The Early Days of HIV/AIDS - 1982-84: The Bathhouse Debates and Death
Liberty and Community, Civil Rights vs. Public Health, "Today the Baths, Tomorrow the Ovens!", SHUT IT DOWN!, Death, Lessons Not Learned, Concluding Remarks
Previous Entry - Patient Zero Part 2
It is common for young people to flirt with libertarian ideas in their youth. I certainly was not an exception to this, as I spent around six or seven years interacting with libertarians, discussing and debating their ideas, and testing them out theoretically before dismissing them as impractical on a large scale, besides other criticisms of philosophical approach. This should not be interpreted as a wholesale rejection of what libertarians have to say, as many of them have valid criticisms of the way things are run these days. In the end, I simply could not agree with what they advocated as remedies.
Some of their arguments still own real estate in my brain. For instance, one friend (Gary J., American) would remind me that “rights cannot conflict”. This concept is predicated on the rejection of the notion of “community rights”, and is championed by libertarians who reside on the traditional right of the political spectrum. The right of the individual is paramount, and therefore collective rights cannot exist (unless voluntarily agreed to by each and every participant and enshrined by covenant) because to allow its existence means that an individual’s right can be infringed upon, and that is a no-no.
This to me was the first big red flag regarding libertarianism (at least its right-wing variant, as I had much less exposure to left-libertarianism in those days). To them, property rights are how individual rights can best be secured. I decided to test this theory out with them by way of hypothetical scenarios. I asked them if an individual had the right to store nuclear waste on his own property. “Yes!”, they loudly replied, “property rights are sacrosanct!”. I followed this up by asking them how they took into consideration the threats to the health of his neighbours. “That’s their own responsibility” they explained to me, “as he is free to do on his own property whatever he wants”. “What about a pervert who masturbates on his front porch every day in full view of children who are being dropped off by the school bus?”, I continued. “He is free to do whatever he wants on his own property”, they reiterated. I wasn’t impressed.
I then offered up one more scenario that was real and that took place in my home county in 1992 as the war moved into Bosnia-Hercegovina: “In my county, anyone who didn’t join to fight to defend our land had their house blown up by our guys. You don’t want to fight? Okay, but you lose your house.”1
“Did they own their houses and land?”, they asked me. “Yes”, I replied. “Then that is a violation of their property rights”, they retorted. “Collective defence means that everyone’s homes get defended collectively. You cannot create islands comprised of single properties when the whole is being attacked”, I patiently explained. Despite my best efforts, my attempts to reason with them fell on deaf ears. There is a subset of people who cannot see beyond the individual, and who convince themselves that they are indeed islands, or at least castles surrounded by a deadly moat.
Liberty, particularly the individual kind, is hard-coded into America’s DNA. Just like you cannot understand British politics and culture without understanding its unique history of class dynamics, it is impossible to understand American culture and politics without understanding its emphasis on liberty and personal freedom, and the rights that guarantee it. Property rights, gun rights, civil rights, women’s rights, equal rights, gay rights, transgender rights…….the history of the USA is littered with examples of how ‘rights’ have played a central role throughout it.
The earlier entries in this series delved into how the gay rights movement created the conditions for gay liberation and ushered in a ‘golden age’ for gays in the USA during the 1970s. As the homosexual act was central to the identity of these rights-seeking gays, and especially because men are men (always ‘up for it’), having gay sex was in itself an act of political liberation. They were finally ‘free’. Catching an STD was a badge of honour for many of these young men (as we saw in an earlier entry), one that was easily fixed by a shot from a “clap doctor”. Little harm, no foul. It was a small price to pay for the freedom that they were finally able to fully enjoy.
It took two years (1979-81) for the medical establishment to realize that something had gone horribly wrong; healthy and young gay men were dying for unknown reasons, often from exotic diseases traditionally seen in tiny numbers that only affected old men. As medical specialists and tuned-in gays learned more about what was happening in the gay community, they quickly began to realize that something deadly was being spread through gay sex acts. It was this dawning realization that brought politics back with a bang into these same communities. If the act around which they defined their own identity and which they fought to secure rights to protect it was the cause of this deadly disease, what did it say about their entire movement and the efforts that they put into it? What did it say about being gay? For many Christians, it was another example of “the wages of sin is death”.
