And The Band Played On

At Fire Island, Larry Kramer is hearing about the mysterious affliction that ravages Enno Poersch’s lover, Nick. Enno believes because “Larry was a famous author who seemed to know everybody” (25), he might be able to assist Nick.

That summer, the conversation among the community revolved around “the latest intestinal parasites going around” (25). The same summer, Larry was not popular among gays due to his book, Faggots, which resulted in criticism for portraying the homosexual community in a negative light. In it, he explores the current reality of gay life, “scenes of drug-induced euphoria at the discos, all-night orgies in posh Upper East Side co-ops, and fist-fucking at The Toilet Bowl […] weekends of parties and dancing on Fire Island, punctuated by cavorting” (27). Larry shares his tiredness over being a “New York City-Fire Island faggot” and desiring a deeper relationship: “I want to love a Person!” (27). Larry attempts to keep a low profile, while “Enno, Nick, and a few other handsome men who made the A-list” (26), including Paul Popham, enjoy the Fire Island nightlife. Rick Wellikoff, Paul’s best friend, is diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma and also happens to be a good friend of Nick’s.

Senator Kennedy prepares for the Democratic National Convention and speaks with Bill Kraus, who as “the highest-ranking Kennedy delegate” (30) assists him in tackling homosexual issues in his run against President Carter. Carter and his camp, despite their preference to veer away from discussing gay rights, were still “better than the Republican alternative, who had just been nominated in Detroit, former California Governor Ronald Reagan” (31).

Later that summer, Enno admits to himself that Nick is dying and replays a tape from a psychic he visits for help who, in a trance, spells out toxoplasmosis, which confuses Enno as toxoplasmosis “was some cat disease” (33).

In Copenhagen, an agricultural engineer suffocates from microscopic protozoa filling his lungs while a gay man from the theater crowd slowly wastes away from “unexplained weight loss and a frighteningly aggressive outbreak of anal herpes” (35). These two deaths are followed by more victims across Europe, whose symptoms have stumped doctors.

In the United States, Rick Wellikoff’s rash is determined to be Kaposi’s sarcoma, a skin cancer identifiable by “flat, painless purple lesions” (37). Originally discovered among Jewish and Italian men, it was relatively benign, but recent reports revealed “a new, more aggressive form of the sarcoma in central Africa” (37). Rick’s lesions were not “rapidly covering his body and internal organs,” and for a New York schoolteacher that had not been to “exotic ports,” his case was an anomaly (37).

Two weeks later, Rick’s doctor, Dr. Linda Laubenstein, is notified by a colleague of another similar patient, and upon visiting him discovers that Rick and he both share mutual friends. He tells her: “You should talk to Gaetan because he’s got this rash too” (38).

Meanwhile, at the Davies Medical Center in San Francisco, Michael Maletta, an old friend of Enno and Nick, is diagnosed with an “FUO-fever of unknown origin” and remembers times with his “old gang that had spent such hot times together in those months when the tall ships came from all over the world to New York Harbor” (38).

Dr. Selma Dritz, the infectious disease specialist for the San Francisco Department of Public Health, gives a presentation at the University of California Medical Center on the serious infections plaguing the gay community: “Too much is being transmitted […] We’ve got all these diseases going unchecked. There are so many opportunities for transmission that, if something new gets loose here, we’re going to have hell to pay” (40).

In New York, Paul Popham’s boyfriend, Jack Nau, takes advantage of his absence and spends the night with Gaetan Dugas. At the same time, Enno brings an unconscious Nick to the hospital.

Dr. Michael Gottlieb, an assistant professor at UCLA, examines an artist suffering from a severe yeast infection and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Extracting the patient’s blood for the immunology lab, he discovers an oddity: “There weren’t any T-helper cells” (43). The artist had suffered from “a cornucopia of venereal diseases” and was gay; however, it did not explain why the unknown “disease tracked down and killed such specific blood cells” (43).

Jimmy Carter accepted his defeat as “Ronald Reagan was sweeping the country and bringing in the first Republican Senate in nearly thirty years” (43) before the West Coast was even finished voting. Bill Kraus worries because gay issues are important only for Democrats, especially with Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority claiming credit for the Reagan victory. Falwell was part of the fundamentalists that always had “some dark reference to the growing clout of homosexuals” (44).

In New York City, Nick has toxoplasmosis. Finally, with a diagnosis, Enno believes that the doctors can cure his lover: “Everything’s gonna be fine” (45).

In San Francisco, Ken Horne, a ballet school dropout, goes to dermatologist Dr. James Groundwater to figure out the purple lesions on his skin and his constant fatigue. Observing the size of his lymph nodes, Groundwater believes that it has “something to do with those spots” (47).

In Los Angeles, Dr. Joel Weismann writes on a patient's chart: “Patient has problems that appear to be secondary to immune deficiency” (48). Weismann had been witnessing at least twenty men with “strange abnormalities of their lymph nodes” (48). As the dean of southern California gay doctors, he “pondered how to start telling gay men to slow down, that all this sex might end up being hazardous to their health” (49), especially since the community did not appreciate being ordered around for their sexual practices.

On December 23, Rick Wellikoff is kept on a machine as he stops breathing due to fluid in his lungs. In the same city, at Beth Israel Medical Center, Dr. Donna Mildvan studies an autopsy report of a German chef who had been suffering from cytomegalovirus and was also homosexual. Two weeks later, a gay Beth Israel nurse with Pneumocystis and cytomegalovirus also dies. Witnessing a pattern in the deaths of the two men, Mildvan meets with Dr. Dan Willian, a prominent gay physician in New York City, saying that “[t]here’s a new disease going around in homosexual men” (50).