June 9, 2023 • 54 mins
A debate rages in San Francisco over whether or not to close the city’s famous bathhouses, as government officials and gay rights advocates weigh the implications for civil liberties and public health.
You can find a list of books, articles, and documentaries we used in our research at bit.ly/fiascopod.
If you like this series, mark your calendars: a new season of Fiasco is coming July 27, 2023, exclusively on Audible. Fiasco: Vigilante tells the story of a shooting that took place in 1984 on the New York City subway, leaving four Bronx teenagers gravely wounded and turning a man named Bernie Goetz into a national folk hero. Fiasco: Vigilante offers a panoramic but intimate view of how this era-defining story unfolded, giving voice for the first time to key players, and immersing listeners in the gritty, paranoid world of ’80s New York City. Listen to the trailer now at adbl.co/vigilante, only on Audible.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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.
(00:20):
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
(00:41):
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 intended from
a sure audiences for a list of books, articles, and
(01:03):
documentaries we used in our research. Follow the link in
the show notes Previously on Fiasco.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
It's mysterious, it's deadly, and it's baffling medical science. Every
time you'd hear about the epidemic, it was inevitably fatal,
dread disease, no survivors, no cure, terminal illness.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
I'm sick of everyone in this community who tells me
to stop creating a panic.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
I am got scare.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
If I can't join another man's body to mind, then
how am I gay? Liking Bet Midler isn't enough the
rights of people with AIDS to as full and satisfying
sexual and emotional lives as anyone else. As a kid,
Cleave Jones routinely skipped jim class to avoid getting beaten
up by his classmates in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona.
(01:56):
Being gay made Jones stick out, even though he kept
it to himself.
Speaker 5 (02:00):
I understood at a very early age that I was
different from the other kids because they made it very
clear that they saw me as being different in a
way that was often pretty violent.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
In high school, Jones grew so desperate that he stole
sedatives and pain pills from his parents and hid them
under a rug in his room.
Speaker 5 (02:18):
I was very frightened because I just didn't see any
possibility of there being any joy or happiness in my life,
and I was getting ready to kill myself.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
At one point, Jones tried to do some research on
what it meant to be gay, but all he could
find was scientific literature that classified homosexuality as a mental illness.
Speaker 5 (02:37):
It was through these really outdated old psychology textbooks that
were in my father's library, which talked about prefrontal lobotomy
and electroconvulsive shock treatment and things like that. So it
was quite a revelation sitting in the high school library
one day reading magazines during gym class when I read
(02:57):
about the gay liberation movement.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
It was nineteen seventy one and Jones was in his
junior year of high school. He had faked an illness
and gotten a doctor's note so he could spend his
gym period in the library. It was there that he
came across an article and Life magazine titled Homosexuals in Revolt.
The piece was accompanied by photos of men with long
(03:22):
hair and raised fists marching through the streets of far
off American cities.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Mcgay liberation movement, the drive for legal and civil rights,
and for freedom of expression of the homosexual lifestyle.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
We are just as viable a lifestyle, just as happy
a type human being as any other.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
In this country. Jones stole the magazine, went home and
flushed the pills he had been hiding down the toilet.
After graduating from high school, he began making his way
towards San Francisco.
Speaker 6 (04:02):
After hundreds of years of people hating quote fags and queers,
a city has emerged where homosexuality is not only tolerated,
but thrives.
Speaker 5 (04:11):
I remember coming across the Bay Bridge for the first time,
and there used to be a coffee roasting plant right
there at the base of Market Street, and I would
smell the coffee and the fog, and I thought it
was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen.
Speaker 6 (04:23):
Today, fully fifteen percent of the city is estimated to
be gay.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
In fact, there are.
Speaker 6 (04:28):
More homosexuals per capita in San Francisco than any other
city in the world.
Speaker 5 (04:33):
The environment was electric. Every single day. More of us
were arriving, hundreds a day, young kids, boys and girls
from all over the country that had come to San Francisco.
Most of us, just a few years prior to that,
had really thought we were the only people on the
whole planet that felt this way. So it was just
this incredible excitement in this sense of anything is possible.
(04:58):
Now anything is possible. Look how many of us there
are who?
Speaker 1 (05:02):
When Jones moved to San Francisco in nineteen seventy three,
sodomy laws that made gay sex illegal were still on
the books in California, as they were across much of
the country. When the state finally repealed it sodomy laws
in nineteen seventy five, a city that was already one
(05:24):
of the freest places on earth for gay people became
a little freer.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
The gay subculture has come up with its own conventions,
and since no rules exist from the outside, there's a
freedom about gay bars.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
As the seventies War on a world historical nightlife scene
flourished and expanded in San Francisco as gay men flooded
into bars and dance clubs.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
When you ask why a person goes to a gay bar,
here's what you get.
Speaker 5 (05:50):
I'm so comfortable there. I like to have my high
filled with smoke, and I like to get d drunk
and I like to meet pepole, which I usually don't.
Speaker 7 (06:00):
My atmosphere's my life whouse.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
The city also saw a proliferation of a very specific
kind of establishment, the gay bathouse.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
While many gays patronized there bar as in search of
an all night companion, the gay baths of San Francisco
offer what should be a more certain solution to other
men similarly inclined, a safe and conducive atmosphere for uninhibited
sensuality and the expectation that even if your fantasy is
enough fulfilled, something will be.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
For decades, gay men have been having sex in secret,
often in public spaces like parks and restrooms, where they
risked arrest and assault by anti gay vigilantes. Bath Houses,
by comparison, were safe and private. In exchange for a
modest cover charge, gay men could walk in and do
whatever they wanted. By the late nineteen seventies, the bathhouses
(06:55):
dotted San Francisco's gay neighborhoods. Many of them featured live
DJs working in a new American art form, disco. The
music of Sylvester, the hometown hero known as the Queen
of Disco, could be heard all over town at establishments
like the handball Express, the cornhole, and the barracks.
Speaker 5 (07:19):
A lot of people have I think a very skewed
impression of what bathhouses were at the time. People imagine
them as being dark and scary. They were anything but
the bathhouse I used to go to was I think
it was three floors. There was an enormous swimming pool,
a huge chacuzzi. There were saunas and steam rooms, and
(07:41):
cafe sort of place, a sandwich shop, a rooftop deck.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
The bathhouses hosted all kinds of events, dance parties as
you might expect, but also voter registration drives and clinics
for STD testing. Some were known for their thematic flourishes,
like the Bulldog Baths, which were designed to look like
San Quentin pre and others were known for their sheer size.
The Club Baths, which Cleve Jones liked to frequent, was
(08:06):
big enough to host eight hundred visitors at a time.
Speaker 5 (08:09):
What drew me to the baths originally was, you know,
if you live in a cramped, old, drafty, cold Victorian
apartment with five other boys, you each get maybe, if
you're lucky, four minutes in this shower a day. It
was just so luxurious to go there and take a long,
hot shower, and then of course one could have a
(08:29):
lot of sex, and we did.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
There was a brief window when bathhouses were some of
the safest places in San Francisco for gay men to
meet and have sex that was about to come to
an abrupt end. I'm Leon Nafok from Audible Originals and
Prologue Projects. This is fiasco.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Age continues as epidemic spread in San Francisco.
Speaker 8 (08:55):
Ninety six percent that catch this thing are gonna die.
Speaker 4 (08:59):
Prevent fallout.
Speaker 9 (09:00):
You've called for the closing of bath houses.
Speaker 10 (09:02):
We pay the price when we violate the.
Speaker 11 (09:04):
Laws of God.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Gay community leaders worry about such a dangerous legal precedent.
Speaker 5 (09:08):
We're on the road to recriminalizing sodomi politically, it's like
a simple solution. It's a problem.
Speaker 12 (09:13):
Close it down.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
In this episode, aids threatens gay life in San Francisco
and the city's bathhouses spark a confrontation over public health
and civil liberties. In nineteen seventy seven, Cleave Jones started
(09:37):
volunteering for the campaign to elect Harvey Milk as San
Francisco's city supervisor.
Speaker 4 (09:42):
My name is.
Speaker 8 (09:43):
Harvey Milk, and I'm here Jimmy Kuciuney.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
After Milk won and took office, Jones worked with him
as an intern at City Hall. Less than a year later,
on November twenty seventh, nineteen seventy eight, Milk was shot
and killed by an assassin along with the city's mayor,
George Moscone immers author Harvey.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
Milk, a city supervisor, was shot there the city Hall
this morning.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Jones had left the building to run an errand when
he got back he saw his boss's wing tip shoes
on the floor sticking out of his office.
Speaker 5 (10:24):
There's his body right out the doorway. That. It was
pretty surreal, pretty horrible.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
This is the body of Supervisor Harvey Milk because it
was taken from City Hall. That night, Jones took part
in a spontaneous candlelight vigil, which was attended by more
than twenty five thousand people.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
They filled the place the straight and the gay of
the unknown and the well known Governor Brown was.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Here just later as Jones was there when Milk's assassin
was spared a murder conviction and was instead found guilty
of manslaughter and sentenced to just over seven years in prison.
Jones joined a crowd in the streets of San Francisco
to protest the verdict, but began as a peaceful demonstration
(11:09):
gave way to violent clashes between police and protesters.
Speaker 13 (11:13):
In the Castro district, a group of what some called
rogue cops broke into a gay bar.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Several people were bloodied there and on the sidewalks.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
It became known as the White Knight Riot. It served
as a dramatic reminder that for all its advances, the
gay liberation movement remained under threat.
Speaker 5 (11:31):
It's a very crazy night. And then the police attacked
Castro Street and destroyed some of the bars and beat
a lot of people up before they were driven out
of the neighborhood.
Speaker 10 (11:40):
What do you things have gone.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
From good to bad to very bad.
Speaker 10 (11:43):
Every once in a while, demonstrator a protester will come
out of the crowd, throw a piece of burning material
into a police car and started on fire.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Cleave Jones continued working in politics after Harvey Milk's death.
By the nineteen eighties, his years as an activist had
propelled him to a job as a legislative consultant in
the California State Assembly. One of his responsibilities was to
examine bills coming out of the Assembly's Health Committee. Jones
didn't know much about public health policy, so the first
(12:25):
thing he did was subscribe to a stack of medical journals.
Speaker 5 (12:28):
And among them was the MMWR, the Morbidity Immortality Weekly
Report out of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
This CDC report was the same one you heard about
earlier in our series, the one that put forward the
very first scientific findings on what would turn out to
be AIDS.
Speaker 5 (12:47):
I remember quite clearly the first week of June, forty
years ago, nineteen eighty one, reading these first few paragraphs
describing clusters of homosexual man with capasi sarcoma and numasistus pneumonia,
and I clipped it out, and I put it on
my bulletin board, and I just had this very bad
(13:08):
feeling that this was something serious.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
Not long after Cleve Jones read the CDC report, a
doctor named Marcus Conant asked to meet him for dinner.
