How the CDC's James Curran helped create the sociopathic science that formed the foundation of CFS/AIDS apartheid.

     The Centers for Disease Control’s James Curran was one of the chief architects of the original AIDS paradigm. Curran had the perfect medical background for laying down the formative heterosexually-biased interpretations of the early data that epidemiologists gathered about the sick gay men who were thought to be the patients zero of a new supposedly gay epidemic. Jacob Levinsen described Curran in The Story of AIDS and Black America: “ . . . Jim Curran, the Chief of the CDC’s Venereal Disease Control Division was tapped to head up a Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infection Task Force. Despite being short staffed and underfunded, the Task Force managed to bring together experts from diverse fields like virology, cancer, and parasitic diseases in addition to a small team of epidemiological intelligence officers, who were the agency’s foot soldiers for disease prevention. . . . He had done quite a bit of work on hepatitis B with gay men in the 1970s, and he almost immediately suspected that the had a similar sexually transmitted and blood borne disease on their hands.” ( The Story of AIDS and Black America) And that suspicion paved the way for one of the biggest conceptual mistakes in the history of epidemiology.

     According to Shilts’s Band, when Curran saw the first reports on PCP in gay men, he wrote an odd note to one of his colleagues saying “Hot stuff. Hot stuff.” (ATBPO p.67) Shilts also described a rather revealing meeting at a subsequent CDC conference at which Curran was briefed on the sexual behavior of gay men by a gay physician named David Ostrow. According to Shilts, “Ostrow mused on the years he had spent getting Curran and Dr. Jaffe [Curran’s CDC colleague] acculturated to the gritty details of gay sexual habits. . . . Curran had seemed uptight at the start, Ostrow thought, but he buckled down to his work. Both Jaffe and Curran were unusual in that federal officials rarely had any kind of contact with gays, and the few who did rarely wanted to hear detailed gymnastics of gay sex.” (ATBPO p. 68) They clearly buckled down to their work a little too well. With their heterosexual sense of noblesse oblige (venereal division), these high-level clap doctors gone wild, set out to understand what the mysterious new gay epidemic was all about. Gay men would have run for the hills or hidden in basements if they had known what would result from the efforts of these two quick learners about “the gymnastics of gay sex” who were headed their way. Again, I must point out, if only the CDC had recognized the 1980 DuBois CFS cases as the actual beginning of the AIDS/CFS/autism pandemic of HHV-6, the two quick learners might never have gotten their mitts on the “hot stuff’ that was happening in the gay community. They never would have become experts on the joy of gay sex.

     Curran was married and the father of two children. Three days into what he thought was the sexually transmitted epidemic he was examining gay patients and, already, according to Shilts, he “was struck by how identifiably gay all the patients seemed to be (ATBPO p.70) These gays were apparently really gay, not the plainclothes kind who could pass. According to Shilts, these gays “hadn’t just peeked out of the closet yesterday.” (ATBPO p.71) It may have been the perceived intense gayness of the first patients—the really gay ones—that resulted in Curran’s huge, consequential mistake of erecting a mostly gay venereal epidemiological paradigm that would become the virtual thirty year hate crime against all gays, both the ones who could pass and the ones who were really gay. It wasn’t just the patients who were strange. The strangeness of the people who had the disease would inspire a strange new kind of science, epidemiology and virology that was in essence “homodemiology.” It was destined to make everything worse for gays and everyone else who had the bad luck of getting caught up in the CDC’s paradigm. And that would ultimately even include members of the heterosexual general population.

     Shilts tried to capture Curran’s thought process when he wrote, “It was strange because diseases tended not to strike people on the basis of social group.” (ATBPO p.71)  He added that “To Curran’s recollection . . . No epidemic had chosen victims on the basis of how they identified themselves in social terms, much less on the basis of sexual lifestyle. Yet, this identification and a propensity for venereal diseases were the only things the patients from three cities—New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—appeared to share. There had to be something within this milieu that was hazardous to these people’s health. (ATBPO p. 71) Well, there certainly was something about to enter this “milieu” that would be extremely hazardous to these people’s health, and that was Curran himself and his merry band of gay-sex-obsessed groupthinking epidemiologists who were about to hang the albatross of the venereal AIDS paradigm around the neck of the entire gay community.