“Today the Baths, Tomorrow the Ovens!”
Gay men were not (and still aren’t) monolithic, so how they approached this deadly issue defined the existential question that they asked themselves. For some, the question was: “Were we wrong all along to do this? Were the Christians right?” For others it was: “Are they going to force us back into the closet?” Another segment asked: “How can we balance our hard won rights with being responsible citizens?” It was these differences in primary focus and opinion that found themselves at odds in the “bathhouse debates”.
Why the Bathhouses?
Well, number one was the baths, because we knew that was the main source of AIDS transmission. A gay man could pick up one or two partners in a bar, and they'd go off someplace to have their fun. There were back rooms in the bars, in the baths, too. They were called orgy rooms, where ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty men were dancing around with almost no light, and of course, anything happened there. That explained to us why a gay man would say, "I don't know who I got it from. I never saw his face." That sort of thing.
The bars were not the best places to be, but at least, they would limit the amount of contact a man could have. In a bookshop, in a small sex club, out in the park--these places limited the contact. But in the baths... At a four-story bathhouse, Club Baths south of Market I think it was, 350 men would gather on a Saturday night at $10 a crack, and they got their $10 worth. And more. Including drugs in addition to poppers.
Would you permit a child with measles to go to school with a classroom of thirty other children? No! It's a transmissible disease. You exclude him, and if the whole room has been exposed, then you close that classroom--you discontinue that class and send the kids home. There was quarantine for these diseases at one time. In Africa, if one or two patients came up with smallpox, you isolated the village, and you vaccinated everybody. So after the smallpox was finished with that patient or those two patients, it had no place else to go.
We didn't have a vaccine for AIDS. We had the disease spreading wildly. We knew that the numbers were going up geometrically in those first two years. The numbers of new cases were doubling every six months. It was terrible.
Hughes
But times had changed. Society was putting much more emphasis on individual rights, particularly for minorities such as the gay population. It was no longer as acceptable for a government agency to do what some factions regarded as removing individual rights.
Dritz
That's right. It was not only civil rights and individual rights, but the federal government was also saying, "We have too much government now. Let's concentrate on the threat from the Evil Empire overseas." This epidemic was going to wipe us out, and they didn't even care about it.
The emphasis was not so much on civil rights as on fear in the gay community that if they were "outed," made known that they were gay, that they would lose jobs, friends, a place to sleep, insurance. All of these things made them resist closing the baths, because their incognito activities in a closed environment in the baths kept them from being known on the outside.
………..
I can talk about the meeting we had when Dr. Silverman was about to announce that he was going to close the baths, then he didn't, because the mayor and he couldn't get together on it. I wasn't in on that session between the two of them, though, so I can't give you all the details.
Many members from the gay community were at that meeting. Bobbi Campbell, who was already infected with AIDS, was standing at the back. I remember at least three members of the gay community, nude, just with towels around them, holding signs that said, "Today the baths; tomorrow the ovens." They meant that, if we let you close the baths on us, next thing you'll quarantine us, then we'll be in jail, then you'll destroy us, like a Hitler. It was very, very extreme.2
By 1982, worries had already grown to such an extent in the gay communities of New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco that there were calls to shut down the bathhouses as they were viewed as ground zero for ‘super spreader events’. There were three problems with this:
there was still no conclusive proof that sexual acts caused the spread of this disease
bathhouse owners were willing to fight in court to keep their businesses open
pushback from the gay community who viewed the bathhouse as central to their newly-won rights, fearing that their shutdown would force them back into the closet
Medical experts already knew how this disease was being spread, and gay men in larger gay centres were aware as well. Larry Kramer and Randy Shilts both argued for their closure. Despite the public calls from these two (and many others) to close them, they remained open.