Conant was a forty five year old dermatologist at the
University of California, San Francisco. He was originally from Jacksonville, Florida,
and like Jones, he had chosen to launch his career
in the Bay Area. In no small part because he
(13:35):
was a gay man.
Speaker 8 (13:36):
Most gay men coming from Jacksonville, Florida, knew that if
you were going to be a gay man and not
live a lot, you know, get married and have kids
and snink away two or three times a year to
go pursue a gay lifestyle, that you had to live
in a major city, and that would probably be New
York or San Francisco.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
In nineteen eighty one, Conan began seeing cases of rare
skin cancer in his patients. Capus's sarcoma or CHAS for short.
Speaker 8 (14:06):
Now it was and still is, an extremely rare disease.
The average dermatologist in a lifetime could be expected to
see one case.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Soon, Conant opened a clinic devoted to capusi's sarcoma and
quickly became the city's go to doctor for CHAS patients.
Conant was on the front lines of what he believed
was an unfolding epidemic, but hardly anyone seemed to be
paying attention. It was out of frustration with this state
(14:40):
of affairs that Conant sought out Cleave Jones, with his
political connections and his work with the Health Committee. Maybe
Jones could help Conant get funding for research, and just
as urgently, maybe he could help raise awareness in the
gay community of what was going on. Before dinner, Conant
took Jones to dead see one of his chaos patients
(15:01):
in person. The young man showed Jones a photo of
what he had looked like before he got sick, handsome,
smooth skinned, and muscular. Now his emaciated body was covered
in purple lesions.
Speaker 8 (15:15):
He had multiple lesions of CAPSI sarcoma, but then had
a terrible, terrible infectious disease causing intractable diarrhea with you know,
twenty or thirty bowel movements a day, and he deteriorated
very rapidly.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Cleave. Jones was terrified by what he saw. Afterwards, he
and Conant left the hospital and went to the Zuni Cafe,
a restaurant not far from City Hall. There, Conan explained
his theory of the case.
Speaker 5 (15:46):
He told me that he thought it was a new
or previously unrecognized virus and that did something that crippled
the immune system, leaving the body vulnerable to a whole
range of opportunists confections.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
At this early point, there was no consensus among doctors
as to what exactly was causing people to get sick,
But Conan told Jones what he believed, that the disease
was primarily sexually transmitted, and that gay men were at
special risk.
Speaker 5 (16:18):
There was no drama, there was no theatrics about He's
got a slight Southern cadence to his voice, and he
just kind of laid it out to me over dinner,
and I thought, well, my goodness, were all dead.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
After the dinner, Jones was convinced that the gay community
was in trouble, and he agreed to help Conant start
a foundation that would raise money for research. Soon, the
two men were both working towards another more controversial goal
as well, convincing their fellow gay men to change how
they had sex.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
I was worried today that a new and frightening disease,
a quiet immune deficiency syndrome, destroys the body's ability to
fight certain illnesses.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
By the summer of nineteen eighty two, the mysterious disease
causing KS and various opportunistic infections had become known as AIDS.
The number of diagnosed AIDS patients was doubling every five months.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
There is no known cause, no known cure, and more
than forty percent of the victims have died.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
As the numbers swored, Marcus Conant grew increasingly frustrated that
the gay community was not taking the crisis more seriously.
She was especially worried about the city's booming circuit of
bath houses.
Speaker 8 (17:38):
What was going on in the community was denial. I
had people telling me that, oh, it's okay to go
to the bath houses as long as you take a
shower after you have sex. I had one guy claim
that he just changed the sheets on the bed in
his stall at the bath house every time he had sex.
So just change the sheets and you'll be fine. Now,
as long as you have a belief, something that you
(17:59):
can hold on to, whether it's scientifically valid or not,
is often more valid for people than scientific evidence.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
It wasn't just that seemingly healthy men were putting themselves
at risk. Conan was also seeing patients with visible symptoms
of AIDS who were still flatly refusing to modify their
sexual routines.
Speaker 8 (18:21):
I had a patient he had a couple of pleasions
of capsis sarcoma, and he said, in the course of
the interview, he said, hurry up, doctor, you know I
want to go to the baths tonight. And I said,
you're still going to the bass And he said, sure,
I'm going to the bass. And I said, but you've
got CAPSI sarcoma, and you know everyone thinks that it's transmissible.
(18:43):
Let's get going from one person or another. And he said,
you know everybody knows that, so they can take their
risk too, But I'm going to the bass.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
For years, Conan had enjoyed going to the baths himself,
but after encounters like that, he not only stopped going,
he stopped having sex all together. One weekend in nineteen
eighty three, Conant and his boyfriend took a trip to
Santa Cruz, where they wandered around an amusement park on
the boardwalk.
Speaker 8 (19:14):
We walked up and down the boardwalk and did all
those sorts of things, and we finally got to the
roller coaster. And there's this old rickety roller coaster at
the end. It's a nightmare because it's still a wooden structure.
It rattles, it sounds like it's coming apart when the
cars go by.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
It was while Conant was on the roller coaster that
he had an epiphany about the baths.
Speaker 8 (19:34):
So we get on this thing, and you know, typical
roller coaster. We're slowly climbing up to the peak of
the high point. You can see out over the Pacific Ocean.
It's just great. And then suddenly, you know, the bottom
drops out from under you and the car goes greening down.
And my only thought at that point is the things
was rattling and sounded like it was going to come apartments.
(19:56):
If this thing weren't safe, they meaning the authorities, will
close it down. It must be safe, because otherwise they
just wouldn't let this thing happen. And as we reached
the bottom of the loop, I realized, wait a minute,
that's true of the bathhouses.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Conant realized that people were going to the bathhouses because
the bathhouses were open. If the bath houses weren't safe,
these people figured someone would have surely closed them down.
Speaker 8 (20:26):
And of course that's when I realized I've got to
get out of my ivory tower, quit plupling the doctor
and the white coat, and get out there and start
saying no, no, We've got to go public and say
those of us at the university who are seeing these patients,
who are looking at this thing every day, who know
something about this disease, feel like you need to close
down the bathhouses.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Of course, Marcus Koenant was just a doctor. He didn't
have the power to shut down the bathhouses. That would
be up to the city government, specifically the director of
public Health.
Speaker 12 (21:05):
I'm Mervyn Silverman, former director of Health in the City
and County of San Francisco from nineteen seventy seven to
nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Working for the San Francisco Health Department was a dream
come true for doctor Mervyn Silverman, who moved to the
city after years of holding a similar position in which
a tak Kansas. In San Francisco, Silverman found a health
department that was well funded, well respected, and free to
implement progressive new programs other cities might have discouraged.
Speaker 12 (21:35):
I had about I think five thousand employees and a
huge budget, so we did everything from a brain surgery
to bath house inspection.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
The bathhouse inspections were basically like hotel or restaurant inspections.
They were mostly about making sure that rooms and other
facilities were clean before aids. Looking after the bathhouses was
not exactly Silverman's top priority.
Speaker 12 (21:58):
Honestly didn't just I didn't pay that much attention to it.
I think they were regularly attended by probably five or
ten percent of the whole gay community. So it wasn't
a major thing, but it was something that was symbolic.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
It's hard to find reliable numbers on how many people
were actually visiting San Francisco's bathhouses. One informal survey taken
in nineteen eighty three indicates that it was more than
Silverman thought that one in four gay men went to
the baths once a week, while one in five went
once a month. In any event, as aids began to
spread in San Francisco, Silverman was reluctant to do anything
(22:35):
that might make gay people feel unfairly targeted or encourage
members of the general public to treat them like pariah's.
In nineteen eighty three, when Marcus Conan and others began
pressuring the city's health department to take action against the bathhouses,
Silverman was conflicted. He knew the baths were incredibly important
to the gay community, not only as gathering places, but
(22:58):
as symbols of liberation. As one bathhouse owner put it.
Speaker 14 (23:02):
As an institution that's specifically designed to allow one to
be as free as they need to be.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
But as the epidemiology of AIDS came into clearer view,
it seemed increasingly likely that the disease could be spread
through sex. And if that was true, then the bathhouses
were potential hotbeds for infection.
Speaker 12 (23:23):
There were areas that were communal and dark, and sometimes
with a guy might have sex with five, ten, fifteen people,
maybe more, I don't know. In one evening.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
From a purely scientific perspective, closing the bath seemed like
it would almost certainly slow the spread of AIDS. But
the Silverman the work of public health wasn't always as
simple as doing exactly what the science dictated.
Speaker 12 (23:48):
I look at public health the way a doctor looks
at the patient. The community is my patient. I don't
want to do something in one part of the community
that will do damage in another parts, Like I don't
want to treat your heart as my patient and destroy
your liver in the process.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Silverman wanted to take action on the baths, but he
was not going to do it without buying from community
leaders like Cleave Jones. Jones, for his part, was torn
on the issue. He told Silverman that while the bathhouses
might be a problem, closing them could create an even
bigger one.
Speaker 5 (24:21):
I think I can still articulately argue both sides of
this debate. The people who wanted the bathhouses closed said, look,
there's no other place you could look at where there
were more opportunities for transmission than a bath house. And
then the other side said, yes, but if you allow
the state to shut down bath houses, what's next. You
(24:44):
could look at gay bars and say, well, there's an
incredible opportunity for transmission in any gay bar that you
look at, and this will erode our civil liberties. At
the time, it was very fraught and a lot of
people were very very angry about it, and I'm not
sure what was the right thing to do.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Part of the difficulty was that doctors and public health
officials like Conan and Silverman weren't the only ones who
wanted the bathhouses closed, and some of the loudest voices
calling for closure weren't exactly friends of the gay community.
Speaker 5 (25:18):
I think an important part of the context for this
is that you had the moral majority types and the
preachers who were calling for closure, and worse, this whole
debate was occurring in this context of many people from
the radical right, and not just the radical right, expressing
really extreme measures right up to quarantine and putting people
(25:41):
in camps and tattooing their HIV status on their bodies.
So it was not unreasonable for people to fear how
slippery that slope might be.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
The backlash to gay liberation had helped fuel a new
kind of conservatism that had taken hold in American politics
that included the creation of the Moral Majority, a coalition
of religious groups opposed to abortion and gay rights. It
was started in nineteen seventy nine by the Virginia based
televangelist Jerry Folwell.
Speaker 15 (26:20):
The high point of the week is an assembly conducted
by doctor Fowell himself. Is theme the need for Christians
to become active in politics by turning local congregations into
blocks of voters that were unseat politicians who are held
to undermine the American way of life.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
In nineteen eighty Fallwell barnstormed across America, delivering fiery sermons
to his followers and rallying them behind conservative candidates.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
We have a three full primary responsibility. Number one, get
people saved. Number two, get them baptized.
