Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Saturday, February 20

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From The Calendar (San Antonio, TX), February 17, 1984, page 3.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Marcus Welby, M.D. Episode “The Other Martin Loring” Airs: 1973. Marcus Welby was America’s favorite doctor, and Marcus Welby, M.D. was the first program to hit number one in the Nielsen ratings for the perpetually struggling ABC. But America’s favorite doctor made a bad call in its fourth season when it aired an episode titled “The Other Martin Loring.” The episode centers around Loring, who consults Dr. Welby for being an alcoholic, overweight, depressed and diabetic. Relax, take it easy, don’t work too hard, Welby tells Loring. That night, Loring who goes home to his wife, who demand a divorce and custody of their son. When he threatens to countersue, Mrs. Loring says she won’t “hold anything back.” He later collapses under the strain and under Welby’s care again. One thing led to another, including a drunk-driving car accident. Eventually, Welby figures out that Loring is gay. Welby’s advice: Loring had a “serious illness” and he should suppress his desires and see a psychiatrist because his “tendencies” were “degrading and loathsome.”

Shortly before the episode’s scheduled air date, a script was leaked to the Gay Activist Alliance, which organized a protest of two dozen demonstrators at ABC’s New York headquarters. Another group of thirty activists entered the building, guided by a detailed map provided by someone within the network, and took over the thirty-ninth floor offices of the network’s top executives. “It was one of the first big actions we took,” Ron Gold, GAA’s media director, later recalled. “It was also one of the biggest mistakes we made. ABC offered to set up a meeting for two of us with their standards and practices person and the president of the network if the rest of us would go away. But we were afraid that we were going to get screwed over so we said no. That was very foolish because we didn’t get to talk to anybody. They thought we were crazy — and to a certain extent we were. But we were also justifiably paranoid.”

Other protests broke out in Los Angeles when the episode aired, and gay activists tried to launch a nationwide advertiser boycott. But the boycott fizzled, largely because the fractious gay activist community didn’t have the means to communicate with each other effectively, let alone mount a campaign to sway the general public. LGBT-advocacy was still in its infancy, learning the ways of effective demonstration and publicity. But they were quick learners. More than a year later when Marcus Welby, M.D. would air another homophobic episode (see Oct 8), gay activists were better prepared, and their actions would lead to seventeen ABC affiliates dropping that episode and nearly a dozen sponsors pulling out.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
► William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp: 1872-1938. He succeeded his father as Earl at the age of eighteen when his father died of a heart attack during dinner in 1891. That was the start of a very prodigious political career. He became mayor of Worcester in 1895, and was given the post as Governor of New South Wales, Australia in 1899, while still only twenty-seven. But here, his inexperience showed. He was unpopular due to a series of gaffes, including the time he referred to Australia’s “birthstain” as a penal colony. Bored with the assignment, Beauchamp returned to Britain in 1900. In 1902, he joined the Liberal Party and married Lady Lettice Grosvenor. The couple would go on to have three sons and four daughters. When the Liberals came to power in 1905, Beauchamp took on a series of posts in the government, and he served as Liberal Leader in the House of Lords from 1924 to 1931.

Stories had circulated since the 1920s about parties Beauchamp threw at Walmer Castle. But it would be a return trip to Australia in 1930 that would be his undoing, as he was accompanied during the two month trip by young Liberal MP, Robert Bernays, who was also Beauchamp’s lover. Hugh Grosvenor, the Tory Duke of Westminster, was a staunch foe of the Liberals and, more to the point, developed a deep and abiding hatred for his brother-in-law. He summoned his sister and laid the evidence of Beauchamp’s homosexuality before her and urged her to divorce her husband. She never did file for divorce, but she left him immediately. The Duke also demanded that Beauchamp’s children testify against him, but they refused. Finally, the Duke took his information to King George V, who was shocked at the allegation. “I thought men like that shot themselves,” he muttered.

It appeared Beauchamp’s arrest and trail by the House of Lords was imminent. But there was one problem: during the depths of the Great Depression, the House of Lords was increasingly looked upon as a place of idleness and privilege, prompting calls for its abolition. A scandal like this would only worsen the its reputation. Also, Beauchamp was personally close to the King — he had carried the Sword of State at William’s coronation and served as Steward of the Household. Also, the King’s son, George, was seeing one of Beauchamp’s daughters, although that relationship soon ended. The King intervened, and sent three envoys to persuade Beauchamp to resign from all of his official posts and leave England by midnight.

Beauchamp fled England that night, taking a boat to the continent and traveling to the German spa town of Wiesbaden. His plan, which he had disclosed to two of his daughters before leaving, was to commit suicide by overdose. His children took turns traveling weeks at a time to Wiesbaden to remain with him at all times, watching over him. It was finally Hugh, his second son (and who was also gay) who finally persuaded his father from taking his life.

