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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

June, 1989

LIVING WITH AIDS

by Joseph Interrante Executive Director

Health Issues Taskforce

Lesbian-Gay Health Conference

On April 5-9, 1989, I and the Coordinators of Counseling Services for the Taskforce, Darrel Greene and Karen Cimini, attended the Eleventh National Lesbian and Gay Health Conference and Seventh National AIDS Institute in San Francisco.

With over 500 workshop and plenary sessions covering different aspects of AIDS, lesbian heath, lesbian-gay mental health, youth, people of color, organizational issues, substance use or abuse, and alternative care, the conference was an overwhelming but stimulating experience. At no other conference that I know of do discussions during and between sessions range from the pragmatic to the ethical and philosophical about our work as service providers and educators. This brief report reflects my participatory focus on AIDS-related is-

sues.

As many readers know, the conference was overshadowed by the case of Hans Paul Verhoef, a Dutch PWA and AIDS educator who was detained and placed in a maximum security prison in Minnesota on April 2 when immigration authorities there discovered he had AIDS. After 5 days of intense negotiation with state and federal authorities, Verhoef was finally released and reached the conference on April 7. He had been required to post a $10,000 bond, paid by the Minneapolis AIDS Project. He was also asked to abstain from sex during his stay. Verhoef would only promise to abstain from risky behavior.

In retrospect, everyone seemed to recognize that the detainment was a medically and politically misinformed act. It revealed the AIDS phobia of immigration officials. And the repercussions are still being felt. Reportedly the World Health Organization in Geneva is considering whether to list the United States as a country which bans or harasses tourists with HIV conditions. What this might mean for American tourists and people traveling to AIDS conferences in Europe is unclear. Verhoef's treatment was neither gentle nor kind it was just plain stupid.

The first day of the conference was devoted to special topic institutes. The Taskforce participated in the "Rural AIDS Institute," which focused on the problems faced by nonmetropolitan coastal areas. (As one educator said to me, "Everything west of Westchester County is the midwest.")

Our presentation on providing education and support to gay men returning home summed up one of the major issues facing these organizations, and was one issue which distinguished us from coastal AIDS organizations.

The Institute itself was a response to what had been perceived as a thematic domination of the 1988 conference by the