This is the capital city of gay culture. It’s remarkable for a provincial centre with a population of only 750 thousand.
But gay men and women gravitate to San Francisco from all parts of America... They find here uncritical acceptance and sexual freedom.
Two gay lovers. Man no.1 speaks. “I just moved here to San Francisco ..”
Man no. 2: “He’ll let me talk about my legs...”
Man no.1: I met him. I moved here. I meet the most wonderful man of my dreams. It is like a dream come true. A month before gay pride and here we are. Everybody should have as much luck. Go San Francisco. Thanks.
The Castro district is the city’s gay ghetto. It was here that doctors first began to notice that some sexually active men were getting a rare skin cancer, Kaposi’s Sarcoma - the earliest indications of a fatal virus new to the western world....
Kenny: When I first moved here I was very promiscuous.
Crystal: I had sex with a lot of different partners. You know I definitely had my fun.
William: The HIV part is always at the back of my mind but there’s always that ‘well there’s a chance I won’t catch it'.
Seth: It shows we are dealing with feelings of invulnerability which is typical of most young people.”
Kenny: I started meeting people through bars. and from bars I graduated to sex clubs, that’s where I did a lot of it, yeah..
Crystal: If it was on the board I probably did it. I was very adventurous.
Kenny: You’re just there to have sex, people are there just to have sex with you.
Crystal: I really wanted to experience what it was like to be a gay person in San Francisco and have this array of sexual fetishes and tastes.
Dr Andrew Moss has lived here for 20 years. He pioneered studies into the way the epidemic spread..
Dr Andrew Moss: That’s the Castro and that’s Castro’s market street, the main intersection of the district down there at the bottom of the hill. And I’ve been living here up above it for about 20 years since before it was a gay neighbourhood in fact. It started being gay in the mid 70s and I was living here in 1981 when the Aids epidemic hit. I was in fact the only epidemiologist living in the middle of the Aids epidemic.
His latest study of young gay men shows that infection rates are rising back towards the level they were at when the epidemic was at its worst...
Dr Andrew Moss: The people who put the weight of the original Aids epidemic are now in their late 40s or 50s and now there’s a whole second generation of gay men who’ve come to San Francisco since Aids who in fact grew up with it who are in their 20s. Now the kind of sex they are interested in is transgressive sex, doing things that piss of the older generation, us. so I think the whole idea of transgressive sexuality, what makes it interesting and exciting is danger. That’s one other thing that is going on now among the young - it’s a reflection of the times we live in.
William: There’s some different reasons that unsafe sex is appealing.
Reporter: Is there anything about the danger that makes it appealing?
William: Umm.. Probably sub-consciously there’s something in there that makes it appealing, because danger is always appealing.
Dr Andrew Moss PTC: There’s a huge wave of death going on from Aids right now but you can’t see it, you won’t see it. We blind ourselves to it. And for young people they’re able not to see this amazing collective death that’s going on around them.
In 1984 after fierce debate, San Francisco’s notorious bath-houses and sex clubs were closed down or heavily restricted for being a danger to public health.
But in recent years they’ve been re-opening...
Buzz Bense, sex club owner: The rules are very basic - come on me, not in me. Bodily fluids should not be brought inside your body. If you want to fuck - you have to use a condom. If you want to play with someone’s butt you need to use a vinyl glove.
Buzz Bense runs ‘Eros’ a sex club which promotes itself as a venue for gay men to have safe sex.
Buzz Bense: ... hygiene and washing up after playing. Our staff is present in the playrooms and we feel like our staff and our customers are all engaged in keeping the environment safe.
Fearful perhaps of new calls to shut down the clubs, Bense offered to show us around ... in off-duty hours.
Buzz Bense: A lot of people have preconceptions about what a sex club is and they think it’s going to be a dark, slimy horrible place.
Reporter: So what is this room?
Buzz Bense: This is our social area, our living room as it were. People come in here to hang out, have a cigarette, chat, either before or after.
Reporter: Before or after?
Bense: Sex!
Dr Andrew Moss: If you have to open in San Francisco a bathhouse of the kind we had then, a huge basis with lots and lots of sex going on, dangerous sex, and you the kind of research and public health authority stand by, you’re in dire neglect of your duty. People can’t do that, people will definitely get infected, dying as a result of what’s going on there and you can’t say this is not dangerous, and so we closed them down and I thought this right. So I think we are maybe getting to that position again..
