to the Zuni Cafe,
Speaker 1: a restaurant not far from City Hall. There, Conan explained
Speaker 1: his theory of the case.
Speaker 5: He told me that he thought it was a new
Speaker 5: or previously unrecognized virus and that did something that crippled
Speaker 5: the immune system, leaving the body vulnerable to a whole
Speaker 5: range of opportunists confections.
Speaker 1: At this early point, there was no consensus among doctors
Speaker 1: as to what exactly was causing people to get sick,
Speaker 1: But Conan told Jones what he believed, that the disease
Speaker 1: was primarily sexually transmitted, and that gay men were at
Speaker 1: special risk.
Speaker 5: There was no drama, there was no theatrics about He's
Speaker 5: got a slight Southern cadence to his voice, and he
Speaker 5: just kind of laid it out to me over dinner,
Speaker 5: and I thought, well, my goodness, were all dead.
Speaker 1: After the dinner, Jones was convinced that the gay community
Speaker 1: was in trouble, and he agreed to help Conant start
Speaker 1: a foundation that would raise money for research. Soon, the
Speaker 1: two men were both working towards another more controversial goal
Speaker 1: as well, convincing their fellow gay men to change how
Speaker 1: they had sex.
Speaker 2: I was worried today that a new and frightening disease,
Speaker 2: a quiet immune deficiency syndrome, destroys the body's ability to
Speaker 2: fight certain illnesses.
Speaker 1: By the summer of nineteen eighty two, the mysterious disease
Speaker 1: causing KS and various opportunistic infections had become known as AIDS.
Speaker 1: The number of diagnosed AIDS patients was doubling every five months.
Speaker 2: There is no known cause, no known cure, and more
Speaker 2: than forty percent of the victims have died.
Speaker 1: As the numbers swored, Marcus Conant grew increasingly frustrated that
Speaker 1: the gay community was not taking the crisis more seriously.
Speaker 1: She was especially worried about the city's booming circuit of
Speaker 1: bath houses.
Speaker 8: What was going on in the community was denial. I
Speaker 8: had people telling me that, oh, it's okay to go
Speaker 8: to the bath houses as long as you take a
Speaker 8: shower after you have sex. I had one guy claim
Speaker 8: that he just changed the sheets on the bed in
Speaker 8: his stall at the bath house every time he had sex.
Speaker 8: So just change the sheets and you'll be fine. Now,
Speaker 8: as long as you have a belief, something that you
Speaker 8: can hold on to, whether it's scientifically valid or not,
Speaker 8: is often more valid for people than scientific evidence.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just that seemingly healthy men were putting themselves
Speaker 1: at risk. Conan was also seeing patients with visible symptoms
Speaker 1: of AIDS who were still flatly refusing to modify their
Speaker 1: sexual routines.
Speaker 8: I had a patient he had a couple of pleasions
Speaker 8: of capsis sarcoma, and he said, in the course of
Speaker 8: the interview, he said, hurry up, doctor, you know I
Speaker 8: want to go to the baths tonight. And I said,
Speaker 8: you're still going to the bass And he said, sure,
Speaker 8: I'm going to the bass. And I said, but you've
Speaker 8: got CAPSI sarcoma, and you know everyone thinks that it's transmissible.
Speaker 8: Let's get going from one person or another. And he said,
Speaker 8: you know everybody knows that, so they can take their
Speaker 8: risk too, But I'm going to the bass.
Speaker 1: For years, Conan had enjoyed going to the baths himself,
Speaker 1: but after encounters like that, he not only stopped going,
Speaker 1: he stopped having sex all together. One weekend in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three, Conant and his boyfriend took a trip to
Speaker 1: Santa Cruz, where they wandered around an amusement park on
Speaker 1: the boardwalk.
Speaker 8: We walked up and down the boardwalk and did all
Speaker 8: those sorts of things, and we finally got to the
Speaker 8: roller coaster. And there's this old rickety roller coaster at
Speaker 8: the end. It's a nightmare because it's still a wooden structure.
Speaker 8: It rattles, it sounds like it's coming apart when the
Speaker 8: cars go by.
Speaker 1: It was while Conant was on the roller coaster that
Speaker 1: he had an epiphany about the baths.
Speaker 8: So we get on this thing, and you know, typical
Speaker 8: roller coaster. We're slowly climbing up to the peak of
Speaker 8: the high point. You can see out over the Pacific Ocean.
Speaker 8: It's just great. And then suddenly, you know, the bottom
Speaker 8: drops out from under you and the car goes greening down.
Speaker 8: And my only thought at that point is the things
Speaker 8: was rattling and sounded like it was going to come apartments.
Speaker 8: If this thing weren't safe, they meaning the authorities, will
Speaker 8: close it down. It must be safe, because otherwise they
Speaker 8: just wouldn't let this thing happen. And as we reached
Speaker 8: the bottom of the loop, I realized, wait a minute,
Speaker 8: that's true of the bathhouses.
