And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition Read Online Free PDF

proclaiming their dual pride. The campy Gays Against Brunch formed their own marching unit. A group of drag queens, dressed as nuns and calling themselves the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, had picked the day for their debut.
    Gay tourists streamed to this homophile mecca from all over the world for the high holy day of homosexual life. Floats came from Phoenix and Denver; gay cowboys from the Reno Gay Rodeo pranced their horses down Market Street, waving the flags of Nevada and California, as well as the rainbow flag that had become the standard of California gays.
    Although the parade route was only two miles, it would take four hours for the full parade to pass. Within an hour, the first contingents arrived at the broad Civic Center Plaza, where a stage had been erected in front of the ornate facade of City Hall.
    Radical gay liberationists frowned at the carnival rides that had been introduced to the rally site. Parade organizers had decided that the event had grown “too political” in recent years, so the chest-pounding rhetoric that marked most rallies was given a backseat to the festive feeling of a state fair.
    “We feel it definitely isn’t a time for celebration,” complained Alberta Maged to a newspaper reporter. She had marched with a coalition of radical groups including the Lavender Left, the Stonewall Brigade, and the aptly named Commie Queers. “You can’t celebrate when you’re still being oppressed. We have the illusion of freedom in San Francisco that makes it easy to exist, but the right-wing movement is growing quickly. It’s right to be proud to be gay, but it isn’t enough if you’re still being attacked.”
    Many hard-line radicals, remembering the days when gay liberation was not nearly as fashionable, agreed. The event, after all, commemorated the riot in which Greenwich Village drag queens attacked police engaged in the routine harassment of a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. From the Stonewall riot, on the last weekend of June 1969, the gay liberation movement was born, peopled by angry women and men who realized that their fights against war and injustice had a more personal side. This was the gay liberation movement—named after the then-voguish liberation groups sweeping the country—that had taken such delight in frightening staid America in the early 1970s.
    By 1980, however, the movement had become a victim of its own success. Particularly in San Francisco, the taboos against homosexuality ebbed easily in the midst of the overall sexual revolution. The promise of freedom had fueled the greatest exodus of immigrants to San Francisco since the Gold Rush. Between 1969 and 1973, at least 9,000 gay men moved to San Francisco, followed by 20,000 between 1974 and 1978. By 1980, about 5,000 homosexual men were moving to the Golden Gate every year. The immigration now made for a city in which two in five adult males were openly gay. To be sure, these gay immigrants composed one of the most solidly liberal voting blocs in America, but this was largely because liberals were the candidates who promised to leave gays alone. It was enough to be left alone. Restructuring an entire society’s concept of sex roles could come later; maybe it would happen by itself.
    To the veterans of confrontational politics, the 1980 parade was a turning point because it demonstrated how respectable their dream had become. Success was spoiling gay liberation, it seemed. Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr., had issued a proclamation honoring Gay Freedom Week throughout the state, and state legislators and city officials crowded the speaker’s dais at the gay rally. For their part, gays were eager to show that they were deserving of respectability. 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,