The AIDS Crisis: Episode 2 - How to Have Sex in an Epidemic

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hey, this is Leon Napok. I'm the host of Fiasco, but you may also know me from the podcasts Slowburn, Think Twice, Michael Jackson, and Backfired the Vaping Wars. I'm excited to be sharing with you the next season of Backfired, titled Attention Deficit, which is now available exclusively on Audible. Backfired is a podcast about the business of unintended consequences. In the first season, my co host Ril Pardess and I dove deep into the world of vaping and how the well intentioned quest for a safer cigarette went awry. Now we're tackling ADHD and how the push to destigmatize this hard to define childhood diagnosis has led to an explosion of stimulant use in kids as well as adults. It's a story about the promise of psychiatry to fix our brains and the power of the pharmaceutical industry to shape how we and our doctors think about what's wrong with us. To hear both seasons of Backfired, go to audible dot com slash Backfired and start a free trial that's audible dot com slash backfired. Fiasco is tended for mature audiences. For a list of books, articles and documentaries we used in our research. Follow the link in the show notes Previously on Fiasco.

00:01:14
Speaker 2: It's mysterious, it's deadly, and it's baffling medical science.

00:01:19
Speaker 3: A new deadly disease that no one understands, a great medical puzzle.

00:01:23
Speaker 4: There was virtually no coverage in the mainstream media.

00:01:27
Speaker 5: I just thought that the more I talked about it, the better it would be for other people in my community.

00:01:38
Speaker 1: When Sean Strube arrived in New York in nineteen seventy nine, what he found was a city full of gay men having the time of their lives. It was exactly what Strube had been looking for when he decided to transfer from Georgetown to Columbia.

00:01:54
Speaker 6: I really moved to New York to be free and to be gay. I didn't know anybody there. I literally been there a few weekends and met one person, spent a weekend with him, and fell in love with the city.

00:02:07
Speaker 1: Strube had only recently come out to his parents. His mom had cried and his dad awkwardly asked him if he was the man or the woman in his relationships, but Strube still felt a lot better afterwards. He was a twenty one year old fresh out of the closet with an apartment in Hell's kitchen. Nothing his parents could say was going to put a damper on that. A few weeks after he arrived in New York, Strube attended the Gay Pride Parade for the first time in his life.

00:02:39
Speaker 6: I couldn't believe all these people were gay. I'm like walking through and looking that one and that one and that one, and I was astonished in Central Park. I had no idea there were that many homosexuals in the world.

00:02:50
Speaker 1: The first Gay Pride Parade had taken place about a decade earlier. It celebrated the Stonewall Uprising of nineteen sixty nine, a series of demonstrations that erupted after police rated a popular gay bar in Greenwich Village. Stonewall was a major turning point in gay life, not just in New York City, but across the country.

00:03:10
Speaker 2: A gay liberation movement is challenging a society that abhors homosexuality.

00:03:16
Speaker 7: Tell me, what do you feel about the Harliflow movement.

00:03:18
Speaker 8: I think it's really dynamite, and I think the only way to achieve it is from force and march is like this.

00:03:23
Speaker 9: You know, other groups have their own holidays, you know, their own marshes and things like that.

00:03:28
Speaker 10: This is our day.

00:03:30
Speaker 1: The gay liberation movement was about civil rights and being able to live openly. It was also about sex and having as much of it as you wanted.

00:03:39
Speaker 2: Freedom of sexual expression is as much an issue of the gay movement as civil and legal rights are.

00:03:45
Speaker 6: This was sort of the peak of the explosion in gay male sexuality in the years after Stonewall, right after this sort of intense repression and this new era of liberation in the seventies, and everybody was getting it's axually transmitted infections.

00:04:01
Speaker 1: In my life, there were lots of different diseases circulating around New York. With treatment, they were rarely fatal. That they were everywhere.

00:04:10
Speaker 6: Whether it was you know, goanrhea or crabs or herpes. You know, at the time, herpes was the biggest concern. You know, people say, oh, if I ever got herpes, I'd kill myself. And then everybody got herpes and they didn't kill themselves, so it was commonplace.

00:04:25
Speaker 1: Not long after he started at Columbia in the fall, Strube noticed the lymph nodes on one side of his neck were badly swollen. He went to University Health Services, where they told him he might have a contusion or maybe even leukemia. It was concerning, but the swelling eventually went down and Strube stopped worrying about it. Then he started experiencing other symptoms.

00:04:47
Speaker 6: I was having night sweats, and I'd lost weight in the year after I moved to New York as well. But I was a tall, skinny kid. My weight fluctuated. I didn't pay any attention to that, and then I got hepatitis and I ended up, you know, in bed for about six weeks and had to drop out of Columbia.

00:05:07
Speaker 1: After he recovered from his bout with hepatitis, Strube started volunteering at a gay newspaper that had recently opened an office on fifty seventh Street.

00:05:15
Speaker 6: I was a volunteer copy editor at the New York Native.

00:05:19
Speaker 11: Okay.

00:05:19
Speaker 6: I was dating somebody who worked there, and I would go in and read the you know, the galleys for typos and things like that.

00:05:28
Speaker 1: For years, gay New Yorkers had been without a major news outlet of their own. San Francisco had The Bay Area Reporter, DC had The Blade, Boston had Gay Community News. The Native had sprouted up to fill the gap in New York, and it became a hub of news criticism, advertising, and local gossip. Did you get on newstands or were there boxes or how did it get distributed.

00:05:51
Speaker 6: I'd either get it free from the office, or I'd get it at the newsstands. It was distributed everywhere. I mean it was in Lower Manhattan anyway, it was everywhere.

