A counselor at the BFC describes the earliest HIV prevention efforts by the Gay Men's Health Collective. The Men's Clinic and the HPS continue to collaborate provide STD and HIV testing at Gay venues throughout the Bay Area.
C: In the early days of the GMHC, it became apparent to us that outreach screening for sexually transmitted diseases and education would be an important part of our work. And it was actually almost from the very beginning, we started training in September 1976, and as part of that training process, actually, at a certain level of training, I did some routine screening, outreach clinics at the Steamworks and then started our Sunday evening clinic here. And initially we did no treatment, we only did screening, so we did cultures and blood tests and education and because of the focus of the service, education was an important and consistent element of it. In May 1977, we did our first STD clinic here that was again just a screening clinic, uhm, and about midway through that year, the idea of doing screening down at the Steam Works was brought up and it seemed like a really good place to go and that particular time in history, bath houses were very popular in this area, people who had been in repressed sexual situations in other parts of the country. Guys who reached the age of 18 or who could get fake i.ds saying they were 18 went to the baths and played and old men went to the baths and played and sex, sodom and gomorrah, everything that anybody fantasized about sexuality could happen and did happen. And so, we approached the Steam Works about coming down and doing screening, and they were guardedly supportive, they were nervous about it because we were entering, there wasn't any trust between us, we were these radicals at the Free clinic, and eventhough we were fags, could we cause them some trouble. And they weren't very vulnerable then so it wasn't a tremendous non-conquerable fear, but nevertheless the fear existed.
N: What year was this again?
C: We started down there early, we went down there in '77, or '78, I'm not sure which year, but it was within a year or two of our starting services here at the Steamworks clinic. When we started doing testing down there initially, it was again, for gonorreah and for syphilis primarily, and doing routine cultures and a blood test, and we would go down and actually take over a couple of their small rooms and put towels on and sometimes younger GMHC would go down and act as bait and bring people back. We would rotate out, we'd always go down with a larger crew than we needed and some of us would go play and some of us work and then we'd trade off and so, and the Steam Works learned really quickly that we were trustworthy, that we clearly were one of them and supported the concept of a bath house, course we weren't dealing with HIV then and the only issues we had to deal with were sexually transmitted diseases, and uhm, so it was a marriage made in heaven.
As HIV came onto the scene and developed, we had talked to the Steam Works about how giving out condoms, which they started doing before HIV, we talked to them about improving the showers and improving the kinds of soaps they used, which they did before HIV, and putting up educational literature which they did before HIV and they were generally responsive to our requests and supportive of us financially and other ways where they could help us out. When HIV hit the scene and the baths were threatened, the Steam Works was also threatened and they were threatened by the city health officer who had done some initial probing and had some committee meetings to talk about what the response would be. The Steam Works called us up and asked us for some guidance and support and we had a meeting with them and the health officer basically laid down the law. We said we thought that lighting ought to be improved, that the areas that encourage rectal intercourse should be redesigned to not encourage that kind of laying down and fucking and with that kind of blind luck, because later you know we've come to discover that oral sex is pretty much not a risk for HIV, we discovered that rectal sex is the primary way of it being transmitted as well as needles, so the Steam Works not only complied with our requests, but they went beyond you know. If we said the lighting should be at some candle power, they would put it above that candle power. If we said that they should have few signs up, they would put a lot of signs up, and we said that they should employ health educators so that health education became an integral part of their services, at least a part time health educator, and what they've done is hired a full time health educator. And, (.) uh, we've expanded our services there to include HIV testing now.
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