There were no members whose role was to protect the interest of the customers of these business executives. And, ultimately, that is how the eminent doctors who ran the nation’s blood banks behaved—like business executives.

A city health department that would yank a restaurant license for cockroach infestation certainly would pull a bathhouse license for fostering a far more lethal activity. Yet, by the first months of 1984, it was clear that nobody would do anything.

“We’re both in it for the same thing,” he said. “Money. We make money at one end when they come to the baths. You make money from them on the other end when they come here.”

As usual, the issue was framed in terms of human rights, not human life. “If the baths pulled their own plugs and died a natural death—like some of their patrons—no one would be the richer or the poorer,”

“sexual activity in places like baths or sex clubs should no longer be associated with pleasure—it should be associated with death.”

The bargaining is an attempt to postpone. So gay men bargained. Safe sex had come to mean eliminating your least favorite sexual activity and hedging on the rest.

They must be thinking that if these bathhouses really were dangerous, some responsible authority would not let them operate. Instead, the bathhouses, all licensed by the city, were prospering. Rather than condemn the institutions, Public Health Director Mervyn Silverman had adopted the latest neologism of AIDSpeak and had begun praising the bathhou

“You can’t single out the government; everybody was late in picking up on how serious this was. The media wasn’t around two years ago and neither were the congressmen who are talking so much now.”

cheerfully announced that AIDS diagnoses were decreasing in New York in the last months of 1983. The analyses were based on the fact that rather than doubling, as cases had been for two years, the rate of increase had gone down by 30 percent. This did not mean fewer cases; this only meant that instead of doubling in, say six months, the numbers of