Speaker 10 (26:51):
Number three, get them registered to vote.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
When Ronald Reagan was elected president in the landslide. Fallwell
and the Moral Majority claimed credit for his victory, and
in his first press conference as president, Reagan made it
clear that Fallwell and his ilk would have a receptive
audience in the White House.
Speaker 11 (27:07):
I am going to be open to these people. I'm
not going to separate myself from the people who the
electedition and centers there.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Fallwell enthusiastically condemned homosexuality as a moral perversion. Speaking to
reporters in nineteen eighty one, he warned that if gay
people were allowed civil rights, it would become quote an
established bonafide minority, like women or blacks. Then, in nineteen
eighty three, as the bathhouse controversy was heating up in
(27:40):
San Francisco, Fallwell used his national platform to weigh in
on the issue. He described activity in gay bathhouses as
sub animal behavior, and he called for them to be
shut down across the country.
Speaker 10 (27:53):
I believe that God does not judge people. God judges sin,
and I do believe that aids generally call them believed
to be caused by homosexual promiscuity as a violation both
of them of God's laws, laws of nature and decency,
and as a result, we pay the price when we
violate the laws of God.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Many in the gay community feared that if the moral
majority had its way, they would lose a lot more
than their bathhouses.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Gay community leaders worry about such a broad and dangerous
legal precedent used against one segment of the population.
Speaker 5 (28:25):
It wasn't a huge leap in my view to say
that if we allow the government to close down this
set of businesses, what's next. Maybe now, with hindsight, that
feels like paranoia, but I don't think it was paranoia
at the time. We had just been decriminalized a few
years prior, so I think these were reasonable fears.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
The idea of closing the bathhouses came to be seen
as a capitulation to reactionaries, people who cared less about
saving the lives of gay people than about rolling back
their civil rights. With opponents of gay liberation apparently rallying
around the bathhouse issue, those within the gay community who
(29:09):
supported closure were treated with special suspicion. One outspoken voice
was Randy Schiltz, a gay reporter for the San Francisco
Chronicle who would go on to write the book and
the Band Played on a seminal early history of the
AIDS crisis. With Marcus Conant as one of his key sources.
Schiltz wrote more than a dozen articles for the Chronicle
(29:30):
about the dangers of the bathhouses, and he was fairly
open about his belief that they should be shut down immediately.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
Randy Schiltz went after the gay community for a lifestyle
it was leading to its own destruction That did not
make him very popular.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Even Cleve Jones was called a trader merely for suggesting
in an op ed that gay men practiced safe sex.
Speaker 5 (29:51):
It was a pretty mild call for other sexually active
gay men to curtail our activities to reduce our number
of partners. And you know, I had people scream at
me on the street that I was a Nazi. I
had people spit on my face.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
With all this pressure bearing down on him, Jones decided
he could not get behind the idea of city Hall
ordering the closure of the bathhouses. Jones reached out to
Mervin Silverman to explain his reasoning.
Speaker 12 (30:22):
He called to me and he says, if you close
the bath houses, I'm going to be one of the
ones manning the barricades. And I said why, And he said, well,
because with a city like San Francisco, which is so
tolerant and so welcoming and so compassionate. To do something
like this will send a message across the country that
(30:42):
will have communities instituting or enforcing asrodomy laws and things
like this. The net effect would be worse than better.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
Without the support of the gay community, Silverman felt he
couldn't close the bathhouses, no matter how uneasy it made
him to leave them open, and so for the time being,
Silverman looked for other ways to slow the spread of
AIDS in his city.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
Don't attempt to test it by stretching or blowing it up.
Speaker 13 (31:10):
Every condom you buy has been pre tested.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
One approach was to distribute condoms. At the time, condoms
were seen primarily as the domain of straight people. Trying
to prevent pregnancy. Getting gay men to use them was
an uphill battle. As one bathouse proponent put it, I
didn't become a homosexual so I could use condoms. Under
Silverman's direction, the city health department tried to circulate information
(31:35):
about how AIDS was spread in hopes that it would
convince people to make safer choices.
Speaker 12 (31:39):
All Right, this was the I think this was the
very first AIDS sign that was ever produced at all
in the country.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
Actually, Silverman showed us one of the many posters the
city health department produced. They gave the posters to bathhouse
operators so they could post them in communal areas.
Speaker 12 (31:57):
It says, AIDS is everyone's problem, Protect yourself and those
you love. And it had circle with AIDS in it
and a line through it, and it said use condoms,
avoid any exchange of body fluids, limit your use of
recreational drugs, enjoy more time with fewer partners. AIDS is
not spread through casual contact. For your information, contact the
(32:20):
San Francisco Department of Public Health. I mean pretty benign,
if you know when you look back at it, But
it was the first one of its kind.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Silverman's health department wasn't the only group trying to get
the information out. Organizers in the gay community created their
own public education campaigns, and they were broadly successful in
increasing knowledge of AIDS around the city. More and more
men were making the personal choice to limit their number
of sexual partners by avoiding the baths. Still, Silverman faced
(32:58):
mounting pressure to close the baths from San Francisco's straight
majority that included the most powerful person in the city,
Mayor Dianne Feinstein.
Speaker 16 (33:08):
I don't believe that this city has any business permitting
businesses to operate whose sole source of being is the
very activity that communicates the disease.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Dianne Feinstein had been mayor of San Francisco since nineteen
seventy eight. She and Silverman had never butted heads on
public health issues, but the bathhouse situation was different.
Speaker 12 (33:31):
In fact, she was riding with a political reporter from
the San Francisco Chronicle in Washington and said, I don't
know why Silverman doesn't close the bath houses. If they
were heterosexual bath houses, he would have closed them. And
of course that obviously got back to me from the reporter,
and I said, that's right.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Silverman would not move his line in the sand. He
was not going to shut down to bathhouses without broad
support from San Francisco's gay community.
Speaker 12 (33:58):
I think if you stand back politically, it seemed like
a simple solution. It's a problem, close it down. The
restaurant is insanitary, close it down. But the difference is
this was dealing with human behavior. You were not closing
it down because of what the building was or whether
it was sanitary. You were closing it down because of
(34:19):
what people were doing in there.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
The bathhouse debate came to a head in March of
nineteen eighty four when a man named Larry little John
took matters into his own hands. Little John, a longtime
activist in the gay community, had become convinced that Silverman's
education push was not enough. He said that he had
personally inspected the largest bathhouse in the city and found
that none of Silverman's AIDS information posters were hanging in
(34:45):
the locker room. Little John was tired of waiting for
Silverman to act, and so he announced that he would
begin collecting signatures for a ballot initiative to officially ban
sex in the bathhouses.
Speaker 4 (34:57):
The initiative states that, in order to prevent the spread
of AIDS and to protect the public health, sexual activities
among patrons of public bath houses should be prohibited.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
The future of the baths would be placed in the
hands of San Francisco voters in the nineteen eighty four election.
Here's Little John speaking to a reporter that spring.
Speaker 17 (35:18):
I prefer to see doctor Silverman get some courage and
deal with it today.
Speaker 8 (35:22):
I prefer to see MARYA.
Speaker 4 (35:23):
Feinstein deal with.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
The issue today.
Speaker 13 (35:24):
Before more people die.
Speaker 4 (35:26):
But if we got to wait until November.
Speaker 5 (35:27):
To deal with the issue, the people will deal with
the issue.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
The thing about Little John's push for a citywide bout
initiative is that the overwhelming majority of San Francisco voters
were straight, and if it was up to them, the
bath houses would almost certainly be closed. People in the
gay community were outraged. Letters poured into The Bay Area Reporter,
the city's largest gay newspaper, calling Little John homophobic, slime, morality, cowboy,
(35:57):
and judas.
Speaker 6 (35:58):
They say it's a civil right and closing down won't
slow the spread of AIDS.
Speaker 9 (36:03):
They are no more responsible for multiple sexual activities than
our bars, where people can go and meet someone and
have a liaison later in a hotel or in the home.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
It would be one thing if gay people decided to
shut down the bathhouses themselves. It would be entirely different
if the straight majority imposed the shutdown on them.
Speaker 14 (36:24):
The danger of the initiative, as I see it, is
the opening possibility of creating a police state in San Francisco.
I would be appalled at the idea that police officers
could come into a private situation and inspect the activities
of my sexual life.
Speaker 8 (36:42):
I think this is a worse mistake than the McCarthy era,
and I think that we're going to live to regret
this in San Francisco and throughout the.
Speaker 13 (36:49):
Nation, in the world.
Speaker 8 (36:49):
This all began.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Cleve Jones, who knew as well as anyone that reactionary
forces could still reverse the gains of gay liberation, saw
the writing on the wall.
Speaker 5 (36:59):
The issue of the bathhouses was going to go on
the ballot, and the judgment from a whole lot of
people was that is too dangerous. We cannot have these
kinds of sensitive, nuanced, thorny issues of public health administration
be decided by a popular vote in such a negatively
(37:23):
charged atmosphere. And that was when the conversation shifted to
let's let Silverman shut it down.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
Within days, an open letter was circulated and signed by
dozens of prominent figures in the gay community. The letter
gave Silverman the green light he had been waiting for.
He arranged for a press conference to be held the
next day, But then most of the people who had
signed the letter changed their minds, having apparently realized that
(37:54):
in the eyes of the gay community, they would own
the decision to close the bathhouses. Even more than Silverman would.
Speaker 12 (38:01):
So they all signed this letter to me and said
they supported closing it. Within twenty four hours, most of
them had taken their names off of it.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Cleave Jones was among them. In the end, he was
just too conflicted.
Speaker 5 (38:15):
Sometimes we approach issues where we just don't really know
what is the right thing to do, and that doesn't
make one a coward or dishonest. It means that one
doesn't know what to do.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Mervyn Silverman was back to square one. With no official
backing from the gay community, he felt he could not
follow through with his plan. The problem was reporters had
already been alerted that there was going to be a
major announcement. News trucks were lined up outside the Public
Health building. Silverman felt like he had to at least
show up and say something. Silverman met with Mayor Feinstein
(38:57):
and told her he could not go forward with a
decision to close the Then, right before the press conference,
he met with the city's police chief, who fitted him
with a bulletproof vest. As Silverman's car approached the Public
Health Building, he saw dozens of protesters gathered outside.
Speaker 12 (39:14):
It was bizarre, it with something of I think a
Fellini movie or something like that. I walked in there
and was sort of like a haze, and through the haze,
I'm seeing people naked or sort of naked, with towels
wrapped around it.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Some of the protesters held signs that read today the tubs,
tomorrow your bedroom, and out of the baths into the ovens.
Speaker 13 (39:35):
Protesters and many others worried and angry that after a
year of resisting the calls, Director of Public Health Mervyn Silverman,
had decided to close the baths down.