Bense: This is one of our playrooms, this is an area that people have sex in and as you can see we have lots of different surfaces and areas for people to play in but there aren’t any closed doors and there aren’t any cubicles and there aren’t any areas where people can close the door and be out the way. We’ve got safe sex supplies everywhere round here, every ten feet.
Question: What have you got here?
Bense: Well, we’ve got latex condoms and we’ve got a latex glove, plastic films runwrap, water based lubricant, paper towels, the whole business - so people can play in these areas and there’s no excuse for not having a condom on him because it’s literally within arm’s reach.
Question: So how many people would you normally have in this area here?
Bense: Well, in this particular room, we might have 30 or 40 people in this room, but we might have a couple of hundred who will come through the doors in the course of an evening.
Question: So what happens in this room here?
Bense: It’s all different areas for people to play, different ways fro them to connect or cruise with each other. Again you can see there aren’t any enclosed areas. We can peek around and see what’s going on in all of these spaces. Sex is a good healthy activity and we don’t have judgements about how people express themselves.
Question: What do you say to people who say that it’s places like this who spread the virus?
Bense: It’s false. That is a false perception. Studies have shown that most unsafe sex takes place in someone’s bedroom.
Question. Does it worry you at all to know that some people who come here are HIV positive?
Bense: No, no, not at all. I’m HIV positive.
Dr Andrew Moss: When the first Aids epidemic happened in the early 80s one of the most remarkable things about it was this: when gay men really found out what was going on their risk level plummeted. That wasn’t the result of anything we did in the public health sense. It was just kind of internalising the message.
Barbie AIDS survey. Barbie no.1: It’s still primarily the gay-run organisations like the Stop Aids Foundation that are trying to get the next generation to act on the message.
Survey with Barbie no.2: Have you had anal sex?
Man: Yeah.
Barbie no.2: Okay. Did you use a condom time every time you did?
Answer: No.
Barbie no.2: Have you had vaginal sex in the last six months?
Man: (shakes his head).
Survey with Barbie no. 3: Did you get come in your mouth?
Man: Yes.
Barbie no. 3: Did you come in anyone else’s mouth?
Answer: Yes.
Barbie no. 3: Did you have mouth and rectum contact?
Answer: Yes.
Back to survey with Barbie no. 2: Did you get come in your mouth?”
Man answers: Yeah.
Barbie no. 2: Did you come in someone else’s mouth?
Answer: Yeah: (laughs)
Barbie no. 2: Right have you had mouth and rectum contact in that time?
Man answers: Yeah.
Barbie no. 2: Did you use a barrier when you did?
Answer: No.
Barbie no. 2: I had a feeling your answer was going to be minimal!
Back to survey with Barbie no. 3: In the last six months how many sex partners have you had?
Man’s boyfriend answers: Get the calculators.
Man answers: One a day.
Barbie no. 3: Really?
Answer: Yeah.
Barbie no. 3: So how many days have there been?
Answer: Just round it off, say 150.
Barbie no. 3: Okay. The last time you were tempted to have unsafe sex, what happened?
Answer: I yielded to temptation.
Straw polls like this seem to back up the dispiriting results of the Moss survey..
Though it’s not only young men who’ve become fatalistic..
Man with beard: When I’ve had unsafe sex it’s because I just get to a point when five and ten people die within a period of three months. Even as an HIV negative man I’m insane, I don’t care. For me personally, it’s over. I surrender.
The epidemic is invisible in its early stages - just as it was when it first hit.
gay man: Hi Mom. Wish you were queer.
gay man on a megaphone: Welcome to Castro. Have a wonderful pink Saturday. Give me a dollar now.
It’s Pink Saturday - Castro’s big party on the eve of the city’s annual Gay Pride March.
For many on this night thoughts of death and disease are banished to the shadows.
Just as for a lot of young men the risks in gay sex are swamped by the intensity of ‘coming out’.
Crystal: Back in the 70s it was know as the Gay Mecca. And I kept hearing stories about these wild activities and about wild parties..
I really wanted to experience that for myself. I think trying to get that full experience I forgot a lot about safety.”
Kenny: When I first moved here it was just me acting on desires that had been inside me for years.
Doctor: Why don’t you take off your shirt for me?
Kenny: How do you feel about Pride weekend?
Doctor: How do I feel..
Kenny: It’s here.
Doctor: .. excited, I can’t wait.
Kenny: The weather looks good.
Kenny is part of a citywide testing programme to prepare for a possible vaccine against the virus. So far he’s always tested negative .. but he’s 23 years old and candidly admits that he’s taken some crazy risks, especially while using drugs.
