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.

The poster did inform gay men that there was a nasty disease out there that could kill you; but in saying to only “reduce” the number of partners and “limit” drugs, it did not get to the blunt fact that just one partner or bad needle could bring death.

The gay plague got covered only because it finally had struck people who counted, people who were not homosexuals.