Speaker 1: Conant realized that people were going to the bathhouses because
Speaker 1: the bathhouses were open. If the bath houses weren't safe,
Speaker 1: these people figured someone would have surely closed them down.
Speaker 8: And of course that's when I realized I've got to
Speaker 8: get out of my ivory tower, quit plupling the doctor
Speaker 8: and the white coat, and get out there and start
Speaker 8: saying no, no, We've got to go public and say
Speaker 8: those of us at the university who are seeing these patients,
Speaker 8: who are looking at this thing every day, who know
Speaker 8: something about this disease, feel like you need to close
Speaker 8: down the bathhouses.
Speaker 1: Of course, Marcus Koenant was just a doctor. He didn't
Speaker 1: have the power to shut down the bathhouses. That would
Speaker 1: be up to the city government, specifically the director of
Speaker 1: public Health.
Speaker 12: I'm Mervyn Silverman, former director of Health in the City
Speaker 12: and County of San Francisco from nineteen seventy seven to
Speaker 12: nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1: Working for the San Francisco Health Department was a dream
Speaker 1: come true for doctor Mervyn Silverman, who moved to the
Speaker 1: city after years of holding a similar position in which
Speaker 1: a tak Kansas. In San Francisco, Silverman found a health
Speaker 1: department that was well funded, well respected, and free to
Speaker 1: implement progressive new programs other cities might have discouraged.
Speaker 12: I had about I think five thousand employees and a
Speaker 12: huge budget, so we did everything from a brain surgery
Speaker 12: to bath house inspection.
Speaker 1: The bathhouse inspections were basically like hotel or restaurant inspections.
Speaker 1: They were mostly about making sure that rooms and other
Speaker 1: facilities were clean before aids. Looking after the bathhouses was
Speaker 1: not exactly Silverman's top priority.
Speaker 12: Honestly didn't just I didn't pay that much attention to it.
Speaker 12: I think they were regularly attended by probably five or
Speaker 12: ten percent of the whole gay community. So it wasn't
Speaker 12: a major thing, but it was something that was symbolic.
Speaker 1: It's hard to find reliable numbers on how many people
Speaker 1: were actually visiting San Francisco's bathhouses. One informal survey taken
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty three indicates that it was more than
Speaker 1: Silverman thought that one in four gay men went to
Speaker 1: the baths once a week, while one in five went
Speaker 1: once a month. In any event, as aids began to
Speaker 1: spread in San Francisco, Silverman was reluctant to do anything
Speaker 1: that might make gay people feel unfairly targeted or encourage
Speaker 1: members of the general public to treat them like pariah's.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty three, when Marcus Conan and others began
Speaker 1: pressuring the city's health department to take action against the bathhouses,
Speaker 1: Silverman was conflicted. He knew the baths were incredibly important
Speaker 1: to the gay community, not only as gathering places, but
Speaker 1: as symbols of liberation. As one bathhouse owner put it.
Speaker 14: As an institution that's specifically designed to allow one to
Speaker 14: be as free as they need to be.
Speaker 1: But as the epidemiology of AIDS came into clearer view,
Speaker 1: it seemed increasingly likely that the disease could be spread
Speaker 1: through sex. And if that was true, then the bathhouses
Speaker 1: were potential hotbeds for infection.
Speaker 12: There were areas that were communal and dark, and sometimes
Speaker 12: with a guy might have sex with five, ten, fifteen people,
Speaker 12: maybe more, I don't know. In one evening.
Speaker 1: From a purely scientific perspective, closing the bath seemed like
Speaker 1: it would almost certainly slow the spread of AIDS. But
Speaker 1: the Silverman the work of public health wasn't always as
Speaker 1: simple as doing exactly what the science dictated.
Speaker 12: I look at public health the way a doctor looks
Speaker 12: at the patient. The community is my patient. I don't
Speaker 12: want to do something in one part of the community
Speaker 12: that will do damage in another parts, Like I don't
Speaker 12: want to treat your heart as my patient and destroy
Speaker 12: your liver in the process.
Speaker 1: Silverman wanted to take action on the baths, but he
Speaker 1: was not going to do it without buying from community
Speaker 1: leaders like Cleave Jones. Jones, for his part, was torn
Speaker 1: on the issue. He told Silverman that while the bathhouses
Speaker 1: might be a problem, closing them could create an even
Speaker 1: bigger one.
Speaker 5: I think I can still articulately argue both sides of
Speaker 5: this debate. The people who wanted the bathhouses closed said, look,
Speaker 5: there's no other place you could look at where there
Speaker 5: were more opportunities for transmission than a bath house. And
Speaker 5: then the other side said, yes, but if you allow
Speaker 5: the state to shut down bath houses, what's next. You
Speaker 5: could look at gay bars and say, well, there's an
Speaker 5: incredible opportunity for transmission in any gay bar that you
Speaker 5: look at, and this will erode our civil liberties. At
Speaker 5: the time, it was very fraught and a lot of
Speaker 5: people were very very angry about it, and I'm not
Speaker 5: sure what was the right thing to do.
