It’s Fire Island, N.Y., in the 1970s. Men in bathing suits have their arms draped around other men in bathing suits. They are laughing, walking in the sand at one of the few places in the U.S. where they are in the majority, where being gay is the rule.
Riding an intoxicating new wave of gay liberation, many have embraced casual, frequent sex as nearly a sacred right. No one knows yet that a sexually transmitted virus has entered their community, probably carried across the sea by men who were infected in Africa.
But within months, friends would fall ill and rumors would start of the plague that would destroy the bucolic charm of this getaway spot and bring pain and death to millions.
“A sexually transmitted disease that’s fatal,” says Michael Callen, a young gay man who by his own admission had 3,000 sexual partners by age 26 and had acquired a laundry list of illnesses from those contacts. “Now there’s going to be hell to pay.”
This is the beginning of a four-hour documentary on the history of AIDS, developed over the last three years by the Discovery Channel and Channel 4 of Great Britain. “A Time of AIDS” airs from 8 to 10 p.m. Sunday and Monday (repeated at 11 p.m. both days) on the Discovery Channel.
Following by a few months HBO’s production of “And the Band Played On,” based on San Francisco journalist Randy Shilts’ book on the people and politics of AIDS in the early years, the Discovery mini-series is billed as “the real people behind the real story” of the first years of AIDS.
Spanning the late 1970s to July 1993, “A Time of AIDS” intersperses news clips, interviews and harrowing photos, and includes footage from the U.S., Britain, France, Africa and Thailand.
Moving from one theme to another in the politically charged epidemic, it touches on the medical mystery involved in finding the cause of AIDS, the isolation of early victims, the foot-dragging of the U.S. and British governments, and the gay political action that evolved.
“I was delighted that they were able to find so many of the characters who were really involved and interview them 13 years later,” Dr. Marcus Conant said in an interview. The San Francisco doctor treated some of the first AIDS cases.
Discovery officials say that while they respect Shilts’ groundbreaking 1987 book and credit him as a consultant, they believe their documentary does a better job of presenting the facts about the history of HIV infection and AIDS than the HBO movie did.
Greg Moyer, executive vice president for programming for Discovery, says a decision was made to capitalize on the differences between the two presentations and criticize Home Box Office publicly for taking “liberties with the facts to make a nice, clean, two-hour movie.”
“HBO was not shy in their massive publicity efforts to say (`And the Band Played On’) would be the definitive word on AIDS, almost as if it were investigative journalism,” Moyer said.
HBO officials declined to comment on Discovery’s criticisms, except to say through a spokeswoman: “We are very proud of `And the Band Played On,’ and consider it to be one of the major programming events of the year.” HBO has sold “Band” to NBC, which will air it this winter, the spokeswoman said.
A major difference between the two productions, apart from format and time frame (“Band” ends in 1985, “Time” in 1993), is their depictions of gay men.
Although both presentations clearly show that gay leaders were at fault when they fought against closing bath houses and barring gay men from donating blood, “Band” counters with more positive, and even heroic, images of gays than does “Time.”
And “Time,” with only four hours to compress 12 years, seems to devote an disproportionate amount of time to hemophiliacs with AIDS. Although their plight is among the most tragic, having been given a fatal disease by medication that was supposed to save their lives, hemophiliacs make up only 1 percent of the AIDS cases in the U.S.
Moyer defends these choices.
“I think the movie `Band’ glossed over the role of (gay sex), even though Shilts was an honest broker of (those) facts in his book,” Moyer said. “And we told the story of hemophiliacs because we wanted to make sure people who don’t care about the health of gay people would care about this story.”
Shilts says he is pleased with the balance in the movie version of his book. “There were only a few gay characters in the movie, and if it emphasized gay promiscuity without positive images of gays, it would have given an inaccurate picture,” he said in an interview.
The two presentations differ the most in their treatment of Dr. Robert Gallo, former head of AIDS research for the National Institutes of Health, who had appealed a finding of scientific misconduct by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Research Integrity. On Friday, the government withdrew its misconduct finding against Gallo, saying the board that was set to hear Gallo’s appeal had established a new definition that would make scientific misconduct “extraordinarily difficult” to prove.
The finding stemmed from a dispute between Gallo and French researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris over the identification of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
In the movie version of “Band,” Gallo is portrayed as the consummate, arrogant villain who tricks the French and takes all the credit.
In “Time,” Gallo speaks for himself in one of his last interviews with journalists and is shown as a more ambivalent figure, not so much evil as caught up in a fast-moving scientific puzzle.
For example, Gallo has been criticized for adding a sentence to the Pasteur Institute’s first scientific paper on the AIDS virus. Gallo called it a leukemia virus, describing it in a way the French did not, and making it appear to be a member of a family of human retroviruses he had already discovered.
In “Time,” he defends his action by asking rhetorically who would have thought at that time that there could be another, separate family of the rare human retroviruses.
The answer, says Dr. Don Francis, who was the lead AIDS researcher at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the time, is that the French definitely had thought of that, and that Gallo should have known it. But “Time” does not give the viewer that answer.
Francis and the others who are portrayed in “Band” and speak in “Time” say they are as angry now as they were in the early 1980s. And as frustrated. Their anger is directed primarily at the government and the blood bank industry. Their frustration is against a virus that Conant says “is smarter than we are.”
“The blood banks ultimately killed tens of thousands of people by making decisions that were contrary to what medical experts told them needed to be done,” said Francis, who leads research efforts to develop an HIV vaccine at Genentech Inc. in San Francisco.
He says the failure of the U.S. government to deal with AIDS effectively started with “passive neglect-no money, no resources, no support,” and that moved into “active opposition,” as the religious Right gained influence over the Reagan administration.
Selma Dritz, now retired but in the 1980s assistant director of the Bureau of Communicable Disease Control of the San Francisco Department of Health, said in an interview that she believes precious time was lost by early governmental foot-dragging.
“Those who prevented an effective response in the early days deserve some strong hammer strokes,” Dritz said. “I’m not too hopeful. We’ve made some progress, but if we could have moved more quickly a decade ago, things would not be as bad as they are now.”