Speaker 12 (39:45):
I saw all this stuff, and I didn't say Hi, Joe, Hi, Mary,
who the various reporters. I just went up, sat down
to the desk and basically said, all of you who
think I'm going to close the bath houses, you know,
sit down, forget. It could have happened.
Speaker 7 (40:01):
Because of a number of issues, both legal and medical,
that are not resolved.
Speaker 12 (40:09):
I am not going to be making a.
Speaker 7 (40:10):
Comment discussing the opening or closing of the bath houses.
Speaker 13 (40:14):
At this point, the decision was popular.
Speaker 5 (40:22):
Here.
Speaker 13 (40:22):
The crowd, ready to burst with anger, was greatly relieved.
Do you think that he decided not to do it
right away because of pressure from the gay communities?
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Uncertainly, even though Silvermen had backed down, San Francisco's gay
community was shaken. Word had gotten out about the leaders
who had initially signed the letter in support of closure.
The editor of the Bay Area Reporter labeled them collaborators.
The gay liberation movement, the editor wrote, was almost killed
(40:52):
off last Friday morning by a group of gay men
and one lesbian. This group gave their names to give
the green light to the annihilation and of gay life.
The gay community should remember those names well. The role
of names became known around the city as the Trader's List.
(41:17):
On April ninth, nineteen eighty four, ten days after his
anti climactic press conference, Silverman took a half measure that
seemed to please nobody. Rather than closed down the bathhouse's outright,
he issued a strict new set of rules that mandated
increased lighting, the removal of doors from private rooms, and
most importantly, a ban on sex inside the venues. It
(41:42):
was enough to convince Larry Littlejohn to withdraw his ballot initiative,
which had called for similar restrictions, But unsurprisingly, when the
city sent in undercover health inspectors, they found that people
were not abiding by the new rules, and so the
bathhouses remained in limbo, with the mayor continuing to call
for their closure and gay leaders continuing to make the
(42:03):
case for safe sex.
Speaker 17 (42:05):
We as a community are not exactly slouches when it
comes to sexual creativity. That is not absolutely essential to
go to the baths and stick your butt up in
the air in order to get erotic pleasure as a
gay man.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
The problem was that, according to the bath house owners,
even when they tried to give out condoms, most of
their customers didn't seem to want them. Marcus Conant, the
doctor who had started ringing the alarm about AIDS years earlier,
found this infuriating.
Speaker 18 (42:35):
And so this year the group that we have to
criticize is not the fads, and is not the state,
and it's not the city. It's the gay community. Because
the rationalization that is going on in the gay community
is absolutely terrifying.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
This is Conan speaking in April of eighty four at
a public forum on bathhouses.
Speaker 18 (42:58):
I will tell you the story of two pensions. One
is a man that I saw today who continues to
go to the bath houses and have sex. He has
CAPTUSI sarcone. Another man is a PhD who has idiopathic
tromocytopenic purple and goes to the bath houses. And when
I said to him, do you tell your sexual contacts
that you have AIDS? He says no. And I said,
(43:20):
how do you morally live with that? And he says,
anybody that knows the bath house is a damned fool.
And I think, thank God, what's coming to them. Nothing
that we, as physicians or epidemiologists or nurses or patients
with AIDS have done today has slowed down the instance
(43:42):
of this disease. Whatsoever should we ask the mayor every
time we have an aide's patient to die in San Francisco,
to set off the earthquake sireene for twenty seconds.
Speaker 8 (43:55):
It'll go off every other day.
Speaker 18 (43:58):
Maybe people will be begin to understand the magnitude of
the problem. And then by Christmas, when it's going off
twice a day, and by this time next year, when
it's going off three times a day, everybody will begin
to understand what we're dealing.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
Looking back, Conan says, he gets or people who opposed
closure were coming from.
Speaker 8 (44:19):
I mean I could understand their point of view. I
can still understand their point of view. I mean they
had fought for years for the rights of gay men,
and here we were coming along saying you fought for
it and now you can't have it.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
Still, Conan says that he has no second thoughts about
taking the position that he did.
Speaker 8 (44:39):
It's very much like, what is the more important thing?
Is it people dying or is it the economy? Wells
as with that argument, it's both. But you can't have
an economy if too many people are frightened and dying.
Ninety six percent of them that catch this thing are
gonna die. So you need to be almost raconian in
(45:04):
how you approach this thing. You can't just let people
make up their own mind when they're not just putting
themselves at risk, they're putting the whole society at risk,
at least the whole gays aside.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
Four decades later, Conan still finds the idea of using
bathhouses as sites for safe sex education to be laughable.
Speaker 8 (45:25):
Why do people go to the bath house. They go
to get laid. They don't go for a lecture for
God's sake, I mean quite honest. I mean, you take
a bunch of horny guys and they're going there to
get laid, and you want you want some doctor to
give them a talk about hygiene. Sorry.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
Eventually all the controversy took its toll. Venues, including the Hothouse,
the Liberty Baths, and the Bulldog Baths all made the
decision to voluntarily close their doors.
Speaker 17 (46:15):
What's happening is without them actually legislating the closing of the.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
Bath houses, the politicians are closing us down slowly by
discouraging people.
Speaker 5 (46:25):
To come here.
Speaker 1 (46:25):
Sutro Baths, one of the largest bathhouses in the city,
hosted a three day farewell party where five employees stood
on stage and threw AIDS bursures into a barbecue.
Speaker 4 (46:35):
Tonight, they burned those pamphlets to protest being driven out
of business by what they call AIDS hysteria.
Speaker 1 (46:42):
If we can't pass them out, the owner of Sutro
Baths said, we might as well burn them.
Speaker 14 (46:46):
We take away the tower, was take away the keys.
Speaker 9 (46:50):
We don't need education to fight the streat disease.
Speaker 18 (46:53):
We're closing down the baths and the other.
Speaker 9 (46:56):
Private clubs gets out of the showers, sending.
Speaker 7 (47:04):
You can sing along in the cars city.
Speaker 1 (47:12):
On October ninth, nineteen eighty four, Mervyn Silverman made a
decisive move fourteen.
Speaker 4 (47:17):
Gay bathhouses and sex shops in San Francisco were ordered
shut down by the city's public health director.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
Through the morning, city health officials posted notices clothes or
face legal action.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Silverman had found that fourteen of the city's remaining bathhouses
and sex clubs were in violation of his rules, so
he shut them down completely.
Speaker 7 (47:35):
Today, I have ordered the closure of fourteen commercial establishments
which promote and profit from the spread of AIDS.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
At the time of Silverman's announcement, it was estimated that
forty percent of the gay male population in San Francisco
was infected.
Speaker 3 (47:51):
AIDS continues its epidemic spread in San Francisco, more cases
reported already in the first three quarters of nineteen eighty
four than all of nineteen eighty three. Even thousands more
may have the disease and still not know it. Some
in the gay communities say those who use bath house
as for sex will simply go somewhere else, that today's
action by the city will bring much controversy, not much cure.
Speaker 1 (48:14):
That December, three and a half years after AIDS had
first emerged in San Francisco in nineteen eighty one, Silverman
resigned as Public Health commissioner. A reporter questioned him on
his way out, how did the public health director feel
about leaving his job in the middle of an epidemic.
I'd like to believe this is the middle, Silverman answered,
(48:35):
My fear is that this is the beginning. By the
end of nineteen eighty four, the total number of confirmed
AIDS cases in the US was pushing eight thousand. More
than half of those patients had already died. Cleave Jones
(48:56):
found out he was HIV positive in nineteen eighty five
when a blood as finally became available. To this day,
he's still torn about the bathhouses, which it's worth noting
ended up staying closed for decades.
Speaker 5 (49:09):
You know, I was ambivalent then, I'm ambivalent today. Did
the bathhouse closures result in and across the board sweeping
denial of civil rights?
Speaker 13 (49:22):
No?
Speaker 5 (49:23):
Did the closure of the bathhouses slow the spread of
the pandemic? Probably not. With you know, twenty twenty hindsight,
I wish what could have happened is that the community
could have rallied enough and found enough unity to impose
our own restrictions and guidelines on how these places would operate.
(49:46):
But with hindsight, I would say to you that the
behavior that had gone on in the bath houses continued,
and it went underground, It went out of the county.
It did not go away.
Speaker 1 (50:00):
Eventually, the bathhouse controversy was no longer top of mind
for people like Cleave Jones and his friends. They were
now too busy going to funerals and taking care of
the sick.
Speaker 5 (50:12):
And within just five years, almost everyone I knew was
dead or dying or home caring for someone who was dying.
It ultimately would kill over twenty thousand people in my neighborhood.
Speaker 1 (50:24):
Among the thousands of San Francisco's who would die from
AIDS in the ensuing years were Randy Schiltz, the Chronicle reporter,
and Sylvester the Queen of Disco. Jones remembers losing friends,
making new ones, and then losing them too. He remembers
familiar faces around the neighborhood vanishing one by one.
Speaker 5 (50:43):
There was a male carrier, a guy I never knew
his name, but he always wore shorts. He had muscular legs,
and he always would wear shorts. And we, you know,
we make little jokes about the male guy that always
wore shorts. Of course, he disappeared and the bus drivers disappeared,
in the bakers and the bank tellers, and just aw
(51:06):
the familiar face as your favorite bartenders. Everybody died, and
those who did not were.
Speaker 8 (51:16):
Just so.
Speaker 5 (51:18):
Locked down in grief and the incredibly hard work of
caring for people in the absolute vacuum of any kind
of government response.
Speaker 1 (51:31):
About a year after the bathhouses were shut down, Jones
began planning an AIDS memorial. He had an idea for
something visual and striking, something that might wake up the
country to the enormity of the death toll. He imagined
a giant patchwork quilt. On each square would be the
name of someone lost to AIDS. Someday the quilt would
(51:53):
be big enough to blanket the Mall on Washington.
Speaker 14 (52:10):
Running only Sylvester.
Speaker 8 (52:17):
Who this Siscott Stormy with.
Speaker 5 (52:31):
Simpson Anti Ken.
Speaker 1 (52:35):
On the next episode of Fiasco, AIDS threatens America's blood supply.
Speaker 3 (52:40):
Blood banks and plasma centers may be spreading a new
and mysterious ailment called Age.
Speaker 1 (52:46):
Fiasco is presented by Audible Originals and Prologue Projects. The
show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Sam Graham, Felsen, Madelin Kaplan,
Ulla Kulpa and Me leon Nyfock. Our researcher is Francis Carr,
Editorial support from Jessica Miller and noor waswas archival research
by Michelle Sullivan. This season's score is composed by Edith Mudge.
(53:10):
Additional music by Nick Sylvester of God Mode, Alexis Squadrado,
Joel Saint, Julian and Dan English, Noah hect and Joe Vali.