Speaker 1: Part of the difficulty was that doctors and public health
Speaker 1: officials like Conan and Silverman weren't the only ones who
Speaker 1: wanted the bathhouses closed, and some of the loudest voices
Speaker 1: calling for closure weren't exactly friends of the gay community.
Speaker 5: I think an important part of the context for this
Speaker 5: is that you had the moral majority types and the
Speaker 5: preachers who were calling for closure, and worse, this whole
Speaker 5: debate was occurring in this context of many people from
Speaker 5: the radical right, and not just the radical right, expressing
Speaker 5: really extreme measures right up to quarantine and putting people
Speaker 5: in camps and tattooing their HIV status on their bodies.
Speaker 5: So it was not unreasonable for people to fear how
Speaker 5: slippery that slope might be.
Speaker 1: The backlash to gay liberation had helped fuel a new
Speaker 1: kind of conservatism that had taken hold in American politics
Speaker 1: that included the creation of the Moral Majority, a coalition
Speaker 1: of religious groups opposed to abortion and gay rights. It
Speaker 1: was started in nineteen seventy nine by the Virginia based
Speaker 1: televangelist Jerry Folwell.
Speaker 15: The high point of the week is an assembly conducted
Speaker 15: by doctor Fowell himself. Is theme the need for Christians
Speaker 15: to become active in politics by turning local congregations into
Speaker 15: blocks of voters that were unseat politicians who are held
Speaker 15: to undermine the American way of life.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty Fallwell barnstormed across America, delivering fiery sermons
Speaker 1: to his followers and rallying them behind conservative candidates.
Speaker 2: We have a three full primary responsibility. Number one, get
Speaker 2: people saved. Number two, get them baptized.
Speaker 10: Number three, get them registered to vote.
Speaker 1: When Ronald Reagan was elected president in the landslide. Fallwell
Speaker 1: and the Moral Majority claimed credit for his victory, and
Speaker 1: in his first press conference as president, Reagan made it
Speaker 1: clear that Fallwell and his ilk would have a receptive
Speaker 1: audience in the White House.
Speaker 11: I am going to be open to these people. I'm
Speaker 11: not going to separate myself from the people who the
Speaker 11: electedition and centers there.
Speaker 1: Fallwell enthusiastically condemned homosexuality as a moral perversion. Speaking to
Speaker 1: reporters in nineteen eighty one, he warned that if gay
Speaker 1: people were allowed civil rights, it would become quote an
Speaker 1: established bonafide minority, like women or blacks. Then, in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three, as the bathhouse controversy was heating up in
Speaker 1: San Francisco, Fallwell used his national platform to weigh in
Speaker 1: on the issue. He described activity in gay bathhouses as
Speaker 1: sub animal behavior, and he called for them to be
Speaker 1: shut down across the country.
Speaker 10: I believe that God does not judge people. God judges sin,
Speaker 10: and I do believe that aids generally call them believed
Speaker 10: to be caused by homosexual promiscuity as a violation both
Speaker 10: of them of God's laws, laws of nature and decency,
Speaker 10: and as a result, we pay the price when we
Speaker 10: violate the laws of God.
Speaker 1: Many in the gay community feared that if the moral
Speaker 1: majority had its way, they would lose a lot more
Speaker 1: than their bathhouses.
Speaker 3: Gay community leaders worry about such a broad and dangerous
Speaker 3: legal precedent used against one segment of the population.
Speaker 5: It wasn't a huge leap in my view to say
Speaker 5: that if we allow the government to close down this
Speaker 5: set of businesses, what's next. Maybe now, with hindsight, that
Speaker 5: feels like paranoia, but I don't think it was paranoia
Speaker 5: at the time. We had just been decriminalized a few
Speaker 5: years prior, so I think these were reasonable fears.
Speaker 1: The idea of closing the bathhouses came to be seen
Speaker 1: as a capitulation to reactionaries, people who cared less about
Speaker 1: saving the lives of gay people than about rolling back
Speaker 1: their civil rights. With opponents of gay liberation apparently rallying
Speaker 1: around the bathhouse issue, those within the gay community who
Speaker 1: supported closure were treated with special suspicion. One outspoken voice
Speaker 1: was Randy Schiltz, a gay reporter for the San Francisco
Speaker 1: Chronicle who would go on to write the book and
Speaker 1: the Band Played on a seminal early history of the
Speaker 1: AIDS crisis. With Marcus Conant as one of his key sources.
Speaker 1: Schiltz wrote more than a dozen articles for the Chronicle
Speaker 1: about the dangers of the bathhouses, and he was fairly
Speaker 1: open about his belief that they should be shut down immediately.
Speaker 2: Randy Schiltz went after the gay community for a lifestyle
Speaker 2: it was leading to its own destruction That did not
Speaker 2: make him very popular.