00:06:00
Speaker 1: Read the paper every two weeks. As soon as it came out. In the spring of nineteen eighty one, he came across an article headlined Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded. It accompanied the first news story ever to be published about what would turn out to be AIDS.

00:06:15
Speaker 6: And I read it and had, you know, kind of the gamut of reactions people had, you know, oh my god, this is scary too, Oh my god, this is fear mongering. You know, this can't be true.

00:06:31
Speaker 1: The central takeaway from the article was that an exotic new disease was said to have struck the gay community in New York, but that, according to health officials, there was for now no reason to panic. Soon there would be, and as the disease spread, people like Sean Strub decided they couldn't wait for scientists, doctors, and government officials to help them. They were going to have to help themselves. I'm Leon Napok from Audible Originals and Prologue Projects. This is fiasco.

00:07:04
Speaker 12: I know about this disease, and I know it may strike me tomorrow.

00:07:08
Speaker 7: I am there.

00:07:10
Speaker 4: I have swollen glands, I had night sweats, I have fevers. Am I dying?

00:07:13
Speaker 11: We had no other resources but ourselves.

00:07:16
Speaker 6: We started keeping up a list of who was sick, and then when people die, you know, we'd cross him off.

00:07:22
Speaker 3: Every gay man who was unable to come forward now and fight to save his own life is truly helping to kill the rest of us.

00:07:34
Speaker 1: In this episode, how a handful of gay men in New York improvised their own response to the outbreak. The article in the New York Native Disease Rumors, Largely Unfounded, was written by a physician named Larry Mass. Mass had a medical degree, but he'd realized that he wasn't all that interested in being a doctor, so he became a writer instead, and he started using his expertise to cover medicine and sex for the Native. In nineteen eighty one, Mass heard from a source that a few gay men in New York had come down to the rare lung infection numisistus pneumonia.

00:08:15
Speaker 11: I got a call from a colonae in what I call community medicine, trying to help these underserved communities, gay men and rejects from mainstream medicine and health, and she said there's something going on.

00:08:33
Speaker 1: Mass's source sounded nervous and uncertain. She had been cautioned not to discuss the issue, but according to Mass, she thought that someone in the gay community should know.

00:08:43
Speaker 11: She said, there's some cases in New York City intensive care units and emergency rooms. There's been a couple of deaths. That's it. I can't talk about it. They told me, I can't talk about it. I could basically after talking for a minute and a half like that, it was basic hung up.

00:09:02
Speaker 1: Mass followed up on the tip by calling a doctor the New York City Department of Health. The doctor reassured him that unless someone was severely immunocompromised, they didn't need to worry.

00:09:12
Speaker 11: They said, there are these cases, and there's a few of them. We don't know if they're related to one another. We don't know if it's just a coincidence that we're seeing a few cases and if they are in any way connected, And that was what became the first piece disease rumors largely unfounded.

00:09:38
Speaker 1: When Seaun Strew read the article, it didn't even occur to him that it might have anything to do with him. But then a few months later, a follow up story and the native got his attention. This one was about a group of gay men in Los Angeles, all suffering from the same three symptoms, swollen lymph clans, weight loss, and night sweats.

00:09:59
Speaker 6: I remember reading that article and getting the feeling in the pit of my stomach that that's me. I have all those things.

00:10:06
Speaker 1: Strube went to see a doctor who specialized in treating gay men. Strube called him a classic clap doctor, someone who prescribed antibiotics for things like gonn rhea and syphilis and treated patients who, for various reasons, couldn't turn to their regular physicians.

00:10:23
Speaker 6: He had an office in the same building this apartment was in. I think he had had difficulty holding on to his license, and you know, he kind of showed up at his apartment and his specimen jar for urine specimens was a skipy peanut butter jar.

00:10:38
Speaker 1: The doctor told Strube that he was probably fine, he.

00:10:41
Speaker 6: Said, Oh, don't worry about it, that's nothing. He says, just wash up after you. I think he used some vulgar colloquialism for having sex, you know, wash up, be a boy scout, you'll be fine. That didn't comfort me. I didn't have that much of faith in what he was telling me.

00:10:58
Speaker 1: Anyway, Strube's experience wasn't unusual. All Over New York, gay men were dealing with doctors who didn't have the slightest idea what they were up against. Unlike the specialists you heard about in our first episode, most clap doctors weren't paying attention to the latest alerts from the CDC or engaging in any organized effort to figure out how to treat their patients. Mainly, these doctors were helping people maintain their sex lives. At a moment when it seemed like everyone was walking around with some variety of std there were all.

00:11:33
Speaker 4: These articles in the gay press saying, look, if you're sexually active gay man, you need every three months to go and get checked up to make sure you don't have siphlist and connorrhea.

00:11:42
Speaker 1: This is Richard Burkowitz. He was twenty three when he moved to New York to study film at NYU.

00:11:48
Speaker 4: The responsible gay man who cares about his community. Every three months get to a clinic get tested because the rates were skyrocketing.

00:11:57
Speaker 1: Berkowitz was young, handsome, and and he quickly figured out that he could make a lot of money as an escort. It wasn't long before he had occasion to visit a community clinic for gay men in Greenwich Village.

00:12:11
Speaker 4: And I was really fortunate because my chart just happened to be handed to whatever doctor was available at the moment. And in that moment, it was doctor Joseph Sonoband who became my personal e Moses.

00:12:25
Speaker 1: Joseph Sonoband was a virologist originally from South Africa. He was gay, and he had dedicated his practice in New York to helping men like Richard Berkowitz stay healthy. Berkowitz became close with Sonoband after getting infected with hepatitis A. Sonoband told him that he needed to contact all of his sexual partners and tell them to come see him.