Kenny: Speed which is a big drug in this city .. it’s actually more crystal meth.. and when you do it - it creates this burning, burning desire inside you to just get laid and nothing else matters.
Dan Wolfheiler, Director of Education,Stop Aids Foundation: They’re scared of the epidemic. They know the information, they know it’s out there. At the same time they want to experiment. They want to find out where they fit in sexually and socially.
Crystal: When I caught the disease I was in the period when I was trying to figure out exactly what I thought was safe and what I didn’t.
Seth: How many people under 18 are thinking about ten or fifteen years from now which is when they might get sick if they got the HIV infection.
Crystal: lately, I’ve been rather sick so I just haven’t had any sexual urges at all.
Crystal is 24 years old now. he caught the virus three years ago.
Crystal: I developed Kaposi’s Sarcoma and for a while it was mainly a cosmetic thing. Unfortunately, it went out of control in my body and it started affecting my lymph nodes and then things just went out of hand.
Seth is 25 years old and still HIV negative.
Seth: There used to be sense of being under siege and now there’s a sense of being overwhelmed. I think if I were to seroconvert, part of me would be very surprised, shocked. But then part of me would say ‘well it’s just something I’ve integrated into my life for so long it just dwells there.”
Crystal and his friends are getting ready for Gay Pride March...
The culmination of a week of celebrations..They’re part of a group that calls itself the Radical Fairies.
Crystal: Today I’m gonna be in a wheel chair because the Kaposi’s Sarcoma I have has gotten so bad it’s affecting my legs so even though I’m going to be in 5 inch stilettos I’m going to be wheeled around.
Fifteen years ago it was said that ‘the band played on’ while the epidemic spread. The failure of health authorities, government inertia and the ignorance about safe sex.. could be blamed on that. That’s not the case today .. yet we’re still swimming against the second wave.
Dr Andrew Moss: Ironically speaking, we, them, both the gay men of the first generation and us the researchers and so forth of the first generation have to let go of it, it’s not our epidemic, it’s your epidemic. We did our thing moderately successfully, now you deal with it because it’s yours. You have to take ownership of it and we have to probably get out of the way.
Maybe this won’t happen until the men in this generation see their friends dying..
But by then it will be too late.
Crystal: I could go tomorrow. I could stay another five, ten years, who knows..I’m just living in the present, for the present and enjoying myself.
But gay men and women gravitate to San Francisco from all parts of America... They find here uncritical acceptance and sexual freedom.
Two gay lovers. Man no.1 speaks. “I just moved here to San Francisco ..”
Man no. 2: “He’ll let me talk about my legs...”
Man no.1: I met him. I moved here. I meet the most wonderful man of my dreams. It is like a dream come true. A month before gay pride and here we are. Everybody should have as much luck. Go San Francisco. Thanks.
The Castro district is the city’s gay ghetto. It was here that doctors first began to notice that some sexually active men were getting a rare skin cancer, Kaposi’s Sarcoma - the earliest indications of a fatal virus new to the western world....
Kenny: When I first moved here I was very promiscuous.
Crystal: I had sex with a lot of different partners. You know I definitely had my fun.
William: The HIV part is always at the back of my mind but there’s always that ‘well there’s a chance I won’t catch it'.
Seth: It shows we are dealing with feelings of invulnerability which is typical of most young people.”
Kenny: I started meeting people through bars. and from bars I graduated to sex clubs, that’s where I did a lot of it, yeah..
Crystal: If it was on the board I probably did it. I was very adventurous.
Kenny: You’re just there to have sex, people are there just to have sex with you.
Crystal: I really wanted to experience what it was like to be a gay person in San Francisco and have this array of sexual fetishes and tastes.
Dr Andrew Moss has lived here for 20 years. He pioneered studies into the way the epidemic spread..
Dr Andrew Moss: That’s the Castro and that’s Castro’s market street, the main intersection of the district down there at the bottom of the hill. And I’ve been living here up above it for about 20 years since before it was a gay neighbourhood in fact. It started being gay in the mid 70s and I was living here in 1981 when the Aids epidemic hit. I was in fact the only epidemiologist living in the middle of the Aids epidemic.
His latest study of young gay men shows that infection rates are rising back towards the level they were at when the epidemic was at its worst...
Dr Andrew Moss: The people who put the weight of the original Aids epidemic are now in their late 40s or 50s and now there’s a whole second generation of gay men who’ve come to San Francisco since Aids who in fact grew up with it who are in their 20s. Now the kind of sex they are interested in is transgressive sex, doing things that piss of the older generation, us. so I think the whole idea of transgressive sexuality, what makes it interesting and exciting is danger. That’s one other thing that is going on now among the young - it’s a reflection of the times we live in.
