The New York Times - June 17, 1983
Dudley Clendinen

In New York, a restaurant owner reflects on the way his lover, shunned by hospitals and airlines and then by undertakers, died this winter of the ailment, acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

In Denver, a woman calls to ask how she should fumigate an apartment she bought from a homosexual.In Houston, some people refuse to donate blood lest they contract AIDS from the needles at the blood bank. In New Orleans, a club owner sees a turn toward monogamy, a retreat from the casual, anonymous sex that has characterized "the gay life style" for many homosexuals.

In Washington, as the number of cases nationwide mounts beyond 1,500 and the number of deaths nears 600, Government officials are proclaiming AIDS the nation's No. 1 health priority, though they emphasize their belief that the vast majority of people are not in danger of contracting the deadly disease.

And in Boston, Paul DiAngelo, gripped by a cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma, racked by infections his body's stricken immune system cannot throw off, losing 10 quarts of fluid a day to a diarrhea the doctors cannot quell, struggles at the age of 33 to survive, to hope, to remain brave and to divine the meaning of this dread disorder.

For Mr. DiAngelo, it did not seem so threatening in the beginning: fever, chills, a slight diarrhea. That was four months ago, and it went away. But it came back four days later, abated, then returned, each time growing stronger, and in a few weeks, holding on.

Then he noticed some small lesions on his back, chest and belly, "like little strawberry birthmarks," he said. The fears began to whisper in his mind. He had made love with other men since high school, he said, but he had never, until recently, thought that something from his sex life might kill him.

More than 70 percent of the victims have been homosexual or bisexual men. Now, 14 years after the Greenwich Village riot that spurred an intensified and continuing "Gay Pride" movement, AIDS is torturing not only its victims but also the whole ethic of "the gay life style," which, roughly translated, has meant the freedom to live as one felt, openly, and to seek sex as one wished. Homosexuals Face 2 Problems

The disease, which destroys, apparently irreversibly, the body's ability to fight off infection, is spreading death and a mounting fear through the homosexual population of urban America, changing that culture's sex habits even as it spreads by way of them. Further, signs of alarm are beginning to show in the country as a whole.

Health officials believe that AIDS may be transmitted by an infectious agent, perhaps through sexual relations or through infected needles or contaminated blood. There does not appear to be sufficient evidence that the disease is transmitted through casual personal contact, and the general population is not regarded as being at high risk. Other major risk groups are hemophiliacs who require frequent blood transfusions, intravenous drug users and, mysteriously, Haitians.

As the AIDS caseload grows, homosexuals are faced with two prospects: a disease that burns in their own community like a fire in a barrel and a backlash that can be seen forming in places where tolerance held recent sway.

In New Orleans, a doctor wonders to a colleague if this is God's punishment, saying that if it is, it is not harsh enough. In Texas, preachers are calling for the closing of homosexual bars as health hazards. And in New York City, Bruce Mailman, the owner of a homosexual nightclub and a bathhouse, has nightmares about a "stalking fascism," fearing that the disease "opens the door to the most conventional and biased fears that people have" about homosexuals.

Because AIDS seems to be spread through male sexual contact, because most of the victims have been homosexual or bisexual men, because the incubation period now seems to stretch as long as three years before the symptoms appear, and because no case is known to have been cured, the panic felt among homosexual men has far outdistanced the number of cases diagnosed. An Entire Way of Life May Be Victim of AIDS

By striking at men like Mr. DiAngelo, whose adult life has been a quiet reflection of the progressive reach for self-respect and for public acceptance of homosexual freedom, AIDS has struck at an ethos still in evolution.

For most of a decade and a half, while a college student and administrator and later as a chef, Mr. DiAngelo has lived in emotional monogamy with two successive male lovers, the understanding being that each partner had the freedom to seek sex with others as well.