00:12:46
Speaker 4: Most guys when he said that would just like roll their eyes. It's like, how do you contact a guy from the bath? How do you contact a guy from the Saint Balcony. You couldn't do partner tracing when you're going to the baths and having affected five different people. But I had a sex worklog of every client I'd seen, and I had a lot of phone calls to make that day.

00:13:08
Speaker 1: When Sonoban looked at Berkowitz's blood work, he noticed that his patient was showing signs of immune deficiency. He called Burkewitz back to his office, at which point he also noticed a number of swollen glands.

00:13:20
Speaker 4: He started putting his two sets of fingers under my neck, under my arm pit. He said, Oh my god, there's another swollen glen here. There's another swollen glen here. There's another swollen glan here. And I'm like freaking out, getting like gnauseris.

00:13:35
Speaker 1: Sonobin suggested Berkowitz get a biopsy, and at first Berkowitz refused. He was scared, and he avoided going back to Sonoban's office for several months.

00:13:46
Speaker 9: Hello hello, Hi, are you huh?

00:13:48
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:13:49
Speaker 1: In the meantime, Berkowitz and his friends would talk on the phone about the gay cancer And I.

00:13:54
Speaker 13: Had this big article in the paper about this this gay cancer con man. Yeah, will you say this for.

00:13:59
Speaker 1: The Burkowitz recorded many of his calls and collected them in a personal archive. He and his friends would talk about people they knew who were getting sick and what they were going through.

00:14:10
Speaker 7: He's got it, but he's not saying he's got it. He's keeping it a secret from everybody.

00:14:15
Speaker 13: And you do something you don't want to tell people when you have cancer. They don't want you in your house, they don't want you know what I'm trying to say.

00:14:19
Speaker 7: If you have cant catchy want they can't belive in catsne.

00:14:21
Speaker 13: Yeah, but still there's a stigma that goes along with having cancer. It's like, you know, stay away.

00:14:27
Speaker 1: Burkowitz heard about other people who seem to be developing symptoms of the new disease. The stories hit close to home.

00:14:34
Speaker 4: I had a lot of the escorts who were friends of mine, and one of them was Hibiscus, and I heard that he was sick from other escorts.

00:14:47
Speaker 1: Berkowitz was told that Hibiscus had gone to a hospital in the village. Then the news spread that Hibiscus was dead.

00:14:54
Speaker 4: And that freaked me out because we shared a client.

00:14:58
Speaker 1: After that, burke Whitz finally got his biopsy. When he got home, he decided that his days as an escort were over. He and Hibiscus had advertised in the same magazine. Their ads were right next to each others.

00:15:11
Speaker 4: I walked over to the phone. I called near a telephone. I said, disconnect both my phone numbers. I'm done. I mean, I thought that said I'm going to die twenty six.

00:15:24
Speaker 1: Berkelwitz asked Sonoban to level with him.

00:15:26
Speaker 4: I said everything I'm reading everyone with AIDS dies. You know, I have swollen glands, I have night sweats, I have fevers. I had epichatius. Say it eppatatus, b am I dying? And he looked at me and said, well, actually no.

00:15:40
Speaker 1: Sonoban then shared his theory of the new disease. Unlike some doctors and scientists who were convinced from very early on that AIDS was caused by a virus, Sonoban believed that gay men living in cities like New York and San Francisco had simply burned out their immune systems. They had had too much sex with too many partners, done too many drugs, and gotten too many sexually transmitted diseases. AIDS, Sonobin told Berkowitz was the cumulative result of too many bad decisions, and he.

00:16:11
Speaker 4: Said, Richard, you need everything possible to protect your immune system and stay as healthy as you can to fight off whatever's causing this. You know, this notion that you know it's just a virus, it's just stupid. You're getting repeatedly infected with hepatatus say hepatatus be, syphilist gunner rhea, stomach parasites. I mean, do I have to go down the list? Herpes a, herpes be? I mean it was like exploding, he said. Anybody who thinks that there's not a cumulative consequence to constantly be infected with this, he said, they're you know, they're in denial.

00:16:45
Speaker 1: Whatever this new thing was. Sonoban said it was not just one virus that you could catch from a single sexual encounter. Rather, it was an avoidable outcome of certain behaviors, one that might even be reversible.

00:16:58
Speaker 4: He said, you need to understand that it's not a hopeful situation. And if you stop exposing yourself to all these things, you know, I think you're going to be all right.

00:17:09
Speaker 1: Sonobin wanted to get the word out about his theory. Here he is talking about it on a local news broadcast.

00:17:16
Speaker 14: I suppose the most simplistic and easiest way to view this is that there was a new biological agent that was being transmitted from group to group.

00:17:24
Speaker 4: You believe that, of.

00:17:25
Speaker 14: Course, not on this absurd It's just totally absurd, and it's based on the whole superstructure of conjecture.

00:17:31
Speaker 1: Berkowitz embraced Sonoban's theory wholeheartedly. He excitedly told his friends about what he'd learned.

00:17:37
Speaker 13: Well, I spoke to my doctor with this week. I just wanted to talk to him. Yeah, for he said, first of all, the only people who get this are that hardcore, heavy duty you know, Friday Sunday, every weekend drugs and fucking baths and orgies back rooms. And you're trying to say this cancer comes from a good ten to fifteen years of every weekend drugs, multiple sex, and kinky sex. That's what this comes from, every weekend.