Our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Our credits song
this week is Stormy Weather, performed by Sylvester. You also
heard Sylvester's You Make Me Feel. Music licensing courtesy of
Anthony Roman. Audio mix by Erica Wong, with additional support
(53:33):
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 head of acquisition and
Development for Audible. Thanks to the Vanderbilt Television Archive, Joshua Gampson,
Louis Knieber, and Bryant Erstad. Additional archival material courtesy of
(53:57):
KGO TV in San Francisco. Special thanks to Peter Yasi.
Thanks for listening. Next week, episode four,
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.
(00:20):
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
(00:41):
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 intended from
a sure audiences for a list of books, articles, and
(01:03):
documentaries we used in our research. Follow the link in
the show notes Previously on Fiasco.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
It's mysterious, it's deadly, and it's baffling medical science. Every
time you'd hear about the epidemic, it was inevitably fatal,
dread disease, no survivors, no cure, terminal illness.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
I'm sick of everyone in this community who tells me
to stop creating a panic.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
I am got scare.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
If I can't join another man's body to mind, then
how am I gay? Liking Bet Midler isn't enough the
rights of people with AIDS to as full and satisfying
sexual and emotional lives as anyone else. As a kid,
Cleave Jones routinely skipped jim class to avoid getting beaten
up by his classmates in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona.
(01:56):
Being gay made Jones stick out, even though he kept
it to himself.
Speaker 5 (02:00):
I understood at a very early age that I was
different from the other kids because they made it very
clear that they saw me as being different in a
way that was often pretty violent.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
In high school, Jones grew so desperate that he stole
sedatives and pain pills from his parents and hid them
under a rug in his room.
Speaker 5 (02:18):
I was very frightened because I just didn't see any
possibility of there being any joy or happiness in my life,
and I was getting ready to kill myself.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
At one point, Jones tried to do some research on
what it meant to be gay, but all he could
find was scientific literature that classified homosexuality as a mental illness.
Speaker 5 (02:37):
It was through these really outdated old psychology textbooks that
were in my father's library, which talked about prefrontal lobotomy
and electroconvulsive shock treatment and things like that. So it
was quite a revelation sitting in the high school library
one day reading magazines during gym class when I read
(02:57):
about the gay liberation movement.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
It was nineteen seventy one and Jones was in his
junior year of high school. He had faked an illness
and gotten a doctor's note so he could spend his
gym period in the library. It was there that he
came across an article and Life magazine titled Homosexuals in Revolt.
The piece was accompanied by photos of men with long
(03:22):
hair and raised fists marching through the streets of far
off American cities.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Mcgay liberation movement, the drive for legal and civil rights,
and for freedom of expression of the homosexual lifestyle.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
We are just as viable a lifestyle, just as happy
a type human being as any other.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
In this country. Jones stole the magazine, went home and
flushed the pills he had been hiding down the toilet.
After graduating from high school, he began making his way
towards San Francisco.
Speaker 6 (04:02):
After hundreds of years of people hating quote fags and queers,
a city has emerged where homosexuality is not only tolerated,
but thrives.
Speaker 5 (04:11):
I remember coming across the Bay Bridge for the first time,
and there used to be a coffee roasting plant right
there at the base of Market Street, and I would
smell the coffee and the fog, and I thought it
was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen.
Speaker 6 (04:23):
Today, fully fifteen percent of the city is estimated to
be gay.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
In fact, there are.
Speaker 6 (04:28):
More homosexuals per capita in San Francisco than any other
city in the world.
Speaker 5 (04:33):
The environment was electric. Every single day. More of us
were arriving, hundreds a day, young kids, boys and girls
from all over the country that had come to San Francisco.
Most of us, just a few years prior to that,
had really thought we were the only people on the
whole planet that felt this way. So it was just
this incredible excitement in this sense of anything is possible.
(04:58):
Now anything is possible. Look how many of us there
are who?
Speaker 1 (05:02):
When Jones moved to San Francisco in nineteen seventy three,
sodomy laws that made gay sex illegal were still on
the books in California, as they were across much of
the country. When the state finally repealed it sodomy laws
in nineteen seventy five, a city that was already one
(05:24):
of the freest places on earth for gay people became
a little freer.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
The gay subculture has come up with its own conventions,
and since no rules exist from the outside, there's a
freedom about gay bars.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
As the seventies War on a world historical nightlife scene
flourished and expanded in San Francisco as gay men flooded
into bars and dance clubs.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
When you ask why a person goes to a gay bar,
here's what you get.
Speaker 5 (05:50):
I'm so comfortable there. I like to have my high
filled with smoke, and I like to get d drunk
and I like to meet pepole, which I usually don't.
Speaker 7 (06:00):
My atmosphere's my life whouse.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
The city also saw a proliferation of a very specific
kind of establishment, the gay bathouse.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
While many gays patronized there bar as in search of
an all night companion, the gay baths of San Francisco
offer what should be a more certain solution to other
men similarly inclined, a safe and conducive atmosphere for uninhibited
sensuality and the expectation that even if your fantasy is
enough fulfilled, something will be.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
For decades, gay men have been having sex in secret,
often in public spaces like parks and restrooms, where they
risked arrest and assault by anti gay vigilantes. Bath Houses,
by comparison, were safe and private. In exchange for a
modest cover charge, gay men could walk in and do
whatever they wanted. By the late nineteen seventies, the bathhouses
(06:55):
dotted San Francisco's gay neighborhoods. Many of them featured live
DJs working in a new American art form, disco. The
music of Sylvester, the hometown hero known as the Queen
of Disco, could be heard all over town at establishments
like the handball Express, the cornhole, and the barracks.
Speaker 5 (07:19):
A lot of people have I think a very skewed
impression of what bathhouses were at the time. People imagine
them as being dark and scary. They were anything but
the bathhouse I used to go to was I think
it was three floors. There was an enormous swimming pool,
a huge chacuzzi. There were saunas and steam rooms, and
(07:41):
cafe sort of place, a sandwich shop, a rooftop deck.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
The bathhouses hosted all kinds of events, dance parties as
you might expect, but also voter registration drives and clinics
for STD testing. Some were known for their thematic flourishes,
like the Bulldog Baths, which were designed to look like
San Quentin pre and others were known for their sheer size.
The Club Baths, which Cleve Jones liked to frequent, was
(08:06):
big enough to host eight hundred visitors at a time.
Speaker 5 (08:09):
What drew me to the baths originally was, you know,
if you live in a cramped, old, drafty, cold Victorian
apartment with five other boys, you each get maybe, if
you're lucky, four minutes in this shower a day. It
was just so luxurious to go there and take a long,
hot shower, and then of course one could have a
(08:29):
lot of sex, and we did.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
There was a brief window when bathhouses were some of
the safest places in San Francisco for gay men to
meet and have sex that was about to come to
an abrupt end. I'm Leon Nafok from Audible Originals and
Prologue Projects. This is fiasco.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Age continues as epidemic spread in San Francisco.
Speaker 8 (08:55):
Ninety six percent that catch this thing are gonna die.
Speaker 4 (08:59):
Prevent fallout.
Speaker 9 (09:00):
You've called for the closing of bath houses.
Speaker 10 (09:02):
We pay the price when we violate the.
Speaker 11 (09:04):
Laws of God.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Gay community leaders worry about such a dangerous legal precedent.
Speaker 5 (09:08):
We're on the road to recriminalizing sodomi politically, it's like
a simple solution. It's a problem.
Speaker 12 (09:13):
Close it down.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
In this episode, aids threatens gay life in San Francisco
and the city's bathhouses spark a confrontation over public health
and civil liberties. In nineteen seventy seven, Cleave Jones started
(09:37):
volunteering for the campaign to elect Harvey Milk as San
Francisco's city supervisor.
Speaker 4 (09:42):
My name is.
Speaker 8 (09:43):
Harvey Milk, and I'm here Jimmy Kuciuney.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
After Milk won and took office, Jones worked with him
as an intern at City Hall. Less than a year later,
on November twenty seventh, nineteen seventy eight, Milk was shot
and killed by an assassin along with the city's mayor,
George Moscone immers author Harvey.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
Milk, a city supervisor, was shot there the city Hall
this morning.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Jones had left the building to run an errand when
he got back he saw his boss's wing tip shoes
on the floor sticking out of his office.
Speaker 5 (10:24):
There's his body right out the doorway. That. It was
pretty surreal, pretty horrible.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
This is the body of Supervisor Harvey Milk because it
was taken from City Hall. That night, Jones took part
in a spontaneous candlelight vigil, which was attended by more
than twenty five thousand people.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
They filled the place the straight and the gay of
the unknown and the well known Governor Brown was.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Here just later as Jones was there when Milk's assassin
was spared a murder conviction and was instead found guilty
of manslaughter and sentenced to just over seven years in prison.
Jones joined a crowd in the streets of San Francisco
to protest the verdict, but began as a peaceful demonstration
(11:09):
gave way to violent clashes between police and protesters.
Speaker 13 (11:13):
In the Castro district, a group of what some called
rogue cops broke into a gay bar.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Several people were bloodied there and on the sidewalks.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
It became known as the White Knight Riot. It served
as a dramatic reminder that for all its advances, the
gay liberation movement remained under threat.
Speaker 5 (11:31):
It's a very crazy night. And then the police attacked
Castro Street and destroyed some of the bars and beat
a lot of people up before they were driven out
of the neighborhood.
Speaker 10 (11:40):
What do you things have gone.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
From good to bad to very bad.
Speaker 10 (11:43):
Every once in a while, demonstrator a protester will come
out of the crowd, throw a piece of burning material
into a police car and started on fire.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Cleave Jones continued working in politics after Harvey Milk's death.
By the nineteen eighties, his years as an activist had
propelled him to a job as a legislative consultant in
the California State Assembly. One of his responsibilities was to
examine bills coming out of the Assembly's Health Committee. Jones
didn't know much about public health policy, so the first
(12:25):
thing he did was subscribe to a stack of medical journals.
Speaker 5 (12:28):
And among them was the MMWR, the Morbidity Immortality Weekly
Report out of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
This CDC report was the same one you heard about
earlier in our series, the one that put forward the
very first scientific findings on what would turn out to
be AIDS.
Speaker 5 (12:47):
I remember quite clearly the first week of June, forty
years ago, nineteen eighty one, reading these first few paragraphs
describing clusters of homosexual man with capasi sarcoma and numasistus pneumonia,
and I clipped it out, and I put it on
my bulletin board, and I just had this very bad
(13:08):
feeling that this was something serious.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
Not long after Cleve Jones read the CDC report, a
doctor named Marcus Conant asked to meet him for dinner.
Conant was a forty five year old dermatologist at the
University of California, San Francisco. He was originally from Jacksonville, Florida,
and like Jones, he had chosen to launch his career
in the Bay Area. In no small part because he
(13:35):
was a gay man.
