The AIDS Crisis: Episode 3 - The Baths

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.

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.

I'm sick of everyone in this community who tells me to stop creating a panic.

I am got scare.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was through these really outdated old psychology textbooks that were in my father's library, which talked about prefrontal lobotomy and electroconvulsive shock treatment and things like that.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 about the gay liberation movement.

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 hair and raised fists marching through the streets of far off American cities.

Mcgay liberation movement, the drive for legal and civil rights, and for freedom of expression of the homosexual lifestyle.

We are just as viable a lifestyle, just as happy a type human being as any other.

In this country. Jones stole the magazine, went home and

After hundreds of years of people hating quote fags and queers, a city has emerged where homosexuality is not only tolerated, but thrives.

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.

Today, fully fifteen percent of the city is estimated to be gay.

In fact, there are.

More homosexuals per capita in San Francisco than any other city in the world.

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. Now anything is possible. Look how many of us there are who?

When Jones moved to San Francisco in nineteen seventy three, sodomy laws that made gay sex illegal were still on

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.

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.

When you ask why a person goes to a gay bar, here's what you get.

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.

My atmosphere's my life whouse.

The city also saw a proliferation of a very specific kind of establishment, the gay bathouse.

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.

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 dotted San Francisco's gay neighborhoods. Many of them featured live

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 cafe sort of place, a sandwich shop, a rooftop deck.

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 big enough to host eight hundred visitors at a time.

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 lot of sex, and we did.

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.

Age continues as epidemic spread in San Francisco.

Ninety six percent that catch this thing are gonna die.

Prevent fallout.

You've called for the closing of bath houses.

We pay the price when we violate the.

Laws of God.

Gay community leaders worry about such a dangerous legal precedent.

We're on the road to recriminalizing sodomi politically, it's like a simple solution. It's a problem.

Close it down.

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

My name is.

Harvey Milk, and I'm here Jimmy Kuciuney.

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.

Milk, a city supervisor, was shot there the city Hall this morning.

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.

There's his body right out the doorway. That. It was pretty surreal, pretty horrible.

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.

They filled the place the straight and the gay of the unknown and the well known Governor Brown was.

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 gave way to violent clashes between police and protesters.

In the Castro district, a group of what some called rogue cops broke into a gay bar.

Several people were bloodied there and on the sidewalks.

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.

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.

What do you things have gone.

From good to bad to very bad.

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.

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 thing he did was subscribe to a stack of medical journals.

And among them was the MMWR, the Morbidity Immortality Weekly Report out of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

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.

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 feeling that this was something serious.

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 was a gay man.

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.

In nineteen eighty one, Conan began seeing cases of rare skin cancer in his patients. Capus's sarcoma or CHAS for short.

Now it was and still is, an extremely rare disease. The average dermatologist in a lifetime could be expected to see one case.

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 of affairs that Conant sought out Cleave Jones, with his

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.

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.

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.

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.

There was no drama, there was no theatrics about He's

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.

I was worried today that a new and frightening disease, a quiet immune deficiency syndrome, destroys the body's ability to fight certain illnesses.

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.

There is no known cause, no known cure, and more than forty percent of the victims have died.

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.

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 can hold on to, whether it's scientifically valid or not, is often more valid for people than scientific evidence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was while Conant was on the roller coaster that he had an epiphany about the baths.

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. If this thing weren't safe, they meaning the authorities, will

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.

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.

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.

I'm Mervyn Silverman, former director of Health in the City and County of San Francisco from nineteen seventy seven to nineteen eighty five.

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.

I had about I think five thousand employees and a huge budget, so we did everything from a brain surgery to bath house inspection.

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.

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.

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

As an institution that's specifically designed to allow one to be as free as they need to be.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 could look at gay bars and say, well, there's an incredible opportunity for transmission in any gay bar that you

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

In nineteen eighty Fallwell barnstormed across America, delivering fiery sermons to his followers and rallying them behind conservative candidates.

We have a three full primary responsibility. Number one, get people saved. Number two, get them baptized.