William: There’s some different reasons that unsafe sex is appealing.
Reporter: Is there anything about the danger that makes it appealing?
William: Umm.. Probably sub-consciously there’s something in there that makes it appealing, because danger is always appealing.
Dr Andrew Moss PTC: There’s a huge wave of death going on from Aids right now but you can’t see it, you won’t see it. We blind ourselves to it. And for young people they’re able not to see this amazing collective death that’s going on around them.
In 1984 after fierce debate, San Francisco’s notorious bath-houses and sex clubs were closed down or heavily restricted for being a danger to public health.
But in recent years they’ve been re-opening...
Buzz Bense, sex club owner: The rules are very basic - come on me, not in me. Bodily fluids should not be brought inside your body. If you want to fuck - you have to use a condom. If you want to play with someone’s butt you need to use a vinyl glove.
Buzz Bense runs ‘Eros’ a sex club which promotes itself as a venue for gay men to have safe sex.
Buzz Bense: ... hygiene and washing up after playing. Our staff is present in the playrooms and we feel like our staff and our customers are all engaged in keeping the environment safe.
Fearful perhaps of new calls to shut down the clubs, Bense offered to show us around ... in off-duty hours.
Buzz Bense: A lot of people have preconceptions about what a sex club is and they think it’s going to be a dark, slimy horrible place.
Reporter: So what is this room?
Buzz Bense: This is our social area, our living room as it were. People come in here to hang out, have a cigarette, chat, either before or after.
Reporter: Before or after?
Bense: Sex!
Dr Andrew Moss: If you have to open in San Francisco a bathhouse of the kind we had then, a huge basis with lots and lots of sex going on, dangerous sex, and you the kind of research and public health authority stand by, you’re in dire neglect of your duty. People can’t do that, people will definitely get infected, dying as a result of what’s going on there and you can’t say this is not dangerous, and so we closed them down and I thought this right. So I think we are maybe getting to that position again..
Bense: This is one of our playrooms, this is an area that people have sex in and as you can see we have lots of different surfaces and areas for people to play in but there aren’t any closed doors and there aren’t any cubicles and there aren’t any areas where people can close the door and be out the way. We’ve got safe sex supplies everywhere round here, every ten feet.
Question: What have you got here?
Bense: Well, we’ve got latex condoms and we’ve got a latex glove, plastic films runwrap, water based lubricant, paper towels, the whole business - so people can play in these areas and there’s no excuse for not having a condom on him because it’s literally within arm’s reach.
Question: So how many people would you normally have in this area here?
Bense: Well, in this particular room, we might have 30 or 40 people in this room, but we might have a couple of hundred who will come through the doors in the course of an evening.
Question: So what happens in this room here?
Bense: It’s all different areas for people to play, different ways fro them to connect or cruise with each other. Again you can see there aren’t any enclosed areas. We can peek around and see what’s going on in all of these spaces. Sex is a good healthy activity and we don’t have judgements about how people express themselves.
Question: What do you say to people who say that it’s places like this who spread the virus?
Bense: It’s false. That is a false perception. Studies have shown that most unsafe sex takes place in someone’s bedroom.
Question. Does it worry you at all to know that some people who come here are HIV positive?
Bense: No, no, not at all. I’m HIV positive.
Dr Andrew Moss: When the first Aids epidemic happened in the early 80s one of the most remarkable things about it was this: when gay men really found out what was going on their risk level plummeted. That wasn’t the result of anything we did in the public health sense. It was just kind of internalising the message.
Barbie AIDS survey. Barbie no.1: It’s still primarily the gay-run organisations like the Stop Aids Foundation that are trying to get the next generation to act on the message.
Survey with Barbie no.2: Have you had anal sex?
Man: Yeah.
Barbie no.2: Okay. Did you use a condom time every time you did?
Answer: No.
Barbie no.2: Have you had vaginal sex in the last six months?
Man: (shakes his head).
Survey with Barbie no. 3: Did you get come in your mouth?
Man: Yes.
Barbie no. 3: Did you come in anyone else’s mouth?
Answer: Yes.
Barbie no. 3: Did you have mouth and rectum contact?
Answer: Yes.
Back to survey with Barbie no. 2: Did you get come in your mouth?”
Man answers: Yeah.
Barbie no. 2: Did you come in someone else’s mouth?
