And The Band Played On

On June 29, 1990, the largest gathering of “homosexuals, thousands strong” known as the Gay Freedom Day Parade, assembled: “The event […] commemorated the riot in which Greenwich Village drag queens attacked police engaged in the routine harassment of a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn” (15). Against this backdrop, seven men start their day in San Francisco, “a city in which two in five adult males were openly gay” (15). Political strategist and president of the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club, Bill Kraus is excited to head the parade in an era in which “[w]e don’t need to hide anymore” (12), while gay rights activist and political player Cleve Jones, lead organizer of the White Night Riot (the protest against the assassination of California’s first openly-gay elected official, Harvey Milk) momentarily wonders about the direction of the gay movement.   

That weekend, Dr. Dan William, medical director of the New York Gay Men’s Health Project and David Ostrow, director of the Howard Brown Memorial Clinic, are at a conference for gay physicians at San Francisco State University. “The gay liberation movement of the 1970s had spawned a business of bathhouse and sex clubs” (19), placing the health and future of the community in jeopardy as it increased chances of infection.