And The Band Played On

“In his twenties, he had searched for a husband instead of a career. When he did not find a husband, he took the next best thing—sex—and soon sex became something of a career. It wasn’t love but at least it felt good, for all his time at the Cinderella ball, the prince had never arrived.” 

As a sweet and innocent young gay man, Ken Horne wants love and a husband. Desiring to be a dancer, he goes to San Francisco to study ballet but eventually drops out of school and follows a German lover. When he returns to the city years later, he becomes hardened and to fill the void of lost love, he indulges in sex. For many gay men at the time, if there was no love, the other option becomes an extreme lifestyle of sex. 

“Don’t offend the gays and don’t inflame the homophobes. These were the twin horns on which the handling of this epidemic would be torn from the first day of epidemic. Inspired by the best intentions, such arguments pave the road toward the destination good intentions inevitably lead.” 

During the publication of the CDC’s newsletter detailing instances of Pneumocystis pneumonia in gay men, the original title of the article, which referred to homosexuality, is dropped. With the advent of the epidemic and its initial connection to the gay community, thus begins the visible hesitancy of everyone to tiptoe around the topic of homosexuality.

“How very American, he thought, to look at a disease as homosexual or heterosexual, as if viruses had the intelligence to choose between different inclinations of human behavior. Those Americans are simply obsessed by sex.” 

Dr. Jacques Leibowitch reads the article about the cases of gay men with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and immediately thinks of several of his own patients exhibiting similar symptoms. He makes an interesting social commentary about American culture when he notes that instead of focusing on the disease, the Americans were busy thinking of the implications of a person’s sexuality.