ALISON GERTZ AIDS ACTIVIST KRISTA BLAKE AIDS ACTIVIST

Pretty, young, white heterosexual women, Gertz (left) and Blake (right) contracted HIV in their teens. Both sacrificed comfort and privacy to work in AIDS education programs trying to convince young Americans that they are not immune, invincible, or immortal.

The child of wealthy parents in New York City, Alison Gertz grew up on Park Avenue and went to private schools and Parsons School of Design. She traced her infection with HIV to a 1982 sex-

ual encounter (her first) when she was 16. Diagnosed with AIDS in 1988, she became a crusader, telling her story to warn teenagers, women, and heterosexuals that they are at risk. She appeared on TV talk shows, and Molly Ringwald portrayed her in a TV movie on her life, Something to Live For. Esquire named her its Woman of the Year in 1989, and Dr. Mathilde Krim (see card 98) praised her

as a pioneer in educating middle-class heterosexuals. Alison Gertz strove to help prevent others from contracting HIV. "My message is that AIDS can happen to anyone," she said. "It only took one night for it to happen to me." She died August 8, 1992, at the age of 26. A few days earlier, Krista Blake appeared on the cover of the August 3 issue of Newsweek, giving a face to a story on teens and AIDS. In contrast to Gertz's privileged life in New York, Blake, who

was 20 in 1992, grew up in what she called "basic, white-bread America," in Columbiana, Ohio. Like Gertz, however, she contracted HIV at 16 through sex with a boy. "He knew he was infected and didn't tell me and didn't do anything to keep from infecting me,' she says. Living with AIDS, she tells her story to young audiences to whom she says, "Now I don't have any energy for a sex life." Next Card 20: HALSTON: Fashion Designer

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ALISON GERTZ/KRISTA BLAKE