     When Shilts discussed Curran confronting “sociological issues” that were involved in the mysterious illness, it escaped Shilts that Curran and his associates were themselves sociological (and political) issues as they plopped themselves in the middle of the gay community (at a time when the community was most vulnerable and nearly hysterical) with all of their own peculiar heterosexual and heterosexist baggage. According to Shilts, “About a dozen staffers from all the disciplines potentially involved with the diseases volunteered for the working group. They included specialists in immunology, venereology, virology, cancer epidemiology, toxicology and sociology. Because the outbreak might be linked to the Gay Bowel Syndrome, parasitologists were called in. (ATBPO p. 71) The fact that any illness was labeled “Gay” should probably have been a red flag for the kind of heterosexist thinking that would soon be rolling across the gay community like a tsunami.

     Once the guiding gay-obsessed premise (an example of a Arendtian “image“) was set, it was a matter of gay epidemiological garbage in and gay epidemiological garbage out. Questions with mistaken premises were about to lead the researchers and their medical victims down a deadly primrose path. Shilts summed up the basic direction of the inquiry: “Researchers also sought to determine whether the disease was indeed geographically isolated in the three gay urban centers. Did the detection of cases in the three centers make the patients appear to be only fast-lane gays because gay life tended toward the fast track in those cities? Was the disease all over gay America but in such low numbers that it had not been detected?” (ATBPO p. 81) Now we know, of course that there was indeed something else out there, but not just “all over gay America.” Something wasn’t playing by the rules of the CDC’s gay-obsessed epidemiology. Something was making even the heterosexual DuBois Atlanta cases of 1980 ill, and those non-fast-lane, non-gay cases represented what was going on all over straight general population America in a whole spectrum of ways. Biased epidemiological premises have consequences.

     There is something almost laughable about the notion of Curran’s CDC working group going out into the gay world and asking themselves “What new element might have sparked this catastrophe.” (ATBPO p.82) One brand new element in the gay community that actually was the most significant spark for the coming catastrophe that was about to unfold was the CDC’s own incompetence and heterosexist epidemiology.

     Given the way AIDS would evolve into the kind of abnormal science that doesn’t even require the usual rules of evidence, common sense and logic associated with real science, it is interesting that Curran did apply those old-fashioned rules early on when they were needed to build the venereal AIDS paradigm. Shilts wrote, “To prove an infectious disease, Curran knew, one had to establish Koch’s postulate. According to this century-old paradigm, you must take an infectious agent from one animal, put it into another, who becomes ill, and then take the infectious agent from the second and inject it into still a third subject, who becomes ill with the same disease.” (ATBPO p.105) Curran certainly tried to apply some semblance of the paradigm—or the logic of it anyway—when, by finding people who had AIDS often had slept with people who also had the disorder, he saw the links as a kind of epidemiological proof of transmission even though they weren’t strictly speaking the fulfillment of the animal experimentation inherent in Koch’s postulate. At least Curran knew the basic rules of science. Unfortunately these very same rules would subsequently be thrown out the window to maintain the belief that the retrovirus eventually linked to AIDS was the one true cause of AIDS. Had those Koch’s postulates been adhered to faithfully throughout the epidemic we might be calling HHV-6 the virus of acquired immunodeficiency today and there might have been no Holocaust II to write about.

