How New York copes with A.I.D.S. scare

Press, 4 December 1985, Page 33

How New York copes with A.I.D.S. scare

By

JANE GROSS,

“New

York Times” NEW YORK NZPA-NYT A young man circled a table in New York’s East Village one recent afternoon, approaching and then retreating from the stacks of A.ID.S. literature offered by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. “If you’re sexually active, you’re at risk!” shouted Anne Milano, an educator for the group, who delivered her message next to a sign with the present A.ID.S. statistics: 13,332 diagnosed cases since 1981 and 6481 deaths, about 40 per cent of them in New York City. The young man shook off a preferred brochure, “Healthy Sex is Great Sex,” and instead pushed a crumpled dollar bill into a fishbowl that would hold SUSIS6 by dusk. “It’s bad for my sou! to hear about it,” he whispered, head bowed, then bicycled away. Some continue to resist the message at a time when the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the city’s leading homosexual organisation, is stepping up efforts to educate people about prevention of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, transmitted primarily through intimate sexual contact. While the organisation has been widely praised for its efforts in helping patients once they have A.1.D.5., there is roiling de-

bate among homosexuals, the group most at risk, about whether its directors, or other community leaders, have adequately addressed the issue of prevention and education. These issues are complicated and emotionally charged for the homosexual community, which dates its “liberation” to a 1969 confrontation with the police at a Christopher Street bar called the Stonewall Inn. That police raid led to the formation of the Gay Liberation Front, a multi-issue New Left organisation, and the Gay Activists Alliance, which — in the words of some of its members — “uncritically celebrated” sexual activity. Both organisations are now defunct, but some in the homosexual community say they believe the political climate of that time fostered a tolerance for promiscuity that has exacerbated the A.I.D.S. crisis. The contrast between homosexual behaviour before and after the AJ.D.S. epidemic is demonstrated by a study just completed at Columbia University’s School of Public Health. So far, Dr John Martin, who conducted the study, has interviewed 700 homosexuals and collated data from 100 of them. That small group, including monogamous men, averaged 64 different sexual partners a year outside the home before A.1.D.5., com-

pared with 18 now. Before learning of the disease, 40 of these 100 men frequented bathhouses, with an average of 32 partners a year in such locations. In the last year, 16 have visited the baths and averaged seven partners. “The movement of the 60s and the 70s legitimised promiscuity,” said Larry Kramer, a founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and now one of its most abrasive critics. . “To in any way criticise that as wrong was tantamount to heresy, and still is in certain quarters.” “Is compulsive sexuality freedom?” asked Jim Fouratt, one of the founders of the Gay Liberation Front. “I would argue it’s not. All we got was a lot more alienated sexually, and a lot more disease. “There were mistakes made and I’m not wed to the ideas I had 10 years ago,” Mr Fouratt said. “The problem the gay A.I.D.S. leadership refused to confront until recently — the sex issue, the lifestyle issue — created a vacuum for the homophobic moralists.” It was in this context that the Gay Men’s Health Crisis responded to the AI.D.S. crisis, incorporating in 1982 as an advocacy and socialservice organisation that has devoted itself to the counselling and care of patients. Its earliest educational efforts were its hot-line and its lectures to community groups and health-care professionals.

The group recently began sending counsellors into five of the city’s bathhouses, distributing so called “safesex” literature in homosexual bars and participating in research that involves a weekend of counselling for 800 sexually compulsive men.

“Had education . commenced earlier, how many lives would have been saved?” asked Mr Kramer, the author of “The Normal Heart,” a play about A.I.D.S. “How sad, feeble and useless those little tables are! Everything, everything, is too little, too late. By our silence we have helped murder each other. “I don’t think there is any need for us to feel defensive,” said Richard Dunne, the executive director of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. “We haven’t done as well as we would like, but we haven’t had the luxury of focusing on gay and bisexual men. We have had to educate health-care professionals and the general public because no-one else was doing it, and we needed to get across that this wasn’t merely a disease of a socially disapproved life-style.” Within the homosexual community, sexual behaviour has changed radically since the start of the A.I.D.S. epidemic. The city’s Health Department reports an 80 per cent decline in venereal disease among homosexual men in the last two years, when sexually transmitted disease continued to increase among heterosexuals. Early results from the Columbia study show that homosexuals have dramatically reduced their number of partners and have limited certain sexual practices, particularly those involving the exchange of semen. Dr Martin’s research, to be presented at a November convention of the American Public Health Association, indicates that sexual behaviour has changed not because of education butbecause of contact with the sick and the dying.