00:18:04
Speaker 1: Sonobin's theory of AIDS came to be known as the multi factorial theory. It was wrong, and though Sonoban eventually did soften his views and allow that AIDS was caused by a virus, his longtime skepticism earned him a somewhat uneasy place in the history of the disease. It's important to realize, though, that back in nineteen eighty two, Sonoban's ideas weren't competing with some widely accepted scientific consensus. As you'll hear later in the series, the theory that AIDS was caused by a virus took years to confirm. In the meantime, Sonobin distinguished himself by being one of the first doctors anywhere to start researching AIDS and treating people who had it, and his faith in the multifactorial theory led him to advocate for an idea that even his critics acknowledge was right on the money. Gay men needed to start having safer sex. In Richard Burkowitz, Sonoban found an enthusiastic messenger.

00:19:05
Speaker 4: When Sonoman told me that I was going to live, that there was a good chance I could live, I said to him, I just quit my job. I never told my escort it. I said, I just quit my job. A good all this time? What had you to help? And he said, well, I have another patient I wants to help. I know it was rough for you and your brother.

00:19:26
Speaker 1: Sonoban's other patient was a twenty seven year old named Michael Callen. He was a singer who performed at piano bars around New York.

00:19:36
Speaker 12: If you could see through my eyes.

00:19:42
Speaker 1: Like Berkowitz, Callen had recently been diagnosed with AIDS. Berkowitz actually recorded the first few seconds of his first ever phone call with Callen from nineteen eighty two. Sadly he taped over the rest, but it's still kind of magical to hear it.

00:19:56
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, Michael Callen, Callen, Hi, my name is Rich Burkowitz, right, yeah, Yeah.

00:20:04
Speaker 4: We had both been woken up to Sonobin's ideas that it was actually possible to survive this thing that everyone was calling the end of the world. Once you get it, you're dead. It was the first way of hope, and so in that moment we connected.

00:20:17
Speaker 1: Berkowitz and Kllen bonded over the energetic sex lives they had led prior to their diagnoses. After Berkowitz told Callen he'd been an escort, Kllen confessed he had been with approximately three thousand men. He had done the math because the CDC had just recently interviewed him for a study.

00:20:33
Speaker 4: He said, well, I've had three thousand minute my butt, You're a whore. What are the perfect ones? Start writing? About Sonomin's ideas.

00:20:41
Speaker 1: Berkowitz and Callen got to work right away. At the time, Callen was a full time paralegal, and when he left the office at five o'clock every day, Berkowitz would meet him at his Greenwich Village apartment. Together, they started writing an essay, a kind of open letter in which they would address their fellow gay men.

00:20:59
Speaker 4: In between the writing, he would sometimes bake the most delicious cookies. He had a beat up piano in his apartment.

00:21:05
Speaker 3: I know, I said, it would be a kid.

00:21:09
Speaker 4: He would like play some music and I would sit on the fire scape and I'd look at it at the city Scotland and think, oh my god, just like a storm coming. It's gonna kill so many people. And it's up to us to try to weak people up, to get, you know, to duck for cover. Honey, I know you must go.

00:21:29
Speaker 1: As they worked on their essay, Berkowitz and Callen attended an early support group for gay men with AIDS. There they found like minded people who also didn't want to resign themselves to an inevitable death. The experience informed Burkowitz and Kwen's writing, and after a few months they came up with a piece that was straightforward, a little funny in places, and full of knowing references to the lifestyle the authors have been enjoying until recently.

00:21:54
Speaker 4: Michael said to me, we're gonna call this we Know Who we Are. We live this lifestyle, we loved this lifestyle, and we're going to talk to you like sluts, like gay men of our generation, and we're going to tell you like it is, and we're going to talk to it in a language that you'll recognize and understand as part of your community. Not the whole community, but the sexual active community.

00:22:16
Speaker 1: When Berkowitz and Kallen were done with We Know Who We Are, there was really only one publication they could imagine submitting it to.

00:22:24
Speaker 4: We knew we had to go to the Native, you know, to try to get published, because it was the only newspaper in town that was the outlet for getting information about the ads out to gay men.

00:22:35
Speaker 1: We Know Who We Are ran in The Native in November of nineteen eighty two with a subtitle two Gay Men declare War on Promiscuity. In it, Berkowitz and Kallen urged caution the obvious and immediate solution to the present crisis. They wrote, is the end of urban gay male promiscuity as we know it today?

00:22:54
Speaker 6: Can I get you to read from We know who we.

00:22:56
Speaker 4: Are as we must care enough about ourselves to begin this reevaluation. Gay men are dying as a community. We must initiate and control this process ourselves. Be assured that if we aren't willing to conduct it, others will do it for us. The federal government, to the Centers for Disease Control is already taking a long, hard look at our behavior.

00:23:23
Speaker 1: The article wasn't all bracing rhetoric. Berkowitz and Kalen also shared some pragmatic advice about how gay men could have safer sex. For example, they suggested that the concept of fuck buddies could be modified to become pods of healthy people who only had sex with each other. But ultimately, Berkowitz and Kalen were unequivocal.

00:23:44
Speaker 4: We could continue to deny overwhelming evidence that the prison health crisis is a direct result of the unprecedented promiscuity that has occurred since Stonewall, but such denial is killing us. Denial will continue to kill us until we begin the difficult task of changing the ways in which we have sex. Let me tell you that paragraph. It's not me, that's Michael talking with depressing urgency of disease and death.

00:24:14
Speaker 1: Sean Strube, the young Columbia student turned copy editor at the New York Native, remembers when the article came out, every.

00:24:20
Speaker 6: Gay man who had any consciousness about being gay or part of the.