     The CDC, in an evolving and de facto manner, conducted something that could be called “the Atlanta AIDS/CFS/autism public relations experiment” at the expense of everyone‘s health. What I mean by that coinage is a kind of postmodern public health political experiment in which rather than truly controlling an epidemic by being truthful and effective and scientific, the public health institutions of the CDC and the NIH tried to control and manipulate everything the public knew about the epidemic of AIDS/CFS/autism. It may have been quasi-innocent and simply the product of unrecognized sexual bias and old-fashioned self-deception when it started, but it evolved into something far more sinister and destructive. In the early days of AIDS, as described by Shilts, Curran was seemingly the embodiment of good-egg innocence when it came to the realization that it would be necessary for him to figure out some way to get the media’s attention in order to increase public pressure for providing the funding the CDC needed for AIDS research. Unfortunately, the manipulation of the media by scientists or public health officials can—and did—have grave consequences for scientific, medical and epidemiological truth. In AIDS it became a kind of cancer.

     In 1982 Curran appeared before a group of gay physicians in New York and told them “It’s likely we’ll be working on this most of our lives.” (ATBPO p. 134) Historians one day will want to probe deeply into whether he knew anything that everyone else didn’t know at that point. At the very least, it was as though he was an inadvertent prophet. He and his colleagues were indeed in the process of screwing things up for many generations to come. Curran’s mistakes assured that his grandchildren’s grandchildren will probably still be working on this problem. If they’re not autistic.

     Shilts, in another moment of ironic journalistic naiveté, wrote this about Curran: “As a federal employee Curran had a thin line to walk between honesty and loyalty” (ATBPO p. 144) when he was describing the AIDS situation to Congress. Shilts notes that Curran could not ask Congress for money when he testified, “but he could nudge facts toward logical conclusions.” (ATBPO p. 144) The nudging of facts would become an art form at the CDC over the next three decades and sometimes the facts that had to be nudged were so large they virtually had to be moved with bulldozers and the conclusions they were nudged towards were always more political than logical. One could almost faint from the irony of Curran telling Congress in 1982 (two years after those first Atlanta DuBois cases of immune dysfunction, “The epidemic may extend much further than currently described and may include other cancers as well as thousands of persons with immune defects.” (ATBPO p. 144) Had he or his colleagues at the CDC recognized the DuBois 1980 Atlanta cases as the canaries in the HHV-6 mine, he would have been talking about millions (if not billions) of cases and he would not have had to play games with words to get Congress and the White House to do the right thing financially. One disturbing aspect of his manner of thinking was reflected in how Shilts summed up his testimony: “With death rates soaring to 75 percent among people diagnosed with GRID for two years, the specter of 100 percent fatality from the syndrome loomed ahead, he added.” (ATBPO p.144) It would be nearly impossible to dial back on the distorted image of the epidemic he was presenting and frankly, dialing back on anything was something that the CDC (like the NIH) would turn out to be constitutionally unable to do. That, as we have said, is another sign that we are living in a period of totalitarian abnormal science.

     Curran’s peculiar attitude towards gays surfaced revealingly again when Shilts described his refusal to meet Gaetan Dugas, the unfortunate gay man who would be eternally scapegoated in the echo chambers of the media as the “Patient Zero” of the AIDS epidemic because he had supposedly slept with a number of the original AIDS cases: “Jim Curran passed up the opportunity to meet Gaetan, the Quebecois version of Typhoid Mary. Curran had heard about the flamboyant [flight] attendant and frankly found every story about his sexual braggadocio to be offensive. Stereotypical gays irritated Curran in much the same way that he was uncomfortable watching Amos n’ Andy movies.” (ATBPO p.158) One doesn’t know quite where to begin on this one, except to note that Curran would be able to use his clap-doctor and gay-obsessed epidemiology to act on his feelings and beliefs about both stereotypical and non-stereotypical gays, and every other kind of gay in between. The way that Shilts described Gaetan Dugas should have been a warning to the whole gay community of what kind of medical and social treatment was in store for them: “Gaetan Dugas later complained to friends that the CDC had treated him like a laboratory rat during his stay in Atlanta, with little groups of doctors going in and out of his hospital room. He’d had his skin cancer for two years now, he said, and he was sick of being a guinea pig for doctors who didn’t have the slightest idea what they were doing.” (ATBPO p.158) Of course when those doctors eventually thought they had figured out what they were doing—that was precisely when they really didn’t really have a clue about what they were doing. The Holocaust II era of the gay guinea pig had only just begun. The CDC’s epidemiology would create a whole new gay stereotype. Curran’s difficulty in getting researchers to come into the field was the fallout of the gay and sexual way the frightening disease had been framed for the public—something that might never have happened if the DuBois 1980 wholesome heterosexual Atlanta cases had been the epidemiological and virological template for the epidemic rather than the kind of Amos n’ Andy gay people that made Curran so jiggy with embarrassment that he wouldn’t even meet with them.