Speaker 1: Even Cleve Jones was called a trader merely for suggesting
Speaker 1: in an op ed that gay men practiced safe sex.
Speaker 5: It was a pretty mild call for other sexually active
Speaker 5: gay men to curtail our activities to reduce our number
Speaker 5: of partners. And you know, I had people scream at
Speaker 5: me on the street that I was a Nazi. I
Speaker 5: had people spit on my face.
Speaker 1: With all this pressure bearing down on him, Jones decided
Speaker 1: he could not get behind the idea of city Hall
Speaker 1: ordering the closure of the bathhouses. Jones reached out to
Speaker 1: Mervin Silverman to explain his reasoning.
Speaker 12: He called to me and he says, if you close
Speaker 12: the bath houses, I'm going to be one of the
Speaker 12: ones manning the barricades. And I said why, And he said, well,
Speaker 12: because with a city like San Francisco, which is so
Speaker 12: tolerant and so welcoming and so compassionate. To do something
Speaker 12: like this will send a message across the country that
Speaker 12: will have communities instituting or enforcing asrodomy laws and things
Speaker 12: like this. The net effect would be worse than better.
Speaker 1: Without the support of the gay community, Silverman felt he
Speaker 1: couldn't close the bathhouses, no matter how uneasy it made
Speaker 1: him to leave them open, and so for the time being,
Speaker 1: Silverman looked for other ways to slow the spread of
Speaker 1: AIDS in his city.
Speaker 3: Don't attempt to test it by stretching or blowing it up.
Speaker 13: Every condom you buy has been pre tested.
Speaker 1: One approach was to distribute condoms. At the time, condoms
Speaker 1: were seen primarily as the domain of straight people. Trying
Speaker 1: to prevent pregnancy. Getting gay men to use them was
Speaker 1: an uphill battle. As one bathouse proponent put it, I
Speaker 1: didn't become a homosexual so I could use condoms. Under
Speaker 1: Silverman's direction, the city health department tried to circulate information
Speaker 1: about how AIDS was spread in hopes that it would
Speaker 1: convince people to make safer choices.
Speaker 12: All Right, this was the I think this was the
Speaker 12: very first AIDS sign that was ever produced at all
Speaker 12: in the country.
Speaker 1: Actually, Silverman showed us one of the many posters the
Speaker 1: city health department produced. They gave the posters to bathhouse
Speaker 1: operators so they could post them in communal areas.
Speaker 12: It says, AIDS is everyone's problem, Protect yourself and those
Speaker 12: you love. And it had circle with AIDS in it
Speaker 12: and a line through it, and it said use condoms,
Speaker 12: avoid any exchange of body fluids, limit your use of
Speaker 12: recreational drugs, enjoy more time with fewer partners. AIDS is
Speaker 12: not spread through casual contact. For your information, contact the
Speaker 12: San Francisco Department of Public Health. I mean pretty benign,
Speaker 12: if you know when you look back at it, But
Speaker 12: it was the first one of its kind.
Speaker 1: Silverman's health department wasn't the only group trying to get
Speaker 1: the information out. Organizers in the gay community created their
Speaker 1: own public education campaigns, and they were broadly successful in
Speaker 1: increasing knowledge of AIDS around the city. More and more
Speaker 1: men were making the personal choice to limit their number
Speaker 1: of sexual partners by avoiding the baths. Still, Silverman faced
Speaker 1: mounting pressure to close the baths from San Francisco's straight
Speaker 1: majority that included the most powerful person in the city,
Speaker 1: Mayor Dianne Feinstein.
Speaker 16: I don't believe that this city has any business permitting
Speaker 16: businesses to operate whose sole source of being is the
Speaker 16: very activity that communicates the disease.
Speaker 1: Dianne Feinstein had been mayor of San Francisco since nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight. She and Silverman had never butted heads on
Speaker 1: public health issues, but the bathhouse situation was different.
Speaker 12: In fact, she was riding with a political reporter from
Speaker 12: the San Francisco Chronicle in Washington and said, I don't
Speaker 12: know why Silverman doesn't close the bath houses. If they
Speaker 12: were heterosexual bath houses, he would have closed them. And
Speaker 12: of course that obviously got back to me from the reporter,
Speaker 12: and I said, that's right.
Speaker 1: Silverman would not move his line in the sand. He
Speaker 1: was not going to shut down to bathhouses without broad
Speaker 1: support from San Francisco's gay community.
Speaker 12: I think if you stand back politically, it seemed like
Speaker 12: a simple solution. It's a problem, close it down. The
Speaker 12: restaurant is insanitary, close it down. But the difference is
Speaker 12: this was dealing with human behavior. You were not closing
Speaker 12: it down because of what the building was or whether
Speaker 12: it was sanitary. You were closing it down because of
Speaker 12: what people were doing in there.