Speaker 8 (13:36):
Most gay men coming from Jacksonville, Florida, knew that if
you were going to be a gay man and not
live a lot, you know, get married and have kids
and snink away two or three times a year to
go pursue a gay lifestyle, that you had to live
in a major city, and that would probably be New
York or San Francisco.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
In nineteen eighty one, Conan began seeing cases of rare
skin cancer in his patients. Capus's sarcoma or CHAS for short.
Speaker 8 (14:06):
Now it was and still is, an extremely rare disease.
The average dermatologist in a lifetime could be expected to
see one case.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Soon, Conant opened a clinic devoted to capusi's sarcoma and
quickly became the city's go to doctor for CHAS patients.
Conant was on the front lines of what he believed
was an unfolding epidemic, but hardly anyone seemed to be
paying attention. It was out of frustration with this state
(14:40):
of affairs that Conant sought out Cleave Jones, with his
political connections and his work with the Health Committee. Maybe
Jones could help Conant get funding for research, and just
as urgently, maybe he could help raise awareness in the
gay community of what was going on. Before dinner, Conant
took Jones to dead see one of his chaos patients
(15:01):
in person. The young man showed Jones a photo of
what he had looked like before he got sick, handsome,
smooth skinned, and muscular. Now his emaciated body was covered
in purple lesions.
Speaker 8 (15:15):
He had multiple lesions of CAPSI sarcoma, but then had
a terrible, terrible infectious disease causing intractable diarrhea with you know,
twenty or thirty bowel movements a day, and he deteriorated
very rapidly.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Cleave. Jones was terrified by what he saw. Afterwards, he
and Conant left the hospital and went to the Zuni Cafe,
a restaurant not far from City Hall. There, Conan explained
his theory of the case.
Speaker 5 (15:46):
He told me that he thought it was a new
or previously unrecognized virus and that did something that crippled
the immune system, leaving the body vulnerable to a whole
range of opportunists confections.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
At this early point, there was no consensus among doctors
as to what exactly was causing people to get sick,
But Conan told Jones what he believed, that the disease
was primarily sexually transmitted, and that gay men were at
special risk.
Speaker 5 (16:18):
There was no drama, there was no theatrics about He's
got a slight Southern cadence to his voice, and he
just kind of laid it out to me over dinner,
and I thought, well, my goodness, were all dead.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
After the dinner, Jones was convinced that the gay community
was in trouble, and he agreed to help Conant start
a foundation that would raise money for research. Soon, the
two men were both working towards another more controversial goal
as well, convincing their fellow gay men to change how
they had sex.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
I was worried today that a new and frightening disease,
a quiet immune deficiency syndrome, destroys the body's ability to
fight certain illnesses.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
By the summer of nineteen eighty two, the mysterious disease
causing KS and various opportunistic infections had become known as AIDS.
The number of diagnosed AIDS patients was doubling every five months.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
There is no known cause, no known cure, and more
than forty percent of the victims have died.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
As the numbers swored, Marcus Conant grew increasingly frustrated that
the gay community was not taking the crisis more seriously.
She was especially worried about the city's booming circuit of
bath houses.
Speaker 8 (17:38):
What was going on in the community was denial. I
had people telling me that, oh, it's okay to go
to the bath houses as long as you take a
shower after you have sex. I had one guy claim
that he just changed the sheets on the bed in
his stall at the bath house every time he had sex.
So just change the sheets and you'll be fine. Now,
as long as you have a belief, something that you
(17:59):
can hold on to, whether it's scientifically valid or not,
is often more valid for people than scientific evidence.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
It wasn't just that seemingly healthy men were putting themselves
at risk. Conan was also seeing patients with visible symptoms
of AIDS who were still flatly refusing to modify their
sexual routines.
Speaker 8 (18:21):
I had a patient he had a couple of pleasions
of capsis sarcoma, and he said, in the course of
the interview, he said, hurry up, doctor, you know I
want to go to the baths tonight. And I said,
you're still going to the bass And he said, sure,
I'm going to the bass. And I said, but you've
got CAPSI sarcoma, and you know everyone thinks that it's transmissible.
(18:43):
Let's get going from one person or another. And he said,
you know everybody knows that, so they can take their
risk too, But I'm going to the bass.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
For years, Conan had enjoyed going to the baths himself,
but after encounters like that, he not only stopped going,
he stopped having sex all together. One weekend in nineteen
eighty three, Conant and his boyfriend took a trip to
Santa Cruz, where they wandered around an amusement park on
the boardwalk.
Speaker 8 (19:14):
We walked up and down the boardwalk and did all
those sorts of things, and we finally got to the
roller coaster. And there's this old rickety roller coaster at
the end. It's a nightmare because it's still a wooden structure.
It rattles, it sounds like it's coming apart when the
cars go by.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
It was while Conant was on the roller coaster that
he had an epiphany about the baths.
Speaker 8 (19:34):
So we get on this thing, and you know, typical
roller coaster. We're slowly climbing up to the peak of
the high point. You can see out over the Pacific Ocean.
It's just great. And then suddenly, you know, the bottom
drops out from under you and the car goes greening down.
And my only thought at that point is the things
was rattling and sounded like it was going to come apartments.
(19:56):
If this thing weren't safe, they meaning the authorities, will
close it down. It must be safe, because otherwise they
just wouldn't let this thing happen. And as we reached
the bottom of the loop, I realized, wait a minute,
that's true of the bathhouses.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Conant realized that people were going to the bathhouses because
the bathhouses were open. If the bath houses weren't safe,
these people figured someone would have surely closed them down.
Speaker 8 (20:26):
And of course that's when I realized I've got to
get out of my ivory tower, quit plupling the doctor
and the white coat, and get out there and start
saying no, no, We've got to go public and say
those of us at the university who are seeing these patients,
who are looking at this thing every day, who know
something about this disease, feel like you need to close
down the bathhouses.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Of course, Marcus Koenant was just a doctor. He didn't
have the power to shut down the bathhouses. That would
be up to the city government, specifically the director of
public Health.
Speaker 12 (21:05):
I'm Mervyn Silverman, former director of Health in the City
and County of San Francisco from nineteen seventy seven to
nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Working for the San Francisco Health Department was a dream
come true for doctor Mervyn Silverman, who moved to the
city after years of holding a similar position in which
a tak Kansas. In San Francisco, Silverman found a health
department that was well funded, well respected, and free to
implement progressive new programs other cities might have discouraged.
Speaker 12 (21:35):
I had about I think five thousand employees and a
huge budget, so we did everything from a brain surgery
to bath house inspection.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
The bathhouse inspections were basically like hotel or restaurant inspections.
They were mostly about making sure that rooms and other
facilities were clean before aids. Looking after the bathhouses was
not exactly Silverman's top priority.
Speaker 12 (21:58):
Honestly didn't just I didn't pay that much attention to it.
I think they were regularly attended by probably five or
ten percent of the whole gay community. So it wasn't
a major thing, but it was something that was symbolic.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
It's hard to find reliable numbers on how many people
were actually visiting San Francisco's bathhouses. One informal survey taken
in nineteen eighty three indicates that it was more than
Silverman thought that one in four gay men went to
the baths once a week, while one in five went
once a month. In any event, as aids began to
spread in San Francisco, Silverman was reluctant to do anything
(22:35):
that might make gay people feel unfairly targeted or encourage
members of the general public to treat them like pariah's.
In nineteen eighty three, when Marcus Conan and others began
pressuring the city's health department to take action against the bathhouses,
Silverman was conflicted. He knew the baths were incredibly important
to the gay community, not only as gathering places, but
(22:58):
as symbols of liberation. As one bathhouse owner put it.
Speaker 14 (23:02):
As an institution that's specifically designed to allow one to
be as free as they need to be.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
But as the epidemiology of AIDS came into clearer view,
it seemed increasingly likely that the disease could be spread
through sex. And if that was true, then the bathhouses
were potential hotbeds for infection.
Speaker 12 (23:23):
There were areas that were communal and dark, and sometimes
with a guy might have sex with five, ten, fifteen people,
maybe more, I don't know. In one evening.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
From a purely scientific perspective, closing the bath seemed like
it would almost certainly slow the spread of AIDS. But
the Silverman the work of public health wasn't always as
simple as doing exactly what the science dictated.
Speaker 12 (23:48):
I look at public health the way a doctor looks
at the patient. The community is my patient. I don't
want to do something in one part of the community
that will do damage in another parts, Like I don't
want to treat your heart as my patient and destroy
your liver in the process.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Silverman wanted to take action on the baths, but he
was not going to do it without buying from community
leaders like Cleave Jones. Jones, for his part, was torn
on the issue. He told Silverman that while the bathhouses
might be a problem, closing them could create an even
bigger one.
Speaker 5 (24:21):
I think I can still articulately argue both sides of
this debate. The people who wanted the bathhouses closed said, look,
there's no other place you could look at where there
were more opportunities for transmission than a bath house. And
then the other side said, yes, but if you allow
the state to shut down bath houses, what's next. You
(24:44):
could look at gay bars and say, well, there's an
incredible opportunity for transmission in any gay bar that you
look at, and this will erode our civil liberties. At
the time, it was very fraught and a lot of
people were very very angry about it, and I'm not
sure what was the right thing to do.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Part of the difficulty was that doctors and public health
officials like Conan and Silverman weren't the only ones who
wanted the bathhouses closed, and some of the loudest voices
calling for closure weren't exactly friends of the gay community.
Speaker 5 (25:18):
I think an important part of the context for this
is that you had the moral majority types and the
preachers who were calling for closure, and worse, this whole
debate was occurring in this context of many people from
the radical right, and not just the radical right, expressing
really extreme measures right up to quarantine and putting people
(25:41):
in camps and tattooing their HIV status on their bodies.
So it was not unreasonable for people to fear how
slippery that slope might be.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
The backlash to gay liberation had helped fuel a new
kind of conservatism that had taken hold in American politics
that included the creation of the Moral Majority, a coalition
of religious groups opposed to abortion and gay rights. It
was started in nineteen seventy nine by the Virginia based
televangelist Jerry Folwell.
Speaker 15 (26:20):
The high point of the week is an assembly conducted
by doctor Fowell himself. Is theme the need for Christians
to become active in politics by turning local congregations into
blocks of voters that were unseat politicians who are held
to undermine the American way of life.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
In nineteen eighty Fallwell barnstormed across America, delivering fiery sermons
to his followers and rallying them behind conservative candidates.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
We have a three full primary responsibility. Number one, get
people saved. Number two, get them baptized.
Speaker 10 (26:51):
Number three, get them registered to vote.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
When Ronald Reagan was elected president in the landslide. Fallwell
and the Moral Majority claimed credit for his victory, and
in his first press conference as president, Reagan made it
clear that Fallwell and his ilk would have a receptive
audience in the White House.