     It’s amazing how many people seem to have been assigned credit (by different sources) for bringing (dragging?) Robert Gallo into AIDS research. Shilts has Curran on that Washington-slept-here list too, noting that he said to Gallo when he was receiving an award at a medical conference in 1982, “You’ve won one award. You should come back when you win another award for working on AIDS.” (ATBPO p. 201) Bringing Gallo into the field was like putting a pair of retrovirus-obsessed eyeglasses over a pair of gay VD-obsessed eyeglasses and expecting to see the epidemic for what it was. Otherwise known as the blind recruiting the blind.

     One of the more grimly amusing passages in Shilts’s book concerns Curran’s thought about the fears in the gay community that AIDS would result in gays being put into concentration camps: “Curran thought the train of thought was curious. After all, nobody had suggested or even hinted that gays should be in any way quarantined for AIDS. The right-wing loonies who might propose such a ‘final solution’ were not paying enough attention to the disease to construct the Dachau scenario. Still, it was virtually an article of faith among homosexuals that they should end up in concentration camps.” (ATBPO p. 228) Silly gays. Frankly, who needed concentration camps or “the Dachau scenario” when you had CDC epidemiology. CDC epidemiology saved the country a load of money on barbed wire. And Holocaust I, where gays actually were made to wear pink triangles in real concentration camps—that was so 1940s.

     One of the most unfortunate and tragically wrongheaded things about Curran is that, according to Shilts, he held his colleague Donald Francis “in awe, given Francis’s international reputation for smallpox control.” (ATBPO p.262) As one looks back at the circle jerk that also got Holocaust I going, one might hypothesize that all holocausts begin in passionate mutual admirations societies.

     Something began to surface during James Curran’s reign over AIDS at the CDC that bears close scrutiny by any enterprising historian interested in identifying the institutional roots of Holocaust II. In 1983, when Susan Steinmetz, an aide to Congressman Ted Weiss, visited the CDC in an oversight capacity, she was prevented from seeing files she automatically should have been able to audit as a representative of a Congressional Committee that had oversight responsibilities on health and the environment. According to Shilts, she was told by the then CDC Director William Foege, “she would not have access to any CDC files, and she could not talk to any CDC researchers without having management personnel in the room to monitor the conversations. The agency also needed a written, detailed list of specific documents and files Steinmetz wanted to see.” (ATBPO p.292) Shilts reported that “Steinmetz was flabbergasted. What did they think oversight committees did? Their work routinely involved poring through government files to determine the truth of what the high-muck-a-mucks denied, and then privately talking to employees who, without the prying eyes of their bosses, could tell the truth. This was understood, she thought.” (ATBPO p.292) What she didn’t realize was that the CDC’s de facto little counterrevolution against science and the ideal of transparency in democratic processes had begun before her unassuming eyes and this would become business as usual at the clandestine CDC for the next three decades. The shroud of secrecy (de rigueur in all abnormal science) that would enable Holocaust II and the cover-up of the CFS, autism and Morgellons epidemics was descending on the CDC in Atlanta.