Answer: Yeah: (laughs)
Barbie no. 2: Right have you had mouth and rectum contact in that time?
Man answers: Yeah.
Barbie no. 2: Did you use a barrier when you did?
Answer: No.
Barbie no. 2: I had a feeling your answer was going to be minimal!
Back to survey with Barbie no. 3: In the last six months how many sex partners have you had?
Man’s boyfriend answers: Get the calculators.
Man answers: One a day.
Barbie no. 3: Really?
Answer: Yeah.
Barbie no. 3: So how many days have there been?
Answer: Just round it off, say 150.
Barbie no. 3: Okay. The last time you were tempted to have unsafe sex, what happened?
Answer: I yielded to temptation.
Straw polls like this seem to back up the dispiriting results of the Moss survey..
Though it’s not only young men who’ve become fatalistic..
Man with beard: When I’ve had unsafe sex it’s because I just get to a point when five and ten people die within a period of three months. Even as an HIV negative man I’m insane, I don’t care. For me personally, it’s over. I surrender.
The epidemic is invisible in its early stages - just as it was when it first hit.
gay man: Hi Mom. Wish you were queer.
gay man on a megaphone: Welcome to Castro. Have a wonderful pink Saturday. Give me a dollar now.
It’s Pink Saturday - Castro’s big party on the eve of the city’s annual Gay Pride March.
For many on this night thoughts of death and disease are banished to the shadows.
Just as for a lot of young men the risks in gay sex are swamped by the intensity of ‘coming out’.
Crystal: Back in the 70s it was know as the Gay Mecca. And I kept hearing stories about these wild activities and about wild parties..
I really wanted to experience that for myself. I think trying to get that full experience I forgot a lot about safety.”
Kenny: When I first moved here it was just me acting on desires that had been inside me for years.
Doctor: Why don’t you take off your shirt for me?
Kenny: How do you feel about Pride weekend?
Doctor: How do I feel..
Kenny: It’s here.
Doctor: .. excited, I can’t wait.
Kenny: The weather looks good.
Kenny is part of a citywide testing programme to prepare for a possible vaccine against the virus. So far he’s always tested negative .. but he’s 23 years old and candidly admits that he’s taken some crazy risks, especially while using drugs.
Kenny: Speed which is a big drug in this city .. it’s actually more crystal meth.. and when you do it - it creates this burning, burning desire inside you to just get laid and nothing else matters.
Dan Wolfheiler, Director of Education,Stop Aids Foundation: They’re scared of the epidemic. They know the information, they know it’s out there. At the same time they want to experiment. They want to find out where they fit in sexually and socially.
Crystal: When I caught the disease I was in the period when I was trying to figure out exactly what I thought was safe and what I didn’t.
Seth: How many people under 18 are thinking about ten or fifteen years from now which is when they might get sick if they got the HIV infection.
Crystal: lately, I’ve been rather sick so I just haven’t had any sexual urges at all.
Crystal is 24 years old now. he caught the virus three years ago.
Crystal: I developed Kaposi’s Sarcoma and for a while it was mainly a cosmetic thing. Unfortunately, it went out of control in my body and it started affecting my lymph nodes and then things just went out of hand.
Seth is 25 years old and still HIV negative.
Seth: There used to be sense of being under siege and now there’s a sense of being overwhelmed. I think if I were to seroconvert, part of me would be very surprised, shocked. But then part of me would say ‘well it’s just something I’ve integrated into my life for so long it just dwells there.”
Crystal and his friends are getting ready for Gay Pride March...
The culmination of a week of celebrations..They’re part of a group that calls itself the Radical Fairies.
Crystal: Today I’m gonna be in a wheel chair because the Kaposi’s Sarcoma I have has gotten so bad it’s affecting my legs so even though I’m going to be in 5 inch stilettos I’m going to be wheeled around.
Fifteen years ago it was said that ‘the band played on’ while the epidemic spread. The failure of health authorities, government inertia and the ignorance about safe sex.. could be blamed on that. That’s not the case today .. yet we’re still swimming against the second wave.
Dr Andrew Moss: Ironically speaking, we, them, both the gay men of the first generation and us the researchers and so forth of the first generation have to let go of it, it’s not our epidemic, it’s your epidemic. We did our thing moderately successfully, now you deal with it because it’s yours. You have to take ownership of it and we have to probably get out of the way.
Maybe this won’t happen until the men in this generation see their friends dying..
But by then it will be too late.
Crystal: I could go tomorrow. I could stay another five, ten years, who knows..I’m just living in the present, for the present and enjoying myself.