Sublime

Milton Shapp

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

The U.S. Constitution might be construed to allow the right to commit suicide, but the ramifications of bathhouses did not end with the patron. These people went to other places, picked up and infected others. The Constitution did not grant the right to take other people with you.

Endless letters poured into the Native, denouncing Kramer as an “alarmist” who was rabidly “sex-negative” and was using AIDS to deliver his post-Faggots “I told you so.”

The local blood bank, for example, had long ago learned that it was good business to send their mobile collection vans to such events with large gay crowds. These were civic-minded people. In 1980, they gave between 5 and 7 percent of the donated blood in San Francisco, bank officials estimated.

Only later would studies show that by this time in 1983, the 62 percent of gay men who still engaged in risky sexual behavior had at least a 25 percent chance of being intimate with someone infected with the new virus. Hellish odds in this lottery of death.

Before effective medicines were invented, HIV killed more than 95 percent of people it infected, making it the most lethal virus the world had ever seen.3 But HIV took years to wreak havoc, so infected people could pass it on without knowing they were sick.