00:24:24
Speaker 11: Gay read that article.

00:24:26
Speaker 4: You know, it was absolutely read by everybody.

00:24:29
Speaker 1: The article resonated, even if some people didn't want to hear what Burkowitz and Callen were saying.

00:24:34
Speaker 6: It was like a splash of cold water in this community because people couldn't read that article and not see themselves in it. To one extent or another. There was a lot of denial. You know, I'm not that promiscuous. I don't go to that place. I don't do that particular sexual practice. But underneath it they knew.

00:24:52
Speaker 1: Many readers were furious at berkowitzen Callen for what they saw as a demand to halt their sex lives altogether.

00:24:58
Speaker 12: I'm a gay man. Took me years to bring myself to say that openly and with pride.

00:25:03
Speaker 1: One columnist for The Native published a rebuttal to Callan and Berkowitz, called in defense of promiscuity. He went on local television to make his point.

00:25:12
Speaker 12: Certainly, my sexuality is only a part of my gayness, but it is the central part. If I can't join another man's body to mind, then how am I gay? Liking Bet Midler isn't enough.

00:25:22
Speaker 4: Make no mistake.

00:25:24
Speaker 12: I know about this disease, and I know it may strike me tomorrow. I'm scared. The crucial question is how will I let my fear affect me? I know what I won't do. I won't give up the physical expression of intimacy and in my sexual encounters, we won't start out with a health quiz, Nor will we limit our love making to certain acts I refused.

00:25:45
Speaker 1: Sean Strew remembers the prevailing feeling among his friends during this time as being as much about indifference and avoidance as it was about fear and anger.

00:25:53
Speaker 6: Wats of my friends didn't want to hear about it, you know? I mean I can remember being at events for or a host would say, Okay, let's let's not talk about AIDS tonight. You know, let's not talk about the gay cancer tonight, where they kind of like put that out as something that couldn't be discussed.

00:26:09
Speaker 1: Strube told me that at this point he didn't have a clear sense that some people had aids and others didn't. He experienced it more like a growing ominous presence, one that called the future of everyone around him into question. Do you remember when that turned into a feeling that there was a death sentence hanging over you?

00:26:27
Speaker 6: Yes, in those first years I knew it had something to do with me, but huge numbers of people had stolen influence. You know, it was a massive community. I wasn't singular, This wasn't any sort of secret. It wasn't you know whatever. You know, you would be in bed with somebody and.

00:26:44
Speaker 11: You know, and do you have someone?

00:26:45
Speaker 6: Look, yeah, I do, feeling each other and you know, talking about it, comparing it all the time.

00:26:49
Speaker 4: Is that right?

00:26:49
Speaker 1: You remember you remember being in bed with someone and like feeling each other's.

00:26:53
Speaker 6: Absolutely multiple people. I remember the night I met Michael Misso was my part who died in nineteen eighty eight. The night we met, we were both talking about having, you know, lymph clients that swelled at times, and we talked about the epidemic and and I guess by then the idea that this was something, you know, potentially contagious had emerged.

00:27:21
Speaker 1: As more and more people got sick, news about who had the disease and who was dying of it would spread, almost like gossip. Strube and one of his friends started keeping a written tally.

00:27:33
Speaker 6: We talk on the phone every day, and we just started comparing notes, and you know, I heard, did you hear?

00:27:42
Speaker 4: You know?

00:27:42
Speaker 13: I don't know.

00:27:42
Speaker 6: Bobby went back to Minneapolis to you know, see his family. But it's been like a month.

00:27:46
Speaker 11: I don't know.

00:27:46
Speaker 6: Do you think something's going on? And we put Bobby down question mark, And we started keeping a list of everybody we heard who was sick or who had you know, had lost weight. We were, you know, wondering about and when people die, you know, we'd cross them off.

00:28:09
Speaker 1: Larry Mass, the physician who wrote the first article about AIDS for the New York Native, looks back on this time with some regret. He was too worried about stoking panic, he says, and too hesitant to make recommendations to his readers while the science of the disease was still so uncertain.

00:28:25
Speaker 11: I was someone who, you know, had all these misgivings, what about our civil rights? What about you know, what exactly we're going to tell people? I wanted clarity I felt that go tell everybody just to stop havingly. That wasn't going to work. You know, I look back on it now, I mean we were too cautious. I was too cautious.

00:28:45
Speaker 1: Not everyone in massive circle was so cautious. Mass had one friend in particular who was more than willing to sound an early alarm. That friend was a writer named Larry Kramer, who would become probably the most famous name in the history of AIDS activism.

00:29:01
Speaker 4: Plague. We are in the middle of a fucking plague.

00:29:06
Speaker 3: We are in the worst shape we have ever, ever ever been in.

00:29:12
Speaker 11: I have a fifty year friendship with Larry, going way back. Larry was one of the people I knew in New York, one of the people I first came to see. Larry was my first inspiration as a writer. Had a lot of feeling in regard for Larry, but even I really didn't know where Larry was coming from. He was extremely angry, volcanically incessantly angry.

00:29:41
Speaker 1: It was a disposition well suited to the moment. From the very beginning, Kramer saw the new disease as an existential threat to gay life, and he took some decisive early steps to bring attention to it.

00:29:53
Speaker 3: We have found a complete and utter lack of interest in it on part the gay and the medical and straight communities altogether.

00:30:01
Speaker 10: Or do you think that is I think it's scary.

00:30:04
Speaker 3: I think in terms of the straight community, it's because basically it's homophobia, or not even homophobia. I do not think that heterosexuals are interested in homosexuals. I don't think it's homophobia. I just think it's a complete and utter lack of interest. And that's okay. I mean, what can you do.

