Free The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV by Stephen Tropiano Page B

patients.
    Unfortunately, when AIDS became a front page story, there were few medical dramas on the prime time schedule. In terms of dramatic programming, television in the early 1980s was dominated by prime time soap operas (Dallas, Dynasty, Knots Landing ) and detective/action shows (Magnum, PI., Simon and Simon). Only two medical series enjoyed healthy runs during the 1980s — St. Elsewhere (1982-1988, six seasons) and Trapper John, M.D. (1979-1986, seven seasons). The subject of AIDS would eventually be addressed by other genres, including sitcoms, police dramas, and made-for-TV movies, beginning with the groundbreaking 1985 film, An Early Frost.
    The first medical drama to tackle AIDS was the 1983 Christmas episode of St. Elsewhere, “AIDS and Comfort.” A well-respected, up-and-coming 34-year-old Boston city councilman, Tony Gifford (Michael Brandon), is diagnosed with AIDS. His physician, Dr. Peter White (Terence Knox), is confused because Tony is heterosexual, not an IV drug user, and has never received a blood transfusion. Dr. White and Dr. Westphall are suspicious, so they enlist a friend of Tony’s, hospital administrator Joan Halloran (Nancy Stafford), to find out the truth. Finally, Tony admits he’s been having anonymous sex with men. Upon his release from St. Eligius, the councilman decides to go public with his illness and not resign from office.
    Although Tony’s diagnosis is the focus of the episode, the story devotes equal time to the reactions of the St. Eligius staff at having an AIDS patient under their care. The possibility of contracting AIDS through casual contact was still fresh in everyone’s mind, no doubt thanks to a 1983 news release by the American Medical Association that erroneously made the very same suggestion. Dr. White is pressured by his wife to drop Tony as a patient. Nurse Billie (Rae Dawn Chong) doesn’t want to handle his blood. Luther (Eric Laneuville), an orderly, leaves Tony’s food tray outside his door. Someone even spray paints “AIDS!” inside the hospital elevator. Fearing they could contract the disease by giving blood, members of the community and the hospital staff are reluctant to donate during a city-wide shortage.
    As he contemplates going public with the disease, Tony shares with Dr. Westphall a passage from The Decameron, in which Boccaccio describes a plague that devastated 14th century Florence:
    It was the year 1348, Florence, lovely city of Italy, when the dreadful plague struck. The body was covered with purple spots. Those harborages of death. And the inevitable end was this — avoid those diseased and anything they had come near.
    Later, Dr. Westphall, in a stirring speech, directly challenges the labeling of AIDS as a “plague” sent by God as punishment. At the same time, he emphasizes that the role of the medical community is to care for people who are sick, not to pass moral judgment:
    DR. WESTPHALL: Who am I? Why should any of us be penalized fatally for choosing a certain lifestyle? Especially when you realize it all boils down to chance anyway. And I tell you something, I don’t give a damn for all this talk about morality and vengeful gods and all that. If you have AIDS, you’re sick, you need help. And that’s all that matters. And that’s why we’re here, right? 65
    Eighteen years later, Dr. Westphall’s speech is still relevant when considering that PWAs (People With AIDS) continue to experience discrimination in areas such as health care, housing, and employment. Yet, we also now see how phrases like “choosing a certain lifestyle” and Tony’s “secret” admission that he contracted AIDS through anonymous gay sex offered, at the time, a limited perspective of who is at risk. Tony’s wife (Caroline Smith) is the only one who even questions whether her husband may have passed the virus on to her (Tony’s doctors never even address the issue). The transmission of the virus through heterosexual sex would, in fact, become the