And The Band Played On

After submitting his play to his agent for review, Larry meets federal agencies working on AIDS, where he witnesses the obstacles at play, including the “[i]nteragency rivalry between the CD and that National Cancer Institute” (405). At one point, Congressional Staffer Tim Westmoreland offers to have Larry visit the home of the director of the one of the large institutes within the NIH, who turns out to be a closeted gay man. This leads Larry to understand why this director’s agency “had been extremely slow to respond to AIDS,” as “the greatest impediments to homosexuals’ progress often were not heterosexual bigots but closeted homosexuals” (406).

In San Francisco, there are protests as Dan White, the man who murdered Harvey Milk, is released after five years. Cleve Jones joins in the street march but leaves after succumbing to “persistent fatigue” and being up at night due to “unexplained sweats” (408).

At the CDC offices in Atlanta, Gallo isolates the “elusive AIDS agent” and tries to get as many cultures as possible to show strong evidence. He decides to call the new retrovirus HTLV-III. A few days later, the Pasteur Institute researchers also prove that their virus, LAV, causes AIDS when they accurately sort the blind blood samples of AIDS patients from those unaffected through their testing.