Most nights, Mr. DiAngelo says, he would go home, but some nights he would stop in at a bar, bookstore or bathhouse where homosexuals gathered, "sometimes just for a shower and a look around," sometimes for sex. He did not use drugs or drink, except for wine at meals, he says, and sexual encounters outside his long-term relationships probably varied from 20 to 40 a year. Ten months ago, concerned by what he had heard about AIDS, he cut back on those contacts. Then Came the Symptoms

Then came the chills, the fever, the slight diarrhea. Now, to the end of public understanding, he has granted the use of his name and photograph.

"We are talking about whether this is the end of the sexual revolution," he said. "I think one thing it may lead to is a more responsible way of handling that part of our lives." The tray beside his bed is loaded with cans of juice, little cups containing deodorized tincture of opium, which is a constipating agent, and a mixture of baby's rice cereal and bananas that he calls "my Bangladesh diet."

Mr. DiAngelo's diarrhea is believed to be cryptosporidiosis, caused by an intestinal parasite. It has now appeared in about two dozen AIDS cases and has no known cure, and so at Beth Israel, an advanced teaching hospital of the Harvard Medical School complex, doctors are trying to stem Mr. DiAngelo's loss of fluid with the primitive diet administered to victims of famine and dysentery in Bangladesh. Any Talk of Hope Is in the Past Tense

Mr. DiAngelo, a slim man whose normal weight is 142 pounds, lost 30 pounds before being hospitalized, so weak he could not walk. Infused with liquids, he gained 20 back, ballooning his thighs, then lost 10 more. A plasma bag fortified with such elements as potassium and magnesium, to try to balance the catastrophic effects on his body chemistry, hangs above his bed, trailing fluid through a tube into his arm.

When he speaks of having hope, he speaks in the past tense. "I did in the beginning," he said. "There are so many things about my case that are atypical that I had very high hopes." He paused, his eyes glazed with tears, and reached for a tissue. "It sort of changes week to week," he said.

When he thinks of how he got AIDS, he says he does not know, knows no one with whom he has had sexual relations who has the disease. But he thinks of a friend who visited more than a year ago. "I had one friend out in San Francisco that I wonder about," he said, looking off in thought. "I wonder if he's still alive, and I'm a little afraid to call. We had sexual contact a few times that year."

The uncertainty has induced a sexual panic in New York and San Francisco, with their large homosexual populations. "I don't think there is a thinking person in this town who isn't literally scared to death," says Larry Kramer, the screenwriter and producer of the movie "Women in Love," a founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, a support group for victims in New York.

"I made love the other night for the first time in five months, with someone who checked out, so to speak," Mr. Kramer said. "But I couldn't get out of the back of my mind: Is this the one that will kill me?"

Dr. George A. Pankey, head of the infectious diseases section at the Ochsner Medical Institutions in New Orleans, says that hysteria about AIDS is not justified. "Considering the sexual habits of many homosexuals, there have to be tens of thousands exposed, and there's still under 2,000 sure cases," he said. Some With the Disease Are Treated Like Lepers

Compounding the fear, and the ravages of the disease, is the fact that some victims have been treated like lepers. Ron Doud, the interior designer of the New York disco Studio 54, died of AIDS Feb. 17 at the age of 34 after five months of medical care that his lover of 10 years, Richard Ruskay, says cost "probably $300,000."

What the insurance did not cover was paid by Mr. Ruskay, a restuarant and bar owner, and his memories of the reluctance of medical, transportation and funeral service personnel to handle the case are graphic.

Principal among a range of infections that left Mr. Doud incontinent and incoherent, Mr. Ruskay said, was Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, which seems to be the largest and perhaps the quickest single killer among the cluster of diseases that afflict AIDS victims, and which doctors treat as perhaps the most infectious. Fear of Handling Body

At Lenox Hill Hospital, Mr. Ruskay said, "He was paying $420 a day for a hospital room, and I couldn't get the porter to clean the room. I had to clean the bath myself." A public affairs official at Lenox Hill said, after talking with Mr. Doud's doctor, that she could not speak to this specific instance. She said that the hospital was aware of fear of AIDS among its employees.

When Mr. Ruskay moved Mr. Doud to Phoenix, his mother's home, at her request, "the pilot wanted to throw him off the plane," Mr. Ruskay said. At St. Joseph's Medical Center in Phoenix, "they really were very afraid to handle him," Mr. Ruskay said. "They weren't even washing him."