00:30:18
Speaker 1: Kramer is usually described as the co founder of act UP, the transformative protest group he helped start in nineteen eighty seven, but all that came much later. In the early eighties, Kramer was just a screenwriter and author. One of his screenplays have been nominated for an Oscar, but he was perhaps best known for a polarizing novel published in nineteen seventy eight, in which he satirized the sexual politics of post liberation New York. We have here this morning Larry Kramer, the author of the controversial novel Fagots.

00:30:49
Speaker 4: Good morning Larry, Good morning Randy.

00:30:52
Speaker 3: I would just like somebody to say introduce me as being other than controversial.

00:30:57
Speaker 1: If Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen put themselves forward as young libertines, Larry Kramer had earned a reputation in gay circles as someone who was hopelessly old fashioned, even squeamish, about certain aspects of the gay liberation movement.

00:31:11
Speaker 3: Well, I do think that one of the problems that we're going through now is that we treat ourselves almost exclusively as sexual beings. And while I think sex is fine, and I'm not promulgating that we don't do what we want to do, I think we've come to look upon ourselves strictly in sexual terms, treating each other as only a sexual objects.

00:31:33
Speaker 1: Larry Mass regarded his friend's novel as a judgmental text, a condemnation of a lifestyle that Kramer disapproved of.

00:31:41
Speaker 11: Faggots is basically a great warning to the gay community that you're on the precipice, and you know, the character's name in Faggots is fred Lemish, and basically the images of a lemming going with all these all these other lemmings, you know, off the cliff, because you know, it was like a suicidal lives that we were living.

00:32:05
Speaker 1: I can't decide if Kramer's posture towards the gay liberation movement made him an awkward fit for AIDS activism, or if it made him the perfect man for the job. Regardless, he was motivated and connected enough to get people's attention. In nineteen eighty two, Kramer and five other men, including Larry Mass, co founded an organization called Gay Men's Health Crisis or GMHC for short. At first, they mostly raised money for doctors studying the new disease, but as the outbreak got worse, some GMHC members became more focused on providing care to people who were sick and had nowhere else to turn.

00:32:47
Speaker 11: We had no other resources but ourselves, you know, the hospitals, but especially the government, the city, the City Department of Health. Nobody was, you know, really there for us.

00:33:02
Speaker 1: As they brought on more volunteers, GMHC filled the vacuum in the city. All over New York, there were men who were suffering and dying alone. In many cases, they had been rejected even by their families.

00:33:16
Speaker 11: They had nobody to help them at home, they had nobody to talk to, nobody to help them at multiple levels, and most of them were dying.

00:33:27
Speaker 8: Hello Hi, Bill, Hi, Hi. This is Roger McFarland from the Gay Men's Health Crisis. Oh hi, Hi, what can I do for?

00:33:33
Speaker 1: One of GMHC's earliest volunteers, Roger McFarlane, turned his home phone number into a hotline for people who thought they might be sick. On the first night the hotline was up, McFarlane sat in his living room closet and took more than one hundred calls.

00:33:48
Speaker 8: Hi Bill, Hi, I'm sorry I just connected this.

00:33:50
Speaker 12: Yeah, that's okay.

00:33:51
Speaker 8: So you talked to the social worker and you're still able to work, and they're going to start treating you at Saint Vincent's in a protocol there with doctor Combe.

00:33:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know if they're going to treat me as such or.

00:34:02
Speaker 1: Over the coming months. People called in with questions about which doctors to see, which hospitals to go to, and how to pay for medical care.

00:34:09
Speaker 8: Then there's a couple of things I can suggest. First of all, we do need to see where they're going to refer you. If she doesn't know where to refer you to, I can certainly give her a call.

00:34:20
Speaker 1: And sometimes the calls were less about what to do and more about how to cope with what was happening.

00:34:27
Speaker 13: I am so scared and.

00:34:30
Speaker 7: Be so scared.

00:34:31
Speaker 11: I'm only twenty four years old.

00:34:33
Speaker 15: If I have this, I'm going to die and I'm going to freak out.

00:34:45
Speaker 1: It was in part to help people with the emotional toll of the disease that GMHC created a buddy system that paired the healthy with the sick. Mass himself was never officially part of the buddy system, but he did his fair share of visiting friends in the hospital, and when he did, he tried to do for them the kinds of things that buddies tended to do. One friend wanted to spend his last days in drag, so Mass brought him jewelry to wear in his hospital bed. Another friend, Vito Russo, a gay activist and writer for the New York Native, wanted Mass to rub his feet.

00:35:21
Speaker 11: I had a kind of gmac buddy moment with him. I said, Veto, I said, you know, you've you've been this, you know, fierce great activist, and you know there's so much that isn't being done, and there's so much that so many of us could have done. And and I broke down. I started crying. I said, you know, I'm so sorry. That I wasn't the activist that you all needed. They needed people like Larry and Veto. Not everybody was a Larry or Veto. I mean I wasn't. I'm just not in that league. Larry never accepted that. He said, why aren't you angrier? You know you have to. You know, Larry wouldn't accept that. You know, he was this special, great leader person. He felt that everybody could do lots and lots more and you know, should have been doing that. So I broke down with Veto and I cried, I was I said, I'm so sorry that I wasn't more and better. And he looked at me with that sparkle as I says, I love you, Larry. A lot of memories, a lot of stuff.

00:36:46
Speaker 15: With me in New York is Larry Kramer. He's co founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis task for how many friends have you lost to this disease? Twenty twenty?

00:36:55
Speaker 3: Yes, those are.

