TINA CHOW

TINA CHOW MODEL, DESIGNER

Beautiful, rich, and privileged, Tina Chow has probably been he most famous woman to contract AIDS to date. Frustrated that so little attention had been paid to AIDS and women (see card 84), she said to her celebrity friends, "As a woman with AIDS, I had nowhere to turn."

The child of an American father and a Japanese mother, Bettina Louise Lutz was born in 1950 in Lakeview, Ohio. When she vas in her middle teens her family moved to Japan, where she became a fashion model. Her delicacy and elegance made her a avorite of photographers around the world. In her early twenties she married Michael Chow and worked with him at his fashionable Chinese restaurant in London. They later opened branches in New fork and Los Angeles, but after three restaurants, two children, and her career designing jewelry, their marriage deteriorated.

Exquisite and exotic, Tina Chow was herself like a work of art, in ornament in the jet-set world, where she became involved in AIDS benefits even before she knew she was HIV-positive herself. Diagnosed in 1989, she said she had contracted the virus in a brief eterosexual relationship with a bisexual Frenchman. Rejecting AZT and other Western drugs (see card 71), she tried holistic reatments, macrobiotic diet, and Tibetan medicines and found piritual comfort in rituals conducted by the Dalai Lama. But even or the Beautiful People there is no cure for AIDS, and facing death ravely, she died on January 24, 1992. Parts of her collection of lesigner clothes were left to the Fashion Institute of Technology in Jew York City and to the Kyoto Costume Institute in Japan. Next Card 10: ROY COHN: Lawyer

AIDS AWARENESS: PEOPLE WITH AIDS

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