Let’s jump ahead for a second. Anti-closure gays:
AFTER CLOSURE
Where are we now?
Where do we go from here?
What can we do as a community?
The San Francisco AIDS Foundation was holding a town hall on the evening of Monday, Oct. 22, 1984, to discuss the recent closure of the city’s bathhouses. If the flyer was simple, the matter of the closures certainly was not.
………..
Back in 1984, even in the gay community, there was a certain ambivalence around the proposed bathhouse closure, said Cleve Jones, a longtime gay rights activist who writes about the topic in his autobiography “When We Rise.”
These were very early days for the HIV/AIDS epidemic. There was no antibody test for the virus — that was still a year off — and the question of transmission was still unanswered. But gay rights were also tenuous at the time; sodomy laws were still pervasive and sexual liberation was seen as key to gay liberation.
Nobody wanted to watch their friends die or wonder whether they might be next.
“It was just terrifying,” Jones said. “You had people who were afraid to go into a gay bar. You had people who were afraid to hug.”
At the same time, the bathhouses were central to self-expression and building community. “On a good night I would have sex, but on any night, I would run into friends, we could sit in the Jacuzzi and gossip or plan our next political actions,” Jones said. “It was really hard for them to understand that it really was, for many of us, an important community experience that went beyond the sexual behavior that might occur on any given night.”
Then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein was clear she wanted the bathhouses closed. Randy Shilts, The San Francisco Chronicle’s first openly gay reporter, supported the move and was labeled a traitor for doing so. Meanwhile, the AIDS Foundation and activists saw the closures as shortsighted, arguing that the bathhouses could be potential hubs for sexual health education. Others, Jones said, worried that if the country’s most liberal and gay-friendly city moved to shut these spaces, it would send the wrong message and empower bigots nationwide.
“There were passionate voices in favor of closure and opposed to closure, and then there were an awful lot of people who just didn’t know what the best thing was to do, and it was bitter and ugly,” Jones said. “Gay men were divided and arguing, but we also had that occurring under the microscope of public opinion. It was an extremely uncomfortable situation for all of us.”3
Something a bit more edgy from 1983:
This flyer was produced in 1983.
A Nite at the Baths
Experts on ASSES will be available to answer YOUR questions: "What do I do when they declare my apartment an official health hazard?" "When the baths become health clubs who will make sure the only thing we pump is iron?" "How can I buy condoms without the clerk thinking I'm straight?" "Do I need to take my bodily fluids to a toxic waste dump?"
Acquired Surveillance-System Efficiency Syndrome (A.S.S.E.S.) is sweeping our community with guilt and repression. Spread by intimate contact in the seedy backrooms of politicians and bureaucrats, ASSES threatens to deprive us of our civil rights. Its victims--typically promiscuous politicians--are overwhelmed by delusions of superiority and the need to police other people's behavior. There is no cure for ASSES once it strikes.
Fortunately, WE have all the answers and know what's best for you. At this intensive one-night workshop, your favorite gay leaders will offer their own lives as models for you to follow. You CAN survive sex in the age of Big Brother: MENTAL MASTURBATION--the hands-off approach PHONE SEX--anonymity with safety, the best of both worlds. COPING--feel better by guilt-tripping others. OBEY AUTHORITY--who needs S/M? The bureaucrats and politicians will give you all the discipline you need. PLUS: "Getting Off by Getting Votes"-an alternative to sex from SF's favorite gay supervisor.
Lick ASSES before it licks us! (Wondering where it all leads to? You don't have to swallow it. Laws, regulations, vice squads and politicians never solve problems, they ARE the problem. We can make our community a safe and healthy place to live WITHOUT their help. If you're concerned, say so. . . A message from Housewives for Safe Sex, PO Box 11622, SF, CA 94101.)
It is clear to see that the ‘anti’ side couched their arguments in civil rights and appeals to liberty, although people like Selma Dritz saw more selfish reasons as well.