Finally, when Mr. Doud died, the hospital staff simply "wrapped him in the sheets he was in and put him in a plastic bag," Mr. Ruskay said. And the undertakers at the funeral home, "because of their fear, all they did was to pour embalming fluid on top of the sheets he was in, and closed the plastic bag and put him in the casket."

In San Francisco, where the public health authorities have now posted warning signs about AIDS in homosexual bars and bathhouses, where landlords have begun evicting homosexual tenants, and where the police chief issued vinyl gloves and masks to 250 officers fearful of contracting AIDS from policing the city's concentrated homosexual community, Chuck Morris is still alive at the age of 40, but his life has shrunk. 'The Enormous Horror Of All This Hit Me'

Three years ago, when he was diagnosed as having AIDS, Mr. Morris was publisher of The Sentinel, a newspaper for homosexuals. Now, he says, he has more than 30 active symptoms, has had three brain seizures in six months, is unable to work and is abandoned by friends of years' standing. Twice he has been forced out of his apartments, both times while in the hospital.

The second eviction, he said, took the form of a phone call from one of his roommates, who called to tell Mr. Morris that he would kill him if he moved back. He moved out.

"I was standing on Castro and 18th Street with a little plastic bag with all my possessions that I could grab, and all of a sudden the enormous horror of all this hit me," he says. "At that point I had been working for 25 years, and I felt that the year before I was a reasonably wealthy man. I had my own newspaper, and now here I was, standing on the street, homeless and broke, and I had no idea where I was going to stay. It was the first time that I realized that this had caused my whole world to crumble around me." Others' Reaction a Worry

Close behind the impact of the disease itself, and the fear of it, lies the fear of the reaction from the larger, heterosexual world. In his studio above South Street in Philadelphia, Douglas James, a dance major at Temple University, sat running his hands through his short black hair.

Since collapsing at a dance recital last December, after feelng continually fatigued, with swollen lymph nodes and a sore throat, Mr. James has felt his headaches grow almost constant as his strength has ebbed. His feet and fingers tingle. He has found purple spots on the inside of an eyelid. He has been diagnosed as having "preclinical AIDS."

Like others, Mr. James sees the reaction to AIDS as a threat to the rights and the acceptance homosexuals have gained in recent years. "I don't think we should compromise our civil rights victories of the 70's now, when a lot of people like my aunt and uncle are saying that gays deserve AIDS and ought to be locked up," he said. Reaction and Fear Evident Around Country

At this point, the concern within the homosexual community about outside reaction appears to be more advanced than the reaction itself. "We are preparing a public position paper on the subject now," said Ronald S. Godwin, executive vice president of the Moral Majority in Lynchburg, Va.

"We feel the deepest sympathy for AIDS victims," he said, "but I'm upset that the Government is not spending more money to protect the general public from the gay plague." He was using what was at first a common term for the mysterious malady. Homosexuals, Mr. Godwin said, should be banned from giving blood by requiring them to identify themselves "on pain of law for giving false information."

"What I see," he said, "is a commitment to spend our tax dollars on research to allow these diseased homosexuals to go back to their perverted practices without any standards of accountability."

Around the country there are reflections of that sentiment. In New Orleans, where the owner of a bathhouse, places where men may have anonymous sexual relations with a dozen or more other men in a single night, says that business has dropped about 20 percent in the last six weeks, James P. Carter, a professor of nutrition at Tulane University, is told by a local doctor: "Jim, you think God's trying to punish them? 'Cause if he is, it ain't enough." 'Can I Touch This Person?'

Fourteen cases of AIDS have been confirmed in Colorado, and "whenever a case is diagnosed in a Colorado hospital, people get a little freaked out," says Dr. David Cohn of the Denver Metro Health Clinic. "They ask, 'Can I touch this person,' and so forth. But with proper education, some become less paranoid, and once they understand the disease doesn't spread through the air, they calm down."

