BELINDA MASON

BELINDA MASON JOURNALIST, AIDS ACTIVIST

When people learned that Belinda Mason had AIDS, they could not see her as a young mother, a journalist, or a writer of fiction, but saw the disease foremost. "I have become the disease," she said. "I have become an AIDS poster child."

Born July 2, 1958, Belinda Mason grew up in a mountain. community in rural Kentucky and began to write stories while in grade school. She received a degree in journalism at the University of Kentucky in Lexington in 1980, and the following year met Steve Carden whom she married. Preferring country life, they moved back to the mountains where Mason worked for small-town newspapers in Hartford and Pikeville and wrote short stories. At the birth of their second child in 1987 she was infected with HIV by treatment with products derived from contaminated blood. She accepted her lot with courage, worked with AIDS advocacy groups, and helped to form the Kentuckiana People with AIDS Coalition.

In 1990, President Bush appointed Belinda Mason to the National Commission on AIDS. The month before she died she wrote to him stating her opposition to government plans for mandatory testing of medical personnel, which she feared would further stigmatize people with AIDS. She wrote, "Doctors don't give people AIDS-they care for people with it. The blanket screening of health-care workers will create the false illusion that people with AIDS are a threat to others." She also opposed the governmental ban on people with AIDS from entering the U.S. (see card 91).

Only 33 years old when she died on September 9, 1991, she was buried on the Kentucky mountain farm she loved. Next Card 33: LEONARD MATLOVICH: War Hero, Gay Activist

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