In San Francisco, the bathhouses could have been ordered closed but were not. The sole purpose of the bathhouses was to allow promiscuous sex for gay males. Blood from blood drives does not necessarily stay in the area where it was collected. The United States even imports blood supplies from Mexico. The blood you get in an operation in Chicago, could have been given in Mexico City or even San Francisco.
Young men stroll arm in arm to a noisy backdrop of music and traffic.
There is laughter and the kind of familiar exchanges one expects to hear on Main Street of a small town. The crowd ebbs and flows through the neighborhood, passing the Cock A Doodle Doo restaurant, Does your Mother Know card shop and Moby Dick bar. They give the city the highest AIDS rate in the nation. The disease can incubate up to 10 years before symptoms appear. A National Institutes of Health study of nearly 5,000 homosexual and bisexual males revealed that over half were still praciticing receptive anal intercourse and over two-thirds did not use a condom.