     While Steinmetz was just trying to find memos that would contradict the CDC’s public posture that it had enough money to research the emerging epidemic of AIDS, without realizing it, she had stumbled onto the fact that the CDC had begun acting more like a government intelligence agency with vital national secrets—possibly even embarrassing ones—to keep, than a public health organization that was committed to truthful science and was accountable to the American people. In essence the CDC was showing that it wasn’t above any of the legerdemain that any other part of the government was capable of. It was showing us that it was very much cut from the same cloth as the government gremlins that gave us Watergate and Vietnam.

     Steinmetz wanted to see files that pertained to budgets and planning, but she was bizarrely told that she couldn’t see the files because they had patients names in them and that violated patient confidentiality. It strained credulity to argue that patients names were involved in organization budgets and planning. and in retrospect, it was a very lame excuse. This wouldn’t be the first time in Holocaust II that a dishonest explanation with a fake concern and compassion for patients’ welfare would be used by those in authority to stonewall the very people who were actually trying to do something about the welfare of patients. The CDC was already in a paranoid circle-the-wagons mode that characterizes abnormal and totalitarian science. According to Shilts, “The CDC personnel, who struck Steinmetz as peculiarly contentious, wanted to conduct their own review of the files before letting Steinmetz see them . . .” (ATBPO p. 292) And “as another demand, the CDC insisted that before any interviews with CDC staff took place, the agency would screen questions that Susan Steinmetz put to scientists.” (ATBPO p.292) On the eve of the HHV-6 catastrophe and Holocaust II, government science was going into the lockdown of abnormal science. Shilts wrote, “This is getting pretty strange, Steinmetz thought.” (ATBPO p.292) Strangeness was but a puppy at that point.

     This new emerging opposite world of public health and scientific duplicity and defensiveness didn’t make sense to Steinmetz’s colleagues back in D.C.: “On the phone, other oversight committee staffers in Washington confided that they had never heard of an agency so recalcitrant to Congress . . .” (ATBPO p.292) It got even worse for Steinmetz at the CDC in Atlanta when, on the second day of her oversight visit, she was told by the CDC manager who was handling her visit that her “presence would no longer be permitted in the CDC building and that no agency personnel would be allowed to speak to her.” (ATBPO p. 293) The stonewalling and the lockdown were not confined to the CDC in Atlanta. Shilts reported that Steinmetz also faced new obstacles in her path when “The National Cancer Institute officials issued a memo demanding that all interviews with researchers be monitored by the agency’s congressional liaison. At first the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Disease was cooperative, but then, in an apparent NIH-wide clampdown, information became difficult to excavate there as well.” (ATBPO p.293) Science and public health in America were about to play the same kinds of political games that are played in totalitarian countries. Public health information was about to be totally controlled by the government.

     Curran can himself take a great deal of personal credit for the HIV mistake. Shilts writes that “During the summer of 1983, Dr. James Curran had grown fond of citing the ‘Willie Sutton Law’ as evidence that AIDS was caused by a retrovirus. The notorious bank bandit Willie Sutton was asked once why he robbed banks, to which he replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” Curran, according to Shilts, would ask “’Where should we [at the CDC] put our money? . . . ‘Where would Willie Sutton go? He would go with retroviruses, I think right now.’” (ATBPO p. 331) There is a revealing amount of cockiness and arrogance in Curran that remind one that pride goeth before a fall. But one Willie Suttonish thing was certainly true: retroviruses turned out to be exactly where the big money was for a number of dishonest and incompetent retrovirologists

     It is fascinating to see Shilts catching Curran red-handed as he lies about the inadequate funding for AIDS. Publicly Curran would say “we have everything we need,” (ARBPO p.331) but Shilts was able to use the Freedom of Information Act to locate documents that “revealed that things were not so rosy at the CDC, and Curran knew it. Even while he reassured gay doctors in San Francisco, he was writing memos to his superiors begging for more money.” (ATBPO p. 331) For anymore cognizant of the overwhelming mendacity that characterized just about everything concerning Holocaust II, it is especially disturbing to read Shilts’s account of Curran’s excuse: “‘It’s hard to explain to people outside the system,’ he said. ‘It’s two different things to work within the system for a goal and talking to the people outside the system for that goal,’ he said.” (ATBPO p. 332) Curran was basically making the anti-transparency excuses people inside of the government always make for talking out of both sides of their mouths. It’s too bad Shilts didn’t consider the possibility that this character trait was also reflected in the basic science and epidemiology of AIDS that was being churned out by the CDC. It would turn out over the next few decades that indeed government science spoke out of both sides of its mouth.