00:36:56
Speaker 1: By the fall of nineteen eighty two, nearly six hundred people in the United States have been diagnosed with AIDS, and two hundred and forty three had died. Larry Kramer was only getting angrier.

00:37:09
Speaker 15: And you have still more friends who are sick, very ill.

00:37:12
Speaker 3: Jane, can you imagine what it must be like if you had lost twenty of your friends in the last eighteen.

00:37:17
Speaker 15: Months and you don't know why.

00:37:20
Speaker 3: No cause, no cure, people in hospitals, we can't. It's a very angry community. We feel like a disenfranchised for community. We can't seem to get the government, the National Institutes of Health to accelerate the research.

00:37:35
Speaker 15: That's going on.

00:37:35
Speaker 3: We can't even get the mayor of New York City to acknowledge publicly that there's a health emergency crisis going on. We feel very isolated down in Atlanta.

00:37:44
Speaker 1: New York City was the epicenter of the growing crisis, but local government was doing almost nothing about AIDS. Activists pleaded with the city for funding to pay for things like housing for people with AIDS and a health clinic in the village and a hospice center for all the people who were dying. Mayor at Koch rejected each of these requests, and the longer the mayor dragged his feet, the more confrontational. Larry Kramer became.

00:38:10
Speaker 3: I'm a member of an organization of two hundred volunteers doing things that the city should be doing that. The Red Cross should be during the Cancer Society will not give us twenty nine cents. Mayor Koch has not yet given us twenty nine cents. We have to do it ourselves. We're fighting to get funding.

00:38:25
Speaker 1: On March fourteenth, nineteen eighty three, Kramer published an article that ran on the cover of the New York Native under the headline one thousand, one hundred and twelve and counting it was a true creedcur in which Kramer declared that homosexuals had never been closer to extinction. Here is Kramer reading from the piece.

00:38:46
Speaker 3: Unless we can generate visibly numbers masses, we are going to die. I am sick of everyone in this community who tells me to stop creating a panic. How many of us have to die before you get off your ass, get scared off your ass and into action.

00:39:03
Speaker 11: Every straight person who is.

00:39:05
Speaker 3: Knowledgeable about the AIDS epidemic can't understand why gay men aren't marching on the White House.

00:39:12
Speaker 1: For Kramer, the situation was so dire that even the volunteer care work that GMHC was doing struck him as beside the point. Eventually he left the organization.

00:39:22
Speaker 11: He said, it's good that GMAC is providing these services. It's good that GMAC is helping these people. There's no question that these are good people doing good work. But what GMHC is doing is helping them die rather than live.

00:39:41
Speaker 1: Kramer thought he needed to scare his fellow gay men into awareness and action. Meanwhile, Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen were trying in their way to reassure them. Two months after Kramer's essay came out in the Native Berkowitz and Kalen put out a scorcher of their own, a pamphlet called how to Have Set in an Epidemic. Once again, it was based on the ideas of doctor Joseph sonoband.

00:40:06
Speaker 4: We had sonoband walking us through the microbiological consequences of every type of sex act. It was my experience as a sex worker that turned into a forty page pamphlet because I had seen everything gay men would even consider calling sexual expression.

00:40:24
Speaker 1: How to Have Sex in an Epidemic picked up where Berkowitz and Callen had left off with we Know who we Are, but this time they wanted to emphasize that they weren't calling for an end to gay sex altogether. The pamphlet was full of frank, practical advice about how to have sex without incurring unnecessary risk.

00:40:42
Speaker 4: We gave people every possible shred of information we could think of so that they can make their own journey, make their own decisions, and not have people telling them what to do. And we did it in a language that sexually after gay men spoke. We did it with humor, and we did it clearly.

00:41:02
Speaker 1: How to have sex in an epidemic was a hit. Burkowitz and Kallen delivered copies to doctor's offices in the West Village and handed them out at events and local fundraisers. They found it hard to keep up with demand. At one point, Burkowitz attended a forum on AIDS and ran out of copies before all the attendees who wanted the pamphlet grab one. Afterwards, Burkwood's told Callen about it over the phone.

00:41:24
Speaker 9: I'm telling you people, just the title people were laughing in. When you sit there and you listen to all these things, it hits you in the gut. You're in this auditorium with two thousand gay men and all they're talking about is death and you, no matter what they say, what really hits home is the parties over.

00:41:39
Speaker 13: What are we going to do then?

00:41:41
Speaker 9: And the reaction you tend to see is that, well, if I can't be promiscous and don't want to be gay, who needs all this?

00:41:45
Speaker 13: Who wants these people? Who cares about this?

00:41:47
Speaker 9: I mean, I want my party? How many I had?

00:41:50
Speaker 13: Nine hundred may As.

00:41:51
Speaker 1: The pamphlet raised their profile, Burkowitz and Kallen heard about an upcoming gathering of AIDS activists in Denver, Colorado. It would turn out to be a foundational event in the epidemics history. The idea was for a delegation of people with AIDS from around the country to show up at a medical conference focused on gay health and address the doctors and scientists in attendance. One of the organizers of the gathering was Bobby Campbell, the nurse from San Francisco who had emerged as one of the first people ever to speak publicly about having AIDS.

00:42:22
Speaker 5: I encourage you to contact through the doctors to find other brothers who have this illness, so that we can talk to each other and support each other through this.

00:42:31
Speaker 4: So you are forming support networks. That's right. It's easier to be positive together.

00:42:36
Speaker 5: That's certainly true.