Speaker 1: The bathhouse debate came to a head in March of
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four when a man named Larry little John
Speaker 1: took matters into his own hands. Little John, a longtime
Speaker 1: activist in the gay community, had become convinced that Silverman's
Speaker 1: education push was not enough. He said that he had
Speaker 1: personally inspected the largest bathhouse in the city and found
Speaker 1: that none of Silverman's AIDS information posters were hanging in
Speaker 1: the locker room. Little John was tired of waiting for
Speaker 1: Silverman to act, and so he announced that he would
Speaker 1: begin collecting signatures for a ballot initiative to officially ban
Speaker 1: sex in the bathhouses.
Speaker 4: The initiative states that, in order to prevent the spread
Speaker 4: of AIDS and to protect the public health, sexual activities
Speaker 4: among patrons of public bath houses should be prohibited.
Speaker 1: The future of the baths would be placed in the
Speaker 1: hands of San Francisco voters in the nineteen eighty four election.
Speaker 1: Here's Little John speaking to a reporter that spring.
Speaker 17: I prefer to see doctor Silverman get some courage and
Speaker 17: deal with it today.
Speaker 8: I prefer to see MARYA.
Speaker 4: Feinstein deal with.
Speaker 1: The issue today.
Speaker 13: Before more people die.
Speaker 4: But if we got to wait until November.
Speaker 5: To deal with the issue, the people will deal with
Speaker 5: the issue.
Speaker 1: The thing about Little John's push for a citywide bout
Speaker 1: initiative is that the overwhelming majority of San Francisco voters
Speaker 1: were straight, and if it was up to them, the
Speaker 1: bath houses would almost certainly be closed. People in the
Speaker 1: gay community were outraged. Letters poured into The Bay Area Reporter,
Speaker 1: the city's largest gay newspaper, calling Little John homophobic, slime, morality, cowboy,
Speaker 1: and judas.
Speaker 6: They say it's a civil right and closing down won't
Speaker 6: slow the spread of AIDS.
Speaker 9: They are no more responsible for multiple sexual activities than
Speaker 9: our bars, where people can go and meet someone and
Speaker 9: have a liaison later in a hotel or in the home.
Speaker 1: It would be one thing if gay people decided to
Speaker 1: shut down the bathhouses themselves. It would be entirely different
Speaker 1: if the straight majority imposed the shutdown on them.
Speaker 14: The danger of the initiative, as I see it, is
Speaker 14: the opening possibility of creating a police state in San Francisco.
Speaker 14: I would be appalled at the idea that police officers
Speaker 14: could come into a private situation and inspect the activities
Speaker 14: of my sexual life.
Speaker 8: I think this is a worse mistake than the McCarthy era,
Speaker 8: and I think that we're going to live to regret
Speaker 8: this in San Francisco and throughout the.
Speaker 13: Nation, in the world.
Speaker 8: This all began.
Speaker 1: Cleve Jones, who knew as well as anyone that reactionary
Speaker 1: forces could still reverse the gains of gay liberation, saw
Speaker 1: the writing on the wall.
Speaker 5: The issue of the bathhouses was going to go on
Speaker 5: the ballot, and the judgment from a whole lot of
Speaker 5: people was that is too dangerous. We cannot have these
Speaker 5: kinds of sensitive, nuanced, thorny issues of public health administration
Speaker 5: be decided by a popular vote in such a negatively
Speaker 5: charged atmosphere. And that was when the conversation shifted to
Speaker 5: let's let Silverman shut it down.
Speaker 1: Within days, an open letter was circulated and signed by
Speaker 1: dozens of prominent figures in the gay community. The letter
Speaker 1: gave Silverman the green light he had been waiting for.
Speaker 1: He arranged for a press conference to be held the
Speaker 1: next day, But then most of the people who had
Speaker 1: signed the letter changed their minds, having apparently realized that
Speaker 1: in the eyes of the gay community, they would own
Speaker 1: the decision to close the bathhouses. Even more than Silverman would.
Speaker 12: So they all signed this letter to me and said
Speaker 12: they supported closing it. Within twenty four hours, most of
Speaker 12: them had taken their names off of it.
Speaker 1: Cleave Jones was among them. In the end, he was
Speaker 1: just too conflicted.
Speaker 5: Sometimes we approach issues where we just don't really know
Speaker 5: what is the right thing to do, and that doesn't
Speaker 5: make one a coward or dishonest. It means that one
Speaker 5: doesn't know what to do.
Speaker 1: Mervyn Silverman was back to square one. With no official
Speaker 1: backing from the gay community, he felt he could not
Speaker 1: follow through with his plan. The problem was reporters had
Speaker 1: already been alerted that there was going to be a
Speaker 1: major announcement. News trucks were lined up outside the Public
Speaker 1: Health building. Silverman felt like he had to at least
Speaker 1: show up and say something. Silverman met with Mayor Feinstein
Speaker 1: and told her he could not go forward with a
Speaker 1: decision to close the Then, right before the press conference,
Speaker 1: he met with the city's police chief, who fitted him
Speaker 1: with a bulletproof vest. As Silverman's car approached the Public
Speaker 1: Health Building, he saw dozens of protesters gathered outside.