In Houston, where the City Health Department reports "an emerging epidemic" of 25 cases, blood donations are down by more than a fourth since January. "We're starting to get people who say they won't give blood because they're afraid of getting AIDS," says Bill Teague, executive director of the Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center, explaining that a myth has sprung up that the center uses only one needle.

Fundamentalist preachers in Houston have been calling on the health authorities to close homosexual bars and to declare homosexual conduct a health hazard. In Austin, the Texas Legislature adjourned without acting on a bill that would ban homosexual conduct by reinstituting a law recently struck down as unconstitutional by a Federal district judge. And in Dallas, a group of about 30 doctors and lawyers have formed "Dallas Doctors Against AIDS," with the goal of helping to appeal the court's decision. But Support Is Growing As the Disorder Spreads

But around the nation, lines of governmental and volunteer support are growing in the face of an emergent medical crisis. In San Francisco, the city government has budgeted $4.1 million for medical and social services for AIDS victims.

Mayor Dianne Feinstein of San Francisco heads a group named by the United States Conference of Mayors to alert the nation to the growing danger of AIDS. The other members are the Mayors of New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston and Washington.

In Seattle, City Councilman Jack Richards is sponsoring a resolution of the Dorian Group, a predominantly homosexual political society, asking the city to declare AIDS a public health emergency, allocating funds for citywide surveillance, diagnosis and support services and requesting additional Federal funding for research. Unity Is Forged

But, mainly, the effort to organize in support of the victims has come from those most affected: homosexuals themselves. And repeatedly, in city after city, those involved say that the human toll being exacted by AIDS is forging homosexuals into a community as nothing has before, even bringing bankers, doctors and others out of the closet.

"I have not seen anything that has coalesced the gay community like AIDS," says Harley McMillen, director of the Howard Brown Memorial Clinic in Chicago, a private facility specializing in sexually transmitted diseases.

In New York, where the Gay Men's Health Crisis has enlisted more than 1,000 volunteers and raised perhaps $1 million, in San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, Houston, New Orleans, Boston and elsewhere, organizations have formed or are forming to raise money and volunteers to provide counseling, food, housing and financial assistance to AIDS victims.

Furthermore, a fundamental change seems to be occuring in homosexual conduct, a retreat from casual and multiple sex. "The lover scene is becoming unbelievable," said Jerry Menefee, owner of Menefee's, an elegant restuarant, bar and health club in New Orleans. "People are taking lovers, and no cheating. The gay scene is turning into a very normal situation." Homosexuals Say Bias Affects Government Aid

Another side, however, is the angry side of a culture that feels alienated from the rest of society. Virginia Apuzzo, executive director of the National Gay Task Force, a lobbying organization, makes a charge common among homosexuals: that the Federal Government, under a conservative Administration, is unsympathetic and that research is underfinanced.

It is a charge rejected by Dr. Edward N. Brandt Jr., the Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, who heads the Public Health Service. "We are not the least bit constrained, nor have we constrained ourselves, because 70 percent of these victims are gay," he said. "These are people, and they are ill. They need help. I suspect that there are more scientists in this country working on AIDS than we've had working on any other epidemic in history." Congress Acts on Funds

In Congress, the mood seems sympathetic. "God bless this House," Representative Silvio O. Conte, Republican of Massachusetts, said recently after the House approved $12 million in additional research money for AIDS, with no member raising a objection. Senate approval of the money is expected soon as part of a supplemental apropriations bill, but the White House has threatened to veto the entire measure because it contains $780 million, over all, that President Reagan did not request.

This is the third time that Congress has moved on its own to appropriate research money for AIDS. The Reagan Administration has requested none, suggesting instead that money be taken from other health projects, though Margaret M. Heckler, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, said this week that the effort to find a cause and cure for the disorder was the nation's No. 1 health priority.

And as the research goes on, and homosexuals turn from anonymous or casual sex to partners they know and hope they can trust, Paul DiAngelo describes the dilemma they face in trying to choose among people who do not know themselves whether they carry AIDS. "It doesn't matter," he said sadly. "It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you know their name or not."

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