HIV/AIDS in San Francisco

Early in the 1980’s San Francisco hospitals, such as Children’s where my sister Solveig worked in an oncology ward, began to see patients with a rare skin cancer, Karposi’s sarcoma, sometimes in conjunction with pneumocystis pneumonia. These diseases occur in people with severely compromised immune systems. At first there was no name for it, but it did seem to particularly affect gay men and needle users. As the cases increased and were studied, it became known as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

In San Francisco, it became a plague. Everyone had friends who were HIV-positive, and thus likely to undergo the later stages of disease, AIDS, and die. There was no known cure, though it became clear that the disease was carried by certain bodily fluids and blood. Condoms were seen as the only way to prevent transmission from one person to another. Not until 1987 was the first drug, AZT, offered to combat HIV-related disease, and it was prohibitively expensive.

AIDS had, and still has, a huge impact on the culture. For the first time since the 1960’s, people became more wary about sex. People who were HIV-positive were stigmatized and politicians proposed proscriptions, such as quarantine, which compromised people’s human rights. The gay community in San Francisco responded with organizations and information, protests, care and dignity. But, every year, until the United States reached the highest number of deaths from AIDS in 1995 (48,371), mortality from AIDS increased. The hospice movement which was getting underway was pushed along by the need to care for so many people losing their lives to AIDS. A timeline of scientific, government and community response to AIDS can be seen here.

The stories of those who died from AIDS are kept alive by the Names Project Foundation and by an amazing quilt (Cleve Jones’ idea) which has grown to epic proportions and traveled all over the world. I worked in architectural firms and many of the architects and designers I knew in those years slipped quietly away. Larry Canega, who played the piano for the Pitschel Players and had been my sister’s great friend, died in the early 1990’s. One of my gay friends found that everywhere he looked, every place he went in San Francisco held memories of friends who were gone. “We are being compared to holocaust survivors,” he said to me in 1991. “It’s that bad.” I recall getting one of the “lavender letters” people sent out to friends when their gay partners died.

I remember doing tai chi push hands, in which two people work together, with a man who had very visible Karposi’s sarcoma on his arms and chest. One woman turned away in horror, but the rest of us worked with him. We knew we could not catch it from his skin. I also knew a woman who was married to a man who had been given an HIV-laced blood transfusion. When I again became single in 1989, I had several blood tests to make sure I wasn’t HIV-positive. This was still an emotion-soaked issue in 1995 when I worked on a documentary in which sexually-active students at a Danish film college took similar blood tests.

One of my tai chi teachers, Emilio Gonzalez, is a long-term survivor, doing daily tai chi and keeping close tabs on his health, including using some AIDS drugs. “When I first learned I was HIV-positive [more than 30 years ago], I wouldn’t even subscribe to a magazine!” he told me. He and George Wedemeyer developed Qigong classes which were particularly adapted for immune-compromised people. In 1996, I helped produce a video of these Qigong routines, and especially the Tiger Mountain Tai Chi Gong which Master Kai Ying Tung developed for our school. The best-selling video has been on television, sold as DVDs and is still available on youtube.com here.

The bitter story of AIDS is not mine to tell. But my fictional memoir of the late 1980’s, Nature's Stricter Lessons, would not be true to life without its presence.