Speaker 12: It was bizarre, it with something of I think a
Speaker 12: Fellini movie or something like that. I walked in there
Speaker 12: and was sort of like a haze, and through the haze,
Speaker 12: I'm seeing people naked or sort of naked, with towels
Speaker 12: wrapped around it.
Speaker 1: Some of the protesters held signs that read today the tubs,
Speaker 1: tomorrow your bedroom, and out of the baths into the ovens.
Speaker 13: Protesters and many others worried and angry that after a
Speaker 13: year of resisting the calls, Director of Public Health Mervyn Silverman,
Speaker 13: had decided to close the baths down.
Speaker 12: I saw all this stuff, and I didn't say Hi, Joe, Hi, Mary,
Speaker 12: who the various reporters. I just went up, sat down
Speaker 12: to the desk and basically said, all of you who
Speaker 12: think I'm going to close the bath houses, you know,
Speaker 12: sit down, forget. It could have happened.
Speaker 7: Because of a number of issues, both legal and medical,
Speaker 7: that are not resolved.
Speaker 12: I am not going to be making a.
Speaker 7: Comment discussing the opening or closing of the bath houses.
Speaker 13: At this point, the decision was popular.
Speaker 5: Here.
Speaker 13: The crowd, ready to burst with anger, was greatly relieved.
Speaker 13: Do you think that he decided not to do it
Speaker 13: right away because of pressure from the gay communities?
Speaker 1: Uncertainly, even though Silvermen had backed down, San Francisco's gay
Speaker 1: community was shaken. Word had gotten out about the leaders
Speaker 1: who had initially signed the letter in support of closure.
Speaker 1: The editor of the Bay Area Reporter labeled them collaborators.
Speaker 1: The gay liberation movement, the editor wrote, was almost killed
Speaker 1: off last Friday morning by a group of gay men
Speaker 1: and one lesbian. This group gave their names to give
Speaker 1: the green light to the annihilation and of gay life.
Speaker 1: The gay community should remember those names well. The role
Speaker 1: of names became known around the city as the Trader's List.
Speaker 1: On April ninth, nineteen eighty four, ten days after his
Speaker 1: anti climactic press conference, Silverman took a half measure that
Speaker 1: seemed to please nobody. Rather than closed down the bathhouse's outright,
Speaker 1: he issued a strict new set of rules that mandated
Speaker 1: increased lighting, the removal of doors from private rooms, and
Speaker 1: most importantly, a ban on sex inside the venues. It
Speaker 1: was enough to convince Larry Littlejohn to withdraw his ballot initiative,
Speaker 1: which had called for similar restrictions, But unsurprisingly, when the
Speaker 1: city sent in undercover health inspectors, they found that people
Speaker 1: were not abiding by the new rules, and so the
Speaker 1: bathhouses remained in limbo, with the mayor continuing to call
Speaker 1: for their closure and gay leaders continuing to make the
Speaker 1: case for safe sex.
Speaker 17: We as a community are not exactly slouches when it
Speaker 17: comes to sexual creativity. That is not absolutely essential to
Speaker 17: go to the baths and stick your butt up in
Speaker 17: the air in order to get erotic pleasure as a
Speaker 17: gay man.
Speaker 1: The problem was that, according to the bath house owners,
Speaker 1: even when they tried to give out condoms, most of
Speaker 1: their customers didn't seem to want them. Marcus Conant, the
Speaker 1: doctor who had started ringing the alarm about AIDS years earlier,
Speaker 1: found this infuriating.
Speaker 18: And so this year the group that we have to
Speaker 18: criticize is not the fads, and is not the state,
Speaker 18: and it's not the city. It's the gay community. Because
Speaker 18: the rationalization that is going on in the gay community
Speaker 18: is absolutely terrifying.
Speaker 1: This is Conan speaking in April of eighty four at
Speaker 1: a public forum on bathhouses.
Speaker 18: I will tell you the story of two pensions. One
Speaker 18: is a man that I saw today who continues to
Speaker 18: go to the bath houses and have sex. He has
Speaker 18: CAPTUSI sarcone. Another man is a PhD who has idiopathic
Speaker 18: tromocytopenic purple and goes to the bath houses. And when
Speaker 18: I said to him, do you tell your sexual contacts
Speaker 18: that you have AIDS? He says no. And I said,
Speaker 18: how do you morally live with that? And he says,
Speaker 18: anybody that knows the bath house is a damned fool.
Speaker 18: And I think, thank God, what's coming to them. Nothing
Speaker 18: that we, as physicians or epidemiologists or nurses or patients
Speaker 18: with AIDS have done today has slowed down the instance
Speaker 18: of this disease. Whatsoever should we ask the mayor every
Speaker 18: time we have an aide's patient to die in San Francisco,
Speaker 18: to set off the earthquake sireene for twenty seconds.
