‘As Real As It Gets’

One hot summer Monday in the mid-1970s, I put on my best polyester and headed downtown to start work at the Associated Press. I was 20 years old, fresh from Fresno. As I walked up Market Street, I saw a naked fat man making love to a street lamp. This was something I had not seen before.

I was struck, not only by the spectacle, but also by the way other pedestrians barely noticed this man in writhing embrace with a light pole. They simply walked on by. Right then, I realized that life in the big city would require some adjustment. Later, I would come to understand that I had moved to San Francisco at a time when everyone was learning to adjust to something new, to adapt.

Gays were pouring in from all over. They came for liberation and for fun, for discos and bathhouses, but also for a sense of community and tolerance. They renovated blocks of neglected Victorians and converted the Castro district into the Main Street of Gay America. They built political muscle. And their biggest problem, it seemed then, was Anita Bryant.

By the end of the decade, one out of five San Franciscans was gay. San Francisco is an aggressively tolerant place, and any signs of resistance from straight people were dwarfed by a general atmosphere of acceptance. Most of us aimed, sometimes awkwardly, for a sort of enlightened coexistence. We would try to learn the lingo, to sort through old hang-ups and stereotypes, to know when to stare and when to walk on by.

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I left the city in 1981. I remember a colleague was starting to work at the time on a story about a strange disease that had turned up in a few gay men. Over time, of course, this so-called “gay cancer” would come to be known as AIDS, and it would force San Franciscans, straight and gay, into yet another round of adjustment.

Before AIDS, the gay movement--with San Francisco its epicenter--had been a subject for sociologists. Now the medical writers moved in. “As Real As It Gets,” a new book by journalist Carol Pogash (Birch Lane Press), provides a sense of what the last dozen years have been like for San Francisco and its gay community. Tellingly, the book is set in a hospital.

While the national campaign against AIDS is run from places such as Bethesda, Md., San Francisco General is where the hand-to-hand combat takes place, the trenches. The book’s title comes from a T-shirt worn by nurses, and it is not hyperbole. S.F. General was where patients came from all over for treatment--and where many of them died. It also was where the city turned for reassurance that the epidemic would not take out every resident.

Hysteria, denial, compassion, courage and despair--the emotions that have washed across San Francisco as the AIDS crisis unfolds--all run through Pogash’s account of S.F. General. In that sense, the hospital presents a metaphor for a city in crisis. That both hospital and city have responded with compassion to a hideous plague is, as Pogash said, “uplifting.” That every patient introduced in the book seems marked for a bad death is not. Ten thousand people have died of AIDS in San Francisco so far, and the end is not even imaginable yet.

The foreword to “As Real As It Gets” was written by Randy Shilts, who covers gay issues for the San Francisco Chronicle: “I once kept a mental list,” he writes, “of all the friends who had died, but when one friend died last Sunday, one week to the day after another had died, I realized that I no longer kept any sort of tally. It was better to think of them one corpse at a time; taken together, the totality of death was too much to ponder. It was not the way to adapt.”

Last week, Shilts announced that he, too, has AIDS.

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In the Associated Press bureau on Market Street, I had worked with a man who most of us suspected was gay. We never asked, though, and he never said. What I remember most about him is the way he always was singing Donna Summers disco songs. Again, this was the ‘70s. Today, he is open about himself. He is 46 years old and tests negative for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. He considers himself lucky to have “a chance to die of old age.”

I had asked him to describe what life for gays had been like here in that last season before AIDS. I was not interested in intimate details, really, just the spirit of the times. He said it seemed so long ago it was hard to believe that it even had happened. “My first 10 years here,” he said, “were like a banquet. The second 10 years here have been like a Last Supper.”

Back then, he ran with a crowd of about 25 close friends--his “support group” he called it. They would play volleyball, go to clubs, laugh, console. Today, only one is left. The rest have died of AIDS. That’s a lot of funerals, a lot of adjusting. That’s as real as it gets.