Speaker 11 (27:07):
I am going to be open to these people. I'm
not going to separate myself from the people who the
electedition and centers there.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Fallwell enthusiastically condemned homosexuality as a moral perversion. Speaking to
reporters in nineteen eighty one, he warned that if gay
people were allowed civil rights, it would become quote an
established bonafide minority, like women or blacks. Then, in nineteen
eighty three, as the bathhouse controversy was heating up in
(27:40):
San Francisco, Fallwell used his national platform to weigh in
on the issue. He described activity in gay bathhouses as
sub animal behavior, and he called for them to be
shut down across the country.
Speaker 10 (27:53):
I believe that God does not judge people. God judges sin,
and I do believe that aids generally call them believed
to be caused by homosexual promiscuity as a violation both
of them of God's laws, laws of nature and decency,
and as a result, we pay the price when we
violate the laws of God.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Many in the gay community feared that if the moral
majority had its way, they would lose a lot more
than their bathhouses.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Gay community leaders worry about such a broad and dangerous
legal precedent used against one segment of the population.
Speaker 5 (28:25):
It wasn't a huge leap in my view to say
that if we allow the government to close down this
set of businesses, what's next. Maybe now, with hindsight, that
feels like paranoia, but I don't think it was paranoia
at the time. We had just been decriminalized a few
years prior, so I think these were reasonable fears.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
The idea of closing the bathhouses came to be seen
as a capitulation to reactionaries, people who cared less about
saving the lives of gay people than about rolling back
their civil rights. With opponents of gay liberation apparently rallying
around the bathhouse issue, those within the gay community who
(29:09):
supported closure were treated with special suspicion. One outspoken voice
was Randy Schiltz, a gay reporter for the San Francisco
Chronicle who would go on to write the book and
the Band Played on a seminal early history of the
AIDS crisis. With Marcus Conant as one of his key sources.
Schiltz wrote more than a dozen articles for the Chronicle
(29:30):
about the dangers of the bathhouses, and he was fairly
open about his belief that they should be shut down immediately.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
Randy Schiltz went after the gay community for a lifestyle
it was leading to its own destruction That did not
make him very popular.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Even Cleve Jones was called a trader merely for suggesting
in an op ed that gay men practiced safe sex.
Speaker 5 (29:51):
It was a pretty mild call for other sexually active
gay men to curtail our activities to reduce our number
of partners. And you know, I had people scream at
me on the street that I was a Nazi. I
had people spit on my face.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
With all this pressure bearing down on him, Jones decided
he could not get behind the idea of city Hall
ordering the closure of the bathhouses. Jones reached out to
Mervin Silverman to explain his reasoning.
Speaker 12 (30:22):
He called to me and he says, if you close
the bath houses, I'm going to be one of the
ones manning the barricades. And I said why, And he said, well,
because with a city like San Francisco, which is so
tolerant and so welcoming and so compassionate. To do something
like this will send a message across the country that
(30:42):
will have communities instituting or enforcing asrodomy laws and things
like this. The net effect would be worse than better.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
Without the support of the gay community, Silverman felt he
couldn't close the bathhouses, no matter how uneasy it made
him to leave them open, and so for the time being,
Silverman looked for other ways to slow the spread of
AIDS in his city.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
Don't attempt to test it by stretching or blowing it up.
Speaker 13 (31:10):
Every condom you buy has been pre tested.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
One approach was to distribute condoms. At the time, condoms
were seen primarily as the domain of straight people. Trying
to prevent pregnancy. Getting gay men to use them was
an uphill battle. As one bathouse proponent put it, I
didn't become a homosexual so I could use condoms. Under
Silverman's direction, the city health department tried to circulate information
(31:35):
about how AIDS was spread in hopes that it would
convince people to make safer choices.
Speaker 12 (31:39):
All Right, this was the I think this was the
very first AIDS sign that was ever produced at all
in the country.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
Actually, Silverman showed us one of the many posters the
city health department produced. They gave the posters to bathhouse
operators so they could post them in communal areas.
Speaker 12 (31:57):
It says, AIDS is everyone's problem, Protect yourself and those
you love. And it had circle with AIDS in it
and a line through it, and it said use condoms,
avoid any exchange of body fluids, limit your use of
recreational drugs, enjoy more time with fewer partners. AIDS is
not spread through casual contact. For your information, contact the
(32:20):
San Francisco Department of Public Health. I mean pretty benign,
if you know when you look back at it, But
it was the first one of its kind.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Silverman's health department wasn't the only group trying to get
the information out. Organizers in the gay community created their
own public education campaigns, and they were broadly successful in
increasing knowledge of AIDS around the city. More and more
men were making the personal choice to limit their number
of sexual partners by avoiding the baths. Still, Silverman faced
(32:58):
mounting pressure to close the baths from San Francisco's straight
majority that included the most powerful person in the city,
Mayor Dianne Feinstein.
Speaker 16 (33:08):
I don't believe that this city has any business permitting
businesses to operate whose sole source of being is the
very activity that communicates the disease.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Dianne Feinstein had been mayor of San Francisco since nineteen
seventy eight. She and Silverman had never butted heads on
public health issues, but the bathhouse situation was different.
Speaker 12 (33:31):
In fact, she was riding with a political reporter from
the San Francisco Chronicle in Washington and said, I don't
know why Silverman doesn't close the bath houses. If they
were heterosexual bath houses, he would have closed them. And
of course that obviously got back to me from the reporter,
and I said, that's right.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Silverman would not move his line in the sand. He
was not going to shut down to bathhouses without broad
support from San Francisco's gay community.
Speaker 12 (33:58):
I think if you stand back politically, it seemed like
a simple solution. It's a problem, close it down. The
restaurant is insanitary, close it down. But the difference is
this was dealing with human behavior. You were not closing
it down because of what the building was or whether
it was sanitary. You were closing it down because of
(34:19):
what people were doing in there.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
The bathhouse debate came to a head in March of
nineteen eighty four when a man named Larry little John
took matters into his own hands. Little John, a longtime
activist in the gay community, had become convinced that Silverman's
education push was not enough. He said that he had
personally inspected the largest bathhouse in the city and found
that none of Silverman's AIDS information posters were hanging in
(34:45):
the locker room. Little John was tired of waiting for
Silverman to act, and so he announced that he would
begin collecting signatures for a ballot initiative to officially ban
sex in the bathhouses.
Speaker 4 (34:57):
The initiative states that, in order to prevent the spread
of AIDS and to protect the public health, sexual activities
among patrons of public bath houses should be prohibited.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
The future of the baths would be placed in the
hands of San Francisco voters in the nineteen eighty four election.
Here's Little John speaking to a reporter that spring.
Speaker 17 (35:18):
I prefer to see doctor Silverman get some courage and
deal with it today.
Speaker 8 (35:22):
I prefer to see MARYA.
Speaker 4 (35:23):
Feinstein deal with.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
The issue today.
Speaker 13 (35:24):
Before more people die.
Speaker 4 (35:26):
But if we got to wait until November.
Speaker 5 (35:27):
To deal with the issue, the people will deal with
the issue.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
The thing about Little John's push for a citywide bout
initiative is that the overwhelming majority of San Francisco voters
were straight, and if it was up to them, the
bath houses would almost certainly be closed. People in the
gay community were outraged. Letters poured into The Bay Area Reporter,
the city's largest gay newspaper, calling Little John homophobic, slime, morality, cowboy,
(35:57):
and judas.
Speaker 6 (35:58):
They say it's a civil right and closing down won't
slow the spread of AIDS.
Speaker 9 (36:03):
They are no more responsible for multiple sexual activities than
our bars, where people can go and meet someone and
have a liaison later in a hotel or in the home.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
It would be one thing if gay people decided to
shut down the bathhouses themselves. It would be entirely different
if the straight majority imposed the shutdown on them.
Speaker 14 (36:24):
The danger of the initiative, as I see it, is
the opening possibility of creating a police state in San Francisco.
I would be appalled at the idea that police officers
could come into a private situation and inspect the activities
of my sexual life.
Speaker 8 (36:42):
I think this is a worse mistake than the McCarthy era,
and I think that we're going to live to regret
this in San Francisco and throughout the.
Speaker 13 (36:49):
Nation, in the world.
Speaker 8 (36:49):
This all began.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Cleve Jones, who knew as well as anyone that reactionary
forces could still reverse the gains of gay liberation, saw
the writing on the wall.
Speaker 5 (36:59):
The issue of the bathhouses was going to go on
the ballot, and the judgment from a whole lot of
people was that is too dangerous. We cannot have these
kinds of sensitive, nuanced, thorny issues of public health administration
be decided by a popular vote in such a negatively
(37:23):
charged atmosphere. And that was when the conversation shifted to
let's let Silverman shut it down.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
Within days, an open letter was circulated and signed by
dozens of prominent figures in the gay community. The letter
gave Silverman the green light he had been waiting for.
He arranged for a press conference to be held the
next day, But then most of the people who had
signed the letter changed their minds, having apparently realized that
(37:54):
in the eyes of the gay community, they would own
the decision to close the bathhouses. Even more than Silverman would.
Speaker 12 (38:01):
So they all signed this letter to me and said
they supported closing it. Within twenty four hours, most of
them had taken their names off of it.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Cleave Jones was among them. In the end, he was
just too conflicted.
Speaker 5 (38:15):
Sometimes we approach issues where we just don't really know
what is the right thing to do, and that doesn't
make one a coward or dishonest. It means that one
doesn't know what to do.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Mervyn Silverman was back to square one. With no official
backing from the gay community, he felt he could not
follow through with his plan. The problem was reporters had
already been alerted that there was going to be a
major announcement. News trucks were lined up outside the Public
Health building. Silverman felt like he had to at least
show up and say something. Silverman met with Mayor Feinstein
(38:57):
and told her he could not go forward with a
decision to close the Then, right before the press conference,
he met with the city's police chief, who fitted him
with a bulletproof vest. As Silverman's car approached the Public
Health Building, he saw dozens of protesters gathered outside.
Speaker 12 (39:14):
It was bizarre, it with something of I think a
Fellini movie or something like that. I walked in there
and was sort of like a haze, and through the haze,
I'm seeing people naked or sort of naked, with towels
wrapped around it.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Some of the protesters held signs that read today the tubs,
tomorrow your bedroom, and out of the baths into the ovens.
Speaker 13 (39:35):
Protesters and many others worried and angry that after a
year of resisting the calls, Director of Public Health Mervyn Silverman,
had decided to close the baths down.
Speaker 12 (39:45):
I saw all this stuff, and I didn't say Hi, Joe, Hi, Mary,
who the various reporters. I just went up, sat down
to the desk and basically said, all of you who
think I'm going to close the bath houses, you know,
sit down, forget. It could have happened.
Speaker 7 (40:01):
Because of a number of issues, both legal and medical,
that are not resolved.
Speaker 12 (40:09):
I am not going to be making a.
Speaker 7 (40:10):
Comment discussing the opening or closing of the bath houses.
