Kristen Davis

speaker

1,669 appearances 27 recordings 6 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 13 Apr

Kristen Davis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 3.

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My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark · 457 - In With The Goths · 5 Dec 2024 podcast

Yeah. So he gets a job in the housekeeping department. He mops the floors. He takes out the trash. But after a while, he realizes he wants to care for the patients. Before long, Cliff is promoted to an orderly position, a job he holds throughout high school. And after he graduates, he goes to nursing school in Jacksonville. Wow.

I'm going to go...

So that's, of course, the most anyone in his family has ever made. That's incredible. But more than that, Cliff has really found his calling. He says, quote, I realized I really liked being a nurse. It's where I felt the most comfortable. I'd always been told that I was a caring person, so it made sense that I gravitated toward that profession. So Cliff bounces from Jacksonville down to Miami.

There's a thriving gay community there. Down there, there were lots of job opportunities, but it's the 70s. And at this time, down in South Florida, there's a woman named Anita Bryant who's decided to wage war on the LGBTQ community of South Florida. She and her cronies are lobbying hard to have a recently passed ordinance that outlaws discrimination based on sexual orientation repealed.

Repealed? They want to get rid of that.

Hmm. Let's repeal rights, huh? How's your body feel right now? It feels like I want to get a hysterectomy. A little second class? Yeah. Anita Bryant, I believe there's... Her getting pied? Yes. Yes. If I'm right, there's an amazing video because she did it. It's someone who did it. That's like she was also she wasn't she was a performer. She was like a singer and stuff.

And she was kind of like back. It was like back in those Perry Como days where people were very like clean cut. It was all about like late 60s, kind of like all American clean cut, whatever. And so she was kind of like popular in a way. Yeah. And then suddenly she was like, but you know who I really want to oppress is these gays. Yeah.

And so, yeah, there is that legendary video where she gets pied while she's doing, I think, a press conference. Yeah. Yeah, it was by gay activist Tom Higgins. Yeah, you can look that video up on YouTube. It's pretty great. But also it's like at the time, it's like, how dare you? And it's like, it's pie. You're an asshole. And you got a pie in the face. You deserve it. So basically...

those bigoted activists drum up such an increasingly hostile energy in south florida which has up until then been a safe haven for gay people that cliff decides it's time for him to move to california he's always wanted to spend time in the bay area and of course san francisco has become like the mecca for gay people to escape to from all around the country so in 1979 cliff moves there and takes a job at san francisco general

which is at the time a teaching hospital for University of California at San Francisco. So what's funny is Cliff doesn't actually take to the city right away. It's cold. It's foggy. The weather, there's not a lot of sunshine in San Francisco. So he misses the Florida sunshine.

He's also not clicking with the gay community like so many places that can become emblematic of like a movement or a subculture. San Francisco is filled with transplants. So he feels like it's a little artificial. So he figures he'll stay for a year or two and then he's going to go try somewhere else. But all that changes in 1981.

The murmurings of a strange, deadly illness that's largely affecting young gay men begin to circulate. So Cliff and his colleagues at SF General start seeing some of these patients come into their ICU. They're all suffering from the same symptoms. They've lost weight. They have fevers that last for days. They have lesions on their skin, swollen lymph nodes. Some of them are confused and delirious.

And they almost always die from this illness. The news goes from calling it a mystery illness to saying it's a new type of cancer affecting gay men because they just have no idea. By 1982, and I have told you this story. I told you the last time we talked about the AIDS crisis.

But this happening in 1981, I absolutely remember where I was sitting in the living room watching the 6 o'clock news with my mom, or if it was my mom was there. It was the 7 o'clock news. And Dave McElhatton on the Channel 2 News and the little like chyron next to him just said mystery illness. And he basically was like a mystery illnesses in San Francisco. Terrifying. Yeah. Yeah. Really strange.

So by 1982, this mystery illness is given a name, Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, or AIDS for short. Cases are being identified throughout the country now with many, but most importantly, not all of the victims being gay men. So even the best medical experts and the most decorated doctors can't fully explain why these patients are getting sick.

And that uncertainty begins to fuel a widespread panic and blatant homophobia. According to the website Hospital Watchdog, they say, quote, some men suspected as gay and infected with HIV were kicked out of their apartments and fired from their jobs. In one instance, their desks were taken to a parking lot and set on fire.

Insurance companies were screening out gay men to deny coverage by sending out surveys asking if they worked as a florist or a hairdresser. Holy shit. Yeah. In actuality, AIDS is affecting people from all walks of life, but it's an extremely hostile time for members of the gay community. It's a hostile time anyway. Right. And then this comes along. Right.

Then it's like they almost feel justified in their homophobia. Those bigots. Yeah. Yeah. So even within the medical establishment and even in progressive cities like San Francisco, some nurses, doctors, and orderlies are reluctant or they outright refuse to treat patients with certain symptoms or if they suspect that they're gay.

And when those patients are admitted, they are usually isolated and treated more like walking biohazards than as human beings. Actually, literal hazard signs are sometimes plastered on their hospital room doors. Meals are left in the hallway outside of their rooms. Basic care like changing their bed sheets or cleaning them goes undone out of this fear of being infected.

And Cliff is seeing all of this as a nurse. And then one day it hits even closer to home. He comes back from work to find his roommate Wayne collapsed on the hallway floor. Cliff says, quote, we had been talking a lot about the disease because it was just starting to make headlines. And I had a feeling that's what he had.

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