Number three, get them registered to vote.

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.

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.

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 San Francisco, Fallwell used his national platform to weigh in

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.

Many in the gay community feared that if the moral majority had its way, they would lose a lot more than their bathhouses.

Gay community leaders worry about such a broad and dangerous legal precedent used against one segment of the population.

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.

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

Randy Schiltz went after the gay community for a lifestyle it was leading to its own destruction That did not make him very popular.

Even Cleve Jones was called a trader merely for suggesting in an op ed that gay men practiced safe sex.

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

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.

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 will have communities instituting or enforcing asrodomy laws and things like this. The net effect would be worse than better.

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.

Don't attempt to test it by stretching or blowing it up.

Every condom you buy has been pre tested.

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 about how AIDS was spread in hopes that it would convince people to make safer choices.

All Right, this was the I think this was the very first AIDS sign that was ever produced at all in the country.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 what people were doing in there.

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

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.

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.

I prefer to see doctor Silverman get some courage and deal with it today.

I prefer to see MARYA.

Feinstein deal with.

The issue today.

Before more people die.

But if we got to wait until November.

To deal with the issue, the people will deal with the issue.

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, and judas.

They say it's a civil right and closing down won't slow the spread of AIDS.

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.

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.

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.

I think this is a worse mistake than the McCarthy era,

Nation, in the world.

This all began.

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.

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 charged atmosphere. And that was when the conversation shifted to let's let Silverman shut it down.

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 in the eyes of the gay community, they would own the decision to close the bathhouses. Even more than Silverman would.

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.

Cleave Jones was among them. In the end, he was just too conflicted.

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.

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

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.

Some of the protesters held signs that read today the tubs, tomorrow your bedroom, and out of the baths into the ovens.

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.

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.

Because of a number of issues, both legal and medical, that are not resolved.

I am not going to be making a.

Comment discussing the opening or closing of the bath houses.

At this point, the decision was popular.

Here.

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

This is Conan speaking in April of eighty four at a public forum on bathhouses.

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, how do you morally live with that? And he says, anybody that knows the bath house is a damned fool.

It'll go off every other day.

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.

Looking back, Conan says, he gets or people who opposed closure were coming from.

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.

Still, Conan says that he has no second thoughts about taking the position that he did.

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

Four decades later, Conan still finds the idea of using bathhouses as sites for safe sex education to be laughable.

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.

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.

What's happening is without them actually legislating the closing of the.

Bath houses, the politicians are closing us down slowly by discouraging people.

To come here.

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.

Tonight, they burned those pamphlets to protest being driven out of business by what they call AIDS hysteria.

If we can't pass them out, the owner of Sutro Baths said, we might as well burn them.

We take away the tower, was take away the keys.

We don't need education to fight the streat disease.

We're closing down the baths and the other.

Private clubs gets out of the showers, sending.

You can sing along in the cars city.

On October ninth, nineteen eighty four, Mervyn Silverman made a decisive move fourteen.

Gay bathhouses and sex shops in San Francisco were ordered shut down by the city's public health director.

Through the morning, city health officials posted notices clothes or face legal action.

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.

Today, I have ordered the closure of fourteen commercial establishments which promote and profit from the spread of AIDS.

At the time of Silverman's announcement, it was estimated that forty percent of the gay male population in San Francisco was infected.

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

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, My fear is that this is the beginning. By the end of nineteen eighty four, the total number of confirmed

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?

No?

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 the familiar face as your favorite bartenders. Everybody died, and those who did not were.

Just so.

Locked down in grief and the incredibly hard work of caring for people in the absolute vacuum of any kind of government response.

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 be big enough to blanket the Mall on Washington.

Running only Sylvester.

Who this Siscott Stormy with.

Simpson Anti Ken.

On the next episode of Fiasco, AIDS threatens America's blood supply.

Blood banks and plasma centers may be spreading a new and mysterious ailment called Age.

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. Additional music by Nick Sylvester of God Mode, Alexis Squadrado, Joel Saint, Julian and Dan English, Noah hect and Joe Vali.