     Curran got the venereal HIV/AIDS paradigm he and his colleagues wanted, the one that could be expected to materialize given his background. It wasn’t surprising then, that he said in 1984, according to Shilts, “Gay men need to know that if they’re going to have promiscuous sex, they’ll have the life expectancies of people in the developing world.” (ATBPO p.416) Actually, given the crazy treatments some gay men were going to be medically assaulted with, he was a true visionary.

     As could be predicted, according to Shilts, “Jim Curran also viewed testing as essential to any long term strategy in fighting AIDS.” And so the Pink Triangle medical apartheid agenda of testing and stigmatizing gays as HIV positive (or as an HIV risk group) began in earnest. And the gay community got specially tailored forms of communication from Curran. According to Shilts, “Curran was always cautious when he talked to newspaper reporters, fearful that his observations on the future of the AIDS epidemic might be fashioned into the stuff of sensational headlines, but he felt no inhibition with the gay community. Instead he felt his mission was to constantly stress the gravity of the unfolding epidemic.” (ATBPO p.483) Of course, while he was giving the gay community the tough love, behind his epidemiological back was the looming HHV-6 spectrum catastrophe, a situation which was exponentially worse than anything his little team of clap doctors and pseudo-epidemiologists could possibly have imagined. Given that it was the CDC’s AIDS paradigm that in essence scapegoated the gay community for what would turn out to be everyone’s HHV-6 problem, it is the epitome of irony that according to Shilts, Curran thought that “the question was not if there would be a backlash against gays, but when. It might come soon. ‘You should get ready for it,’ he said.” (ATBPO p.484) How does one prepare for a backlash against gays? Buy extra canned goods? Bake an extra quiche? It was certainly nice of him to give the gay community a heads up, but in truth, the pseudoscience, the incompetent fact-gathering implicit in ignoring the DuBois 1980 Atlanta cases, and the homodemiology of the CDC, constituted a kind of  epidemiological backlash before the backlash. Curran and his team needed only look in the mirror to see the kind of anti-gay values that could do far more mischief to the gay community than an army of right wing loons.

     Journalist David Black caught some of the underlying psychological problems at the CDC in his book The Plague Years. He wrote, “In fact the CDC, like many physicians and scientists, seemed embarrassed by the gayness of the disease.” (TPY p.57) We now know only too well in retrospect is that the best science and epidemiology can not be conducted in an atmosphere of gay-sex-related embarrassment. Black quoted one CDC researcher as saying to a visiting gay activist, “This never would have happened if you guys had gotten married.” (TPY p.57) When the activist asked if the researcher meant to each other, the researcher said, “To women.” (TPY p.58) The CDC researchers conducted their epidemiology and science in an awkward atmosphere of antipathy to gays, surely not a fertile field for objectivity. According to Black, when he asked Curran to explain exactly what he means by “‘intimate contact’ [between men] the phrase researchers kept using to describe the conditions under which the syndrome spread, he seemed uncomfortable, squeamish. He stammered and glanced anxiously around the room.” (TPY p.58) If some of Jim Curran’s best friends were gay, they had clearly done very little to make him comfortable with their sex lives. One suspects that most of Jim Curran’s best friends were not gay.

     One absolutely show-stopping moment in Black’s rich little book is a criticism that was leveled at Curran: “He started making up these ‘facts’ from the data as he interpreted it,’ said one unnamed gay critic of Curran.” Who was that astute gay critic? Please stand up now, take your bow.