After recovering his wits at Wiesbaden, Beauchamp moved to Paris, Venice, Sydney and San Francisco, constantly moving between the four cities. The closest city to a home to him was perhaps Sydney, where he spent most of his time and was tempted to buy a house. But after Hugh’s death in 1936, Beauchamp was allowed to return to England to bury his son at the ancestral home of Madresfield Court, staying only a few days for fear of arrest. But the following year, shortly after George V’s death and George VI’s coronation, the charges were finally dropped and Beauchamp was allowed to go home for good. He died in 1938 of cancer while traveling to New York. His children remained loyal to him to the very end.

The Earl of Beauchamp is generally believed to have been model for Lord Marchmain in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited.

Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn

► Roy Cohn: 1927-1986. Could there be a more despicable character in all of gay history? The Columbia Law grad showed signs of legal brilliance early, having been admitted to the bar at twenty-one, becoming an Assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan and playing a prominent role in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951. In 1952, Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) appointed him as chief counsel to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on the recommendation of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, where Cohn became known for his aggressive questioning of suspected Communists. Cohn brought in his good friend, David Schine as consultant to McCarthy’s staff. But when the young and handsome Schine was drafted into the army in 1953, Cohn embarked on a private campaign to ensure special treatment for Schine — light duties, extra leave, an exemption from overseas assignment — and threatened to “wreck the Army” if they didn’t accede to his demands. The bitter irony of all this is that while Cohn was pursuing special treatment for his special friend, McCarthy’s witch hunt extended beyond communists to also include gay people (See, for example, Feb 28, Mar 14, Jul 2, Sep 7).

Roy Cohn and David Schine on the cover of Time.

By 1954, McCarthy’s anti-communist and anti-gay witch hunt extended to the Army, which decided to fight back. During one exchange during a committee hearing, the Army’s head counsel, Joseph Welch, asked a McCarthy staffer about the origin of a photo of Schine and Army Secretary Robert Stevens, which had been doctored to omit the presence of Air Force Colonel Jack Bradley. Welch asked the staffer sarcastically, “Did you think it came from a pixie?” McCarthy interjected, “Will counsel (Welch) for my benefit define– I think he might be an expert on that– what a pixie is?” Welch responded, “Yes. I should say, Mr. Senator, that a pixie is a close relative of a fairy.” Others in the chamber who were in on the rumors, broke into laughter. Cohn later called the remark, “malicious,” “wicked,” and “indecent.”

Roy Cohn, four months before he died in 1986.

Cohn later forced to resign from McCarthy’s staff due to growing outrage over his tactics. He returned to New York and entered private practice, where his clients included mafia figures, the New York Yankees, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, and Studio 54 owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. He was friends with Barbara Walters (she served as his “beard” for a while), columnist Walter Wenchell, and North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms.

While publicly closeted and working actively against gay rights, he partied at the best gay bars and threw lavish parties in New York and Provincetown. In 1984, he was diagnosed with AIDS. He used his connections to jump to the head of the line for treatment with the then-scarce and experimental AZT. By the time he died in 1986, he maintained his public denial both of his homosexuality and his disease — he said it was “cancer.” In Tony Kushner’s Angels In America, Cohn is portrayed as a power hungry, self-loathing hypocrite who is dying of AIDS while haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. Cohn’s name is also on a panel of the AIDS memorial quilt. It reads, “Roy Cohn: Bully, Coward, Victim.” A fitting eulogy if there ever was one.

► Gaëtan Dugas: 1953-1984. There’s a legal principle in U.S. law that says that you cannot libel the dead. That seems particularly unjust in Degas’s case, given that his fame didn’t come until three years after he died. That’s when Randy Shilts cast him as the villain, as Patient Zero, in his bestselling book And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. If you’ve read the book, this scene is impossible to forget:

Club Baths, San Francisco, November 1982 . . . When the moaning stopped, the young man rolled over on his back for a cigarette. Gaetan Dugas reached up for the lights, turning up the rheostat slowly so his partner’s eyes would have time to adjust. He then made a point of eyeing the purple lesions on his chest. “Gay cancer,” he said, almost as if he were talking to himself. “Maybe you’ll get it too.”

Gaëtan Dugas was described as a good-looking airline steward for Air Canada who hopped around the country and wantonly spread AIDS to as many people as he could — from 50 to perhaps more than 250. Shilts didn’t actually write that Dugas was the guy who gave America AIDS. But by identifying him as “Patient Zero,” Shilts gave birth to the notion that the narcissistic, predatory, diseased-laden Dugas — “the Quebecois version of Typhoid Mary,” as Shilts put it — was resonsible for the most significant public health catastrophe of the late twentieth century. A New York Post headline called Dugas “the man who gave us AIDS” , and Time magazine called his life as an “appalling saga.” And pundits and anti-gay activists’ appropriated the story to charge that all people with AIDS, especially gay people with AIDS, were a danger to society — and potential murderers.

