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21 " The finding of AIDS in infants and children who are household contacts of patients with AIDS or persons with risks for AIDS has enormous implications with regard to ultimate transmissibility of this syndrome,” Fauci says. “If routine close contact can spread the disease, AIDS takes on an entirely new dimension,” he adds. "
― Randy Shilts , And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
22 " It was a truism to people active in the gay movement that the greatest impediments to homosexuals’ progress often were not heterosexual bigots but closeted homosexuals. "
23 " AIDSpeakers had not anticipated this. They operated on the principle that a person with AIDS could do no wrong. Therefore, the policeman was subjected to the kind of vicious personal attacks meted out to those who dared to think dangerous thoughts. The only thing that saved the policeman from being accused of wanting all gays locked up in concentration camps was the fact that he was openly gay himself, having been the first person to join the local police force by invoking the city’s gay anti-discrimination law. "
24 " There was no excuse, in this country and in this time, for the spread of a deadly new epidemic. "
25 " and that it would come here too. Paul "
26 " Conant was worried too. He believed that the Mafia, who maintained strong links to bathhouses in other cities, was behind the quick changes in the health director's thinking. "
27 " The primary cause of death was listed as cryptococcal pneumonia, which was a consequence of his Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Those, however, were only the obvious diseases. The KS lesions, it turned out, covered not only his skin but also his lungs, bronchi, spleen, bladder, lymph nodes, mouth, and adrenal glands. His eyes were infected not only with cytomegalovirus but also with Cryptococcus and the Pneumocystis protozoa. It was the first time the pathologist could recall seeing the protozoa infect a person’s eye. Ken’s mother claimed his body from the hospital the day after he died. By the afternoon, Ken’s remains were cremated and tucked into a small urn. His Kaposi’s sarcoma had led to the discovery in San Francisco of the epidemic that would later be called Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. He had been the first KS case in the country reported to a disbelieving Centers for Disease Control just eight months before. Now, he was one of eighteen such stricken people in San Francisco and the fourth man in the city to die in the epidemic, the seventy-fourth to die in the United States. There would be many, many more. "