00:42:38
Speaker 1: Basically, Campbell put out a call on the gay press saying that anyone who had AIDS should consider flying out to Denver for the conference. After raising some money for airfare, Berkowitz and Callen made the trip.

00:42:49
Speaker 4: You know, we knew when we got there that this is going to be a momentous coming together of gay men at the forefront in the first wave of battling AIDS.

00:42:59
Speaker 1: Callen immediately hit it off with Campbell and they started collaborating on a written statement to present at the conference.

00:43:05
Speaker 4: Michael and Bobby Campbell were like the two top dogs of the group, the two control queens, so they took control of writing this document, and they would write together, and then all of us would get back into this hospitality suite and listen to what they read and give our feedback. And after a couple of days it turned to the Denver Principles, and when it was done, it was just breathtakingly brilliant.

00:43:29
Speaker 1: The Denver Principles opened with a declaration, we condemn attempts to label us as victims, a term which implies defeat, and we are only occasionally patients, a term which implies passivity, helplessness, and dependence upon the care of others. The activists said they wanted to be referred to as people with AIDS. Standing on the conference's main stage next to a banner that read fighting for Our Lives, each of the eleven men took reading the Denver Principles out loud, line by line. It amounted to a kind of bill of rights.

00:44:08
Speaker 4: The rights of people with AIDS to as full and satisfying sexual and emotional lives as anyone else. To quality medical treatment and quality social service provision without discrimination of any form. To full explanations of all medical procedures and risk, to choose or refuse their treatment modalities, to refuse to participate in research without jeopardizing their treatment, and to make informed decisions about their lives, to human respect, and to choose who their significant others are, to die and to live in dignity, Denver, nineteen eighty three.

00:44:56
Speaker 1: Before Denver AIDS, activism had been happening in separate silo around the country in cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Now those early activists had come together and staked out a position on how they planned to fit in to whatever was coming next. Afterwards, Berkelwitz continued doing media appearances to publicize the message.

00:45:18
Speaker 11: You don't like the term, Richard, victim of AIDS.

00:45:22
Speaker 7: I guess it's also a response to the media coverage which keeps saying that all victims of AIDS are dying. That has a mortality rate of eighty two hundred percent, and that's pretty demoralizing when you're trying to fight a life threatening illness for which there is no proven treatment or cure.

00:45:37
Speaker 8: What's the prognosis for you, Richard, Well, I'm still immune deficient, but my blood tests are all getting better.

00:45:42
Speaker 7: My fatigue and my fevers are gone. I don't believe any more than I'm going to die. I've stopped checking for lesions.

00:45:51
Speaker 1: The meeting in Denver led to the founding of the National Association of People with AIDS, and to this day, the Denver Principles remain embedded in the mission states of many AIDS organizations around the world. Perhaps most importantly, the Denver Principles gave people who got diagnosed with AIDS or reason to not give up. Sean Strub, for example, was inspired to go into AIDS fundraising and to start a magazine called Pause for and By People with HIV and AIDS.

00:46:20
Speaker 6: Every time you'd hear about the epidemic, it was inevitably fatal, dread disease, no survivors, no cure, terminal illness, one hundred percent fatal. You were bombarded with death sentence messages, It's all anybody heard, death sentence, death sentence, death sentence, including within the gay community. And yet those of us kind of in the middle of the activism saw something different. You know, we saw unspeakable levels of pain and loss, but we also saw a vitality and purpose. You know, some of the happiest times in my life were also times when I had the the least confidence I was going to be able to survive.

00:47:04
Speaker 1: So much of early AIDS activism was directed inwards at the people who were at risk and the people who were already sick, but that was only part of the picture. Slowing the spread of AIDS would require measures that went far beyond any one individual's personal behavior or decision making. AIDS activists would have to reach beyond their own communities and contend with government officials who could not be trusted to have their best interests at heart. On the next episode of Fiasco, we leave New York for San Francisco, were a push to shut down the city's gay bathhouses in order to slow the spread of AIDS ignited a battle over public health and civil liberties.

00:48:08
Speaker 10: This whole debate was occurring in this context of many people from the radical right expressing really extreme measures. It was unreasonable for people to fear how slippery that slope might be.

00:48:26
Speaker 4: Say what is not?

00:48:31
Speaker 3: Change?

00:48:34
Speaker 1: Fiasco was presented by Audible Originals and Prologue Projects. The show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Sam Graham, Felsen, Battlin, kaplan Ula Culpa, and me Leon Napok. Editorial support by Nour Waswas and Jessica Miller. Our researcher is Francis Carr. Archival research by Michelle Sullivan. This season's score is composed by Edith Mudge. Additional music by Nick Silvester of Godman, as well as Billy libby Joel Saint, Julian and Dan English, Noah Hecht and Joe Valley. Our theme song is by Spatial Relations Music Licensing courtesy of Anthony Roman. Our credit song this week is How to Have Sex by Michael Callen, courtesy of Richard Dwarkin. You also heard Can He Find Another One? By Double Discovery courtesy of Eugenia Publishing Company, an Era Recording Studio. Audio mixed by Erica Wong with additional support from Selina Urabe. Our artwork is designed by Teddy Blanks at Chips and Y. David Blum is the editor in chief of Audible Originals, Mike Charzik is the vice president of Audible Studios. Zach Ross is the head of acquisition and Development for Audible. Thanks to the LGBT Community Center National History Archive for giving us access to the Michael Callen collection. Thanks also to Archive dot Org, Ginny Apuzzo, Henry Waxman, Michael Bronski, Victor Bumblow, and Brian Erstadt. Special thanks to Peter Yasse. See you next week for episode three.

00:50:03
Speaker 10: Work Back It's Healthy s