The diagram that started it all. Click to enlarge. From David M. Auerbach, William W. Darrow, Harold W. Jaffe, James W. Curran. “Cluster of cases of acquired immune deficiency syndrome.” American Journal of Medicine 76, no. 3 (March 1984): 487-492.

In fact, Dugas was identified as “Patient O” — the letter O — in a study that was able to demonstrate that there was some sort of transmission agent for the disease. It didn’t mean that he was the guy who first introduced the disease to the population — a person who is often marked as “patient zero” in similar studies. He was just this study’s “O. Marcus Conant of the University of California, who co-wrote the study, pointed out that “if it hadn’t been this man, it would have been some other.” But Patient Zero he became nonetheless. As for the story about Degas having sex with unwitting victims and then callously revealing his “gay cancer” as Shilts described in his book, there’s actually reason to believe that the story was at the very least manipulated and exaggerated, and at worst, made up. In the early 1980s, countless similar stories were circulating as a kind of an urban legend throughout the Bay area, in L.A., New York and Miami. Finally in 2012, Shilts’s former editor, Michael Denneny, admitted that the Degas embellishments were all a bid for publicity:

“We lowered ourselves to yellow journalism. My publicist told me, ‘Sex, death, glamour, and, best of all, he is a foreigner, that would be the icing on the cake,'” said Shilts’ editor, Michael Denneny, in an interview. “That was the only way we could get them to pay attention.”

…”Randy hated the idea. It took me almost a week to argue him into it,” Denneny tells Tiemeyer in the new book.

But there was “terrific animus in the media about covering AIDS at all,” Denneny said. The New York Times, Newsweek and other publications “all told us they were not going to review a book that was an indictment of the Reagan administration and the medical establishment.”

So new publicity materials focusing on the hot flight attendant were fed to the New York Post. The tabloid’s Oct. 6, 1987, headline sparked a media frenzy. Shilts appeared on 60 Minutes. The Times reviewed the book on a weekday and again on Sunday; it was a best-seller the following week.

Dugas had become a scapegoat. He came to personify the stereotype of gay sexual excess, which was already so firmly lodged in the public’s imagination. Dugas carried the blame for thousands of deaths, a charge laid by anti-gay activists as well as by members of the gay community itself.

But those who knew Dugas had a different view of him. Shortly after Dugas died, a small group of AIDS activists in Vancouver had dedicated three cherry trees to the memory of the first three gay men in the city who had died of AIDS: Cedar Debley, Ray Scott and Gaëtan Dugas. They had hoped that people would see the trees and remember the three men with respect. Two years later, they watched, dumbfounded, as their friend became public enemy number one:

Dugas’ two closest friends, both Air Canada flight attendants, were horrified. So was Bob Tivey. He could not believe his eyes when he watched the television coverage: “Gaëtan Dugas is named as Patient Zero in the North American AIDS epidemic.” “Promiscuous French-Canadian flight attendant responsible for the rapid spread of AIDS in the US.”

“They weren’t talking about the man I knew,” Tivey tells me. He had agreed to talk with Shilts when the reporter made a trip to Vancouver while he was researching the book: on the condition that Shilts would not use Dugas’ name. Tivey did not mention anything about Dugas’ sexual habits. At the time, Tivey suspected that Shilts had broken confidentiality to cash in and sell more books. “I had a battle with Randy on Good Morning America. I was very upset.”

Dugas was no angel. He was promiscuous, and he didn’t believe that AIDS was contagious. Dugas wasn’t unusual that way. A lot of people, including quite a number of doctors, had all kinds of theories about what caused AIDS. Some thought that the Hepatitis B vaccine was the culprit. Others blamed poppers and other drugs. Others still thought it was some kind of a haywire immune response to semen. In fact, a suspected AIDS virus wasn’t discovered until 1983 (see May 20), several months after that made-up conversation in Shilts’s book supposedly took place. Yet the Patient Zero myth still persists today.

But the reality  is far more complicated. Last year, a video emerged from an AIDS forum held in Vancouver in 1983. A young man approached the microphone asking the panel of experts pointed questions about AIDS. “If you present yourself to a doctor,” he asked, “what kind of test can be undertaken to confirm if you are a carrier or not?” There was no test, they replied. And no one had yet identified a virus. “So if you have a lover who has AIDS and you don’t have AIDS, what is the warning you give to people? You should not necessarily fear those people,” he pressed. That frightened young man asking those pointed questions was Gaëtan Dugas.

[My thanks to Mark S. King for alerting me to the true story of Gaëtan Dugas.]

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And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?