Toll of AIDS on County Businesses Is Hard to Gauge

Every winter, people would stand in line for blocks just to get a glimpse of the Christmas display at Eschbach’s Flower & Gift Shop in Laguna Beach. For nearly a decade, Jack Eschbach would cover his 46,000 square feet of store space with 25 Christmas trees and thousands of homemade ornaments, including pine cone hummingbirds and mice made of sugar.

But when Eschbach died of AIDS 4 years ago, the store’s Christmas extravagance died with him.

“People came from all over California just to go to Eschbach’s,” said Werner Kuhn, director of the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center of Orange County. “His shop was like one big Christmas present.”

So far, AIDS has killed more than 30,000 gay men in the United States. No statistics are available to show how many businesses have been lost as a result.

The impact of the epidemic on the Orange County business community and the rest of California seems to have been somewhat limited. Many gay-owned businesses are still thriving, and new ones are being opened by a younger generation of entrepreneurs.

But the casualty list includes some of the area’s favorite gay-owned businesses. In recent years, Orange County has lost accountants, attorneys, doctors, computer service firms and beauty salons because of AIDS. Many were sole proprietorships like Eschbach’s, and they simply disappeared after the owner’s death. Most of the closings have gone unheralded, gay business leaders say, because the cause of the owners’ deaths was not disclosed.

“This is a particular problem in the gay community because so many of us go into business for ourselves to avoid discrimination and hassles,” said Mike Newton, former president of the Golden Gate Business Assn., San Francisco’s gay chamber of commerce.

“So when the one man in the one-man law firm dies, the law firm is gone,” he said. “It’s not as if Bank of America lost a teller.”

Sometimes, a firm’s collapse has had a significant impact even in the heterosexual community. Dr. Don Hagan, a gay physician, tended to more than 4,000 patients a year from his Costa Mesa practice before he quit last February because he was too sick to work. Hagan, who suffers from illnesses caused by AIDS-related complex, said most of his patients were “members of the typical Orange County family.”

All of them had to find a new doctor. “People don’t stop to think how integrated gays and lesbians are into the economy,” Hagan said. “We tend to blend into society. Every day, someone boards up their business because of AIDS. Added up, the impact of our deaths on society is great. But because it doesn’t happen all in one day, hardly anybody has noticed.”