The Gay Revolution by Faderman Lillian

The Gay Revolution by Faderman Lillian

Author:Faderman, Lillian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2015-09-07T16:00:00+00:00


Chapter 23

THE PLAGUE

PARIAHS

The disease appeared out of nowhere. In June 1981 a thirty-three-year-old physician and assistant professor of medicine at UCLA, Michael Gottlieb, reported in the Centers for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that between October 1980 and May 1981, there’d been five cases in Los Angeles hospitals of previously healthy young men whose biopsies had confirmed a rare illness, pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, which, he wrote, had been seen before only in severely immunosuppressed patients. All the young men were active homosexuals. By the time Dr. Gottlieb wrote the report, two had already died.1

The following month, the Centers for Disease Control reported that twenty-six homosexual men had been diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare cancer that shows up as skin lesions. Twenty of those men were in New York, and six in Los Angeles and San Francisco—three cities that had led the gay revolution of the preceding decade. Eight of the men were already dead.2 The New York Times article that announced the sudden appearance of this “gay cancer” emphasized that in most cases the men had been promiscuous, having “as many as ten sexual encounters each night, up to four times a week.”3 The Times revised the figures upward a year or so later. Many of the infected had had “sex with fifteen to twenty deliberately anonymous men” per night on a typical visit to a gay bathhouse, the country’s most widely read newspaper reported.4

The Far Right did not waste the shock value. Paleoconservative Patrick Buchanan gloated in his syndicated column that AIDS was a sign that “Nature is exacting retribution”; but now, he wrote, not only were these homosexuals a “moral menace,” they were a “public health menace,” too. Buchanan reported that policemen were so worried about getting AIDS and bringing it home to their families that they had to don masks and gloves when dealing with homosexual lawbreakers; landlords were so worried about the spread of AIDS on their premises that they had to evict infected homosexuals from their property. Because of homosexuals’ morally irresponsible and unhealthy sex practices, they were the spreaders of a host of other diseases, too, that could affect innocent heterosexuals, such as hepatitis. Therefore, Buchanan ranted, they must not be allowed to work in restaurants or any job in which they handled food.5 “Gay rights”—homosexuals’ demands to live and work wherever they wanted—were dangerous to heterosexuals.

In his column, Buchanan called for the total undoing of the bits of progress that gays and lesbians had been slowly making toward civil rights, and the undoing of the Democratic Party along with them. At the last Democratic National Convention, in 1980, seventy-seven of the seated delegates had been openly gay or lesbian and had agitated for the adoption of a gay plank. To get a hearing on the convention floor, they nominated for vice president Melvin Boozer, a young African American PhD from Yale who was then a sociology professor at the University of Maryland. Boozer was also the head of the DC



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