Speaker 13 (40:14):
At this point, the decision was popular.
Speaker 5 (40:22):
Here.
Speaker 13 (40:22):
The crowd, ready to burst with anger, was greatly relieved.
Do you think that he decided not to do it
right away because of pressure from the gay communities?
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Uncertainly, even though Silvermen had backed down, San Francisco's gay
community was shaken. Word had gotten out about the leaders
who had initially signed the letter in support of closure.
The editor of the Bay Area Reporter labeled them collaborators.
The gay liberation movement, the editor wrote, was almost killed
(40:52):
off last Friday morning by a group of gay men
and one lesbian. This group gave their names to give
the green light to the annihilation and of gay life.
The gay community should remember those names well. The role
of names became known around the city as the Trader's List.
(41:17):
On April ninth, nineteen eighty four, ten days after his
anti climactic press conference, Silverman took a half measure that
seemed to please nobody. Rather than closed down the bathhouse's outright,
he issued a strict new set of rules that mandated
increased lighting, the removal of doors from private rooms, and
most importantly, a ban on sex inside the venues. It
(41:42):
was enough to convince Larry Littlejohn to withdraw his ballot initiative,
which had called for similar restrictions, But unsurprisingly, when the
city sent in undercover health inspectors, they found that people
were not abiding by the new rules, and so the
bathhouses remained in limbo, with the mayor continuing to call
for their closure and gay leaders continuing to make the
(42:03):
case for safe sex.
Speaker 17 (42:05):
We as a community are not exactly slouches when it
comes to sexual creativity. That is not absolutely essential to
go to the baths and stick your butt up in
the air in order to get erotic pleasure as a
gay man.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
The problem was that, according to the bath house owners,
even when they tried to give out condoms, most of
their customers didn't seem to want them. Marcus Conant, the
doctor who had started ringing the alarm about AIDS years earlier,
found this infuriating.
Speaker 18 (42:35):
And so this year the group that we have to
criticize is not the fads, and is not the state,
and it's not the city. It's the gay community. Because
the rationalization that is going on in the gay community
is absolutely terrifying.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
This is Conan speaking in April of eighty four at
a public forum on bathhouses.
Speaker 18 (42:58):
I will tell you the story of two pensions. One
is a man that I saw today who continues to
go to the bath houses and have sex. He has
CAPTUSI sarcone. Another man is a PhD who has idiopathic
tromocytopenic purple and goes to the bath houses. And when
I said to him, do you tell your sexual contacts
that you have AIDS? He says no. And I said,
(43:20):
how do you morally live with that? And he says,
anybody that knows the bath house is a damned fool.
And I think, thank God, what's coming to them. Nothing
that we, as physicians or epidemiologists or nurses or patients
with AIDS have done today has slowed down the instance
(43:42):
of this disease. Whatsoever should we ask the mayor every
time we have an aide's patient to die in San Francisco,
to set off the earthquake sireene for twenty seconds.
Speaker 8 (43:55):
It'll go off every other day.
Speaker 18 (43:58):
Maybe people will be begin to understand the magnitude of
the problem. And then by Christmas, when it's going off
twice a day, and by this time next year, when
it's going off three times a day, everybody will begin
to understand what we're dealing.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
Looking back, Conan says, he gets or people who opposed
closure were coming from.
Speaker 8 (44:19):
I mean I could understand their point of view. I
can still understand their point of view. I mean they
had fought for years for the rights of gay men,
and here we were coming along saying you fought for
it and now you can't have it.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
Still, Conan says that he has no second thoughts about
taking the position that he did.
Speaker 8 (44:39):
It's very much like, what is the more important thing?
Is it people dying or is it the economy? Wells
as with that argument, it's both. But you can't have
an economy if too many people are frightened and dying.
Ninety six percent of them that catch this thing are
gonna die. So you need to be almost raconian in
(45:04):
how you approach this thing. You can't just let people
make up their own mind when they're not just putting
themselves at risk, they're putting the whole society at risk,
at least the whole gays aside.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
Four decades later, Conan still finds the idea of using
bathhouses as sites for safe sex education to be laughable.
Speaker 8 (45:25):
Why do people go to the bath house. They go
to get laid. They don't go for a lecture for
God's sake, I mean quite honest. I mean, you take
a bunch of horny guys and they're going there to
get laid, and you want you want some doctor to
give them a talk about hygiene. Sorry.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
Eventually all the controversy took its toll. Venues, including the Hothouse,
the Liberty Baths, and the Bulldog Baths all made the
decision to voluntarily close their doors.
Speaker 17 (46:15):
What's happening is without them actually legislating the closing of the.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
Bath houses, the politicians are closing us down slowly by
discouraging people.
Speaker 5 (46:25):
To come here.
Speaker 1 (46:25):
Sutro Baths, one of the largest bathhouses in the city,
hosted a three day farewell party where five employees stood
on stage and threw AIDS bursures into a barbecue.
Speaker 4 (46:35):
Tonight, they burned those pamphlets to protest being driven out
of business by what they call AIDS hysteria.
Speaker 1 (46:42):
If we can't pass them out, the owner of Sutro
Baths said, we might as well burn them.
Speaker 14 (46:46):
We take away the tower, was take away the keys.
Speaker 9 (46:50):
We don't need education to fight the streat disease.
Speaker 18 (46:53):
We're closing down the baths and the other.
Speaker 9 (46:56):
Private clubs gets out of the showers, sending.
Speaker 7 (47:04):
You can sing along in the cars city.
Speaker 1 (47:12):
On October ninth, nineteen eighty four, Mervyn Silverman made a
decisive move fourteen.
Speaker 4 (47:17):
Gay bathhouses and sex shops in San Francisco were ordered
shut down by the city's public health director.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
Through the morning, city health officials posted notices clothes or
face legal action.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Silverman had found that fourteen of the city's remaining bathhouses
and sex clubs were in violation of his rules, so
he shut them down completely.
Speaker 7 (47:35):
Today, I have ordered the closure of fourteen commercial establishments
which promote and profit from the spread of AIDS.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
At the time of Silverman's announcement, it was estimated that
forty percent of the gay male population in San Francisco
was infected.
Speaker 3 (47:51):
AIDS continues its epidemic spread in San Francisco, more cases
reported already in the first three quarters of nineteen eighty
four than all of nineteen eighty three. Even thousands more
may have the disease and still not know it. Some
in the gay communities say those who use bath house
as for sex will simply go somewhere else, that today's
action by the city will bring much controversy, not much cure.
Speaker 1 (48:14):
That December, three and a half years after AIDS had
first emerged in San Francisco in nineteen eighty one, Silverman
resigned as Public Health commissioner. A reporter questioned him on
his way out, how did the public health director feel
about leaving his job in the middle of an epidemic.
I'd like to believe this is the middle, Silverman answered,
(48:35):
My fear is that this is the beginning. By the
end of nineteen eighty four, the total number of confirmed
AIDS cases in the US was pushing eight thousand. More
than half of those patients had already died. Cleave Jones
(48:56):
found out he was HIV positive in nineteen eighty five
when a blood as finally became available. To this day,
he's still torn about the bathhouses, which it's worth noting
ended up staying closed for decades.
Speaker 5 (49:09):
You know, I was ambivalent then, I'm ambivalent today. Did
the bathhouse closures result in and across the board sweeping
denial of civil rights?
Speaker 13 (49:22):
No?
Speaker 5 (49:23):
Did the closure of the bathhouses slow the spread of
the pandemic? Probably not. With you know, twenty twenty hindsight,
I wish what could have happened is that the community
could have rallied enough and found enough unity to impose
our own restrictions and guidelines on how these places would operate.
(49:46):
But with hindsight, I would say to you that the
behavior that had gone on in the bath houses continued,
and it went underground, It went out of the county.
It did not go away.
Speaker 1 (50:00):
Eventually, the bathhouse controversy was no longer top of mind
for people like Cleave Jones and his friends. They were
now too busy going to funerals and taking care of
the sick.
Speaker 5 (50:12):
And within just five years, almost everyone I knew was
dead or dying or home caring for someone who was dying.
It ultimately would kill over twenty thousand people in my neighborhood.
Speaker 1 (50:24):
Among the thousands of San Francisco's who would die from
AIDS in the ensuing years were Randy Schiltz, the Chronicle reporter,
and Sylvester the Queen of Disco. Jones remembers losing friends,
making new ones, and then losing them too. He remembers
familiar faces around the neighborhood vanishing one by one.
Speaker 5 (50:43):
There was a male carrier, a guy I never knew
his name, but he always wore shorts. He had muscular legs,
and he always would wear shorts. And we, you know,
we make little jokes about the male guy that always
wore shorts. Of course, he disappeared and the bus drivers disappeared,
in the bakers and the bank tellers, and just aw
(51:06):
the familiar face as your favorite bartenders. Everybody died, and
those who did not were.
Speaker 8 (51:16):
Just so.
Speaker 5 (51:18):
Locked down in grief and the incredibly hard work of
caring for people in the absolute vacuum of any kind
of government response.
Speaker 1 (51:31):
About a year after the bathhouses were shut down, Jones
began planning an AIDS memorial. He had an idea for
something visual and striking, something that might wake up the
country to the enormity of the death toll. He imagined
a giant patchwork quilt. On each square would be the
name of someone lost to AIDS. Someday the quilt would
(51:53):
be big enough to blanket the Mall on Washington.
Speaker 14 (52:10):
Running only Sylvester.
Speaker 8 (52:17):
Who this Siscott Stormy with.
Speaker 5 (52:31):
Simpson Anti Ken.
Speaker 1 (52:35):
On the next episode of Fiasco, AIDS threatens America's blood supply.
Speaker 3 (52:40):
Blood banks and plasma centers may be spreading a new
and mysterious ailment called Age.
Speaker 1 (52:46):
Fiasco is presented by Audible Originals and Prologue Projects. The
show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Sam Graham, Felsen, Madelin Kaplan,
Ulla Kulpa and Me leon Nyfock. Our researcher is Francis Carr,
Editorial support from Jessica Miller and noor waswas archival research
by Michelle Sullivan. This season's score is composed by Edith Mudge.
(53:10):
Additional music by Nick Sylvester of God Mode, Alexis Squadrado,
Joel Saint, Julian and Dan English, Noah hect and Joe Vali.
Our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Our credits song
this week is Stormy Weather, performed by Sylvester. You also
heard Sylvester's You Make Me Feel. Music licensing courtesy of
Anthony Roman. Audio mix by Erica Wong, with additional support
(53:33):
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 head of acquisition and
Development for Audible. Thanks to the Vanderbilt Television Archive, Joshua Gampson,
Louis Knieber, and Bryant Erstad. Additional archival material courtesy of
(53:57):
KGO TV in San Francisco. Special thanks to Peter Yasi.
Thanks for listening. Next week, episode four,
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.