Speaker 8: It'll go off every other day.
Speaker 18: Maybe people will be begin to understand the magnitude of
Speaker 18: the problem. And then by Christmas, when it's going off
Speaker 18: twice a day, and by this time next year, when
Speaker 18: it's going off three times a day, everybody will begin
Speaker 18: to understand what we're dealing.
Speaker 1: Looking back, Conan says, he gets or people who opposed
Speaker 1: closure were coming from.
Speaker 8: I mean I could understand their point of view. I
Speaker 8: can still understand their point of view. I mean they
Speaker 8: had fought for years for the rights of gay men,
Speaker 8: and here we were coming along saying you fought for
Speaker 8: it and now you can't have it.
Speaker 1: Still, Conan says that he has no second thoughts about
Speaker 1: taking the position that he did.
Speaker 8: It's very much like, what is the more important thing?
Speaker 8: Is it people dying or is it the economy? Wells
Speaker 8: as with that argument, it's both. But you can't have
Speaker 8: an economy if too many people are frightened and dying.
Speaker 8: Ninety six percent of them that catch this thing are
Speaker 8: gonna die. So you need to be almost raconian in
Speaker 8: how you approach this thing. You can't just let people
Speaker 8: make up their own mind when they're not just putting
Speaker 8: themselves at risk, they're putting the whole society at risk,
Speaker 8: at least the whole gays aside.
Speaker 1: Four decades later, Conan still finds the idea of using
Speaker 1: bathhouses as sites for safe sex education to be laughable.
Speaker 8: Why do people go to the bath house. They go
Speaker 8: to get laid. They don't go for a lecture for
Speaker 8: God's sake, I mean quite honest. I mean, you take
Speaker 8: a bunch of horny guys and they're going there to
Speaker 8: get laid, and you want you want some doctor to
Speaker 8: give them a talk about hygiene. Sorry.
Speaker 1: Eventually all the controversy took its toll. Venues, including the Hothouse,
Speaker 1: the Liberty Baths, and the Bulldog Baths all made the
Speaker 1: decision to voluntarily close their doors.
Speaker 17: What's happening is without them actually legislating the closing of the.
Speaker 1: Bath houses, the politicians are closing us down slowly by
Speaker 1: discouraging people.
Speaker 5: To come here.
Speaker 1: Sutro Baths, one of the largest bathhouses in the city,
Speaker 1: hosted a three day farewell party where five employees stood
Speaker 1: on stage and threw AIDS bursures into a barbecue.
Speaker 4: Tonight, they burned those pamphlets to protest being driven out
Speaker 4: of business by what they call AIDS hysteria.
Speaker 1: If we can't pass them out, the owner of Sutro
Speaker 1: Baths said, we might as well burn them.
Speaker 14: We take away the tower, was take away the keys.
Speaker 9: We don't need education to fight the streat disease.
Speaker 18: We're closing down the baths and the other.
Speaker 9: Private clubs gets out of the showers, sending.
Speaker 7: You can sing along in the cars city.
Speaker 1: On October ninth, nineteen eighty four, Mervyn Silverman made a
Speaker 1: decisive move fourteen.
Speaker 4: Gay bathhouses and sex shops in San Francisco were ordered
Speaker 4: shut down by the city's public health director.
Speaker 3: Through the morning, city health officials posted notices clothes or
Speaker 3: face legal action.
Speaker 1: Silverman had found that fourteen of the city's remaining bathhouses
Speaker 1: and sex clubs were in violation of his rules, so
Speaker 1: he shut them down completely.
Speaker 7: Today, I have ordered the closure of fourteen commercial establishments
Speaker 7: which promote and profit from the spread of AIDS.
Speaker 1: At the time of Silverman's announcement, it was estimated that
Speaker 1: forty percent of the gay male population in San Francisco
Speaker 1: was infected.
Speaker 3: AIDS continues its epidemic spread in San Francisco, more cases
Speaker 3: reported already in the first three quarters of nineteen eighty
Speaker 3: four than all of nineteen eighty three. Even thousands more
Speaker 3: may have the disease and still not know it. Some
Speaker 3: in the gay communities say those who use bath house
Speaker 3: as for sex will simply go somewhere else, that today's
Speaker 3: action by the city will bring much controversy, not much cure.
Speaker 1: That December, three and a half years after AIDS had
Speaker 1: first emerged in San Francisco in nineteen eighty one, Silverman
Speaker 1: resigned as Public Health commissioner. A reporter questioned him on
Speaker 1: his way out, how did the public health director feel
Speaker 1: about leaving his job in the middle of an epidemic.
Speaker 1: I'd like to believe this is the middle, Silverman answered,
Speaker 1: My fear is that this is the beginning. By the
Speaker 1: end of nineteen eighty four, the total number of confirmed
Speaker 1: AIDS cases in the US was pushing eight thousand. More
Speaker 1: than half of those patients had already died. Cleave Jones
Speaker 1: found out he was HIV positive in nineteen eighty five
Speaker 1: when a blood as finally became available. To this day,
Speaker 1: he's still torn about the bathhouses, which it's worth noting
Speaker 1: ended up staying closed for decades.
Speaker 5: You know, I was ambivalent then, I'm ambivalent today. Did
Speaker 5: the bathhouse closures result in and across the board sweeping
Speaker 5: denial of civil rights?
Speaker 13: No?
Speaker 5: Did the closure of the bathhouses slow the spread of
Speaker 5: the pandemic? Probably not. With you know, twenty twenty hindsight,
Speaker 5: I wish what could have happened is that the community
Speaker 5: could have rallied enough and found enough unity to impose
Speaker 5: our own restrictions and guidelines on how these places would operate.
Speaker 5: But with hindsight, I would say to you that the
Speaker 5: behavior that had gone on in the bath houses continued,
Speaker 5: and it went underground, It went out of the county.
Speaker 5: It did not go away.
Speaker 1: Eventually, the bathhouse controversy was no longer top of mind
Speaker 1: for people like Cleave Jones and his friends. They were
Speaker 1: now too busy going to funerals and taking care of
Speaker 1: the sick.
Speaker 5: And within just five years, almost everyone I knew was
Speaker 5: dead or dying or home caring for someone who was dying.
Speaker 5: It ultimately would kill over twenty thousand people in my neighborhood.
Speaker 1: Among the thousands of San Francisco's who would die from
Speaker 1: AIDS in the ensuing years were Randy Schiltz, the Chronicle reporter,
Speaker 1: and Sylvester the Queen of Disco. Jones remembers losing friends,
Speaker 1: making new ones, and then losing them too. He remembers
Speaker 1: familiar faces around the neighborhood vanishing one by one.
Speaker 5: There was a male carrier, a guy I never knew
Speaker 5: his name, but he always wore shorts. He had muscular legs,
Speaker 5: and he always would wear shorts. And we, you know,
Speaker 5: we make little jokes about the male guy that always
Speaker 5: wore shorts. Of course, he disappeared and the bus drivers disappeared,
Speaker 5: in the bakers and the bank tellers, and just aw
Speaker 5: the familiar face as your favorite bartenders. Everybody died, and
Speaker 5: those who did not were.
Speaker 8: Just so.
Speaker 5: Locked down in grief and the incredibly hard work of
Speaker 5: caring for people in the absolute vacuum of any kind
Speaker 5: of government response.
Speaker 1: About a year after the bathhouses were shut down, Jones
Speaker 1: began planning an AIDS memorial. He had an idea for
Speaker 1: something visual and striking, something that might wake up the
Speaker 1: country to the enormity of the death toll. He imagined
Speaker 1: a giant patchwork quilt. On each square would be the
Speaker 1: name of someone lost to AIDS. Someday the quilt would
Speaker 1: be big enough to blanket the Mall on Washington.
Speaker 14: Running only Sylvester.
Speaker 8: Who this Siscott Stormy with.
Speaker 5: Simpson Anti Ken.
Speaker 1: On the next episode of Fiasco, AIDS threatens America's blood supply.
Speaker 3: Blood banks and plasma centers may be spreading a new
Speaker 3: and mysterious ailment called Age.
Speaker 1: Fiasco is presented by Audible Originals and Prologue Projects. The
Speaker 1: show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Sam Graham, Felsen, Madelin Kaplan,
Speaker 1: Ulla Kulpa and Me leon Nyfock. Our researcher is Francis Carr,
Speaker 1: Editorial support from Jessica Miller and noor waswas archival research
Speaker 1: by Michelle Sullivan. This season's score is composed by Edith Mudge.
Speaker 1: Additional music by Nick Sylvester of God Mode, Alexis Squadrado,
Speaker 1: Joel Saint, Julian and Dan English, Noah hect and Joe Vali.
Speaker 1: Our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Our credits song
Speaker 1: this week is Stormy Weather, performed by Sylvester. You also
Speaker 1: heard Sylvester's You Make Me Feel. Music licensing courtesy of
Speaker 1: Anthony Roman. Audio mix by Erica Wong, with additional support
Speaker 1: from Selina Urabe. Our artwork is designed by Teddy Blanks
Speaker 1: at Chips and Y. David Blum is the editor in
Speaker 1: chief of Audible Originals. Mike Charzik is the vice president
Speaker 1: of Audible Studios. Zach Ross is head of acquisition and
Speaker 1: Development for Audible. Thanks to the Vanderbilt Television Archive, Joshua Gampson,
Speaker 1: Louis Knieber, and Bryant Erstad. Additional archival material courtesy of
Speaker 1: KGO TV in San Francisco. Special thanks to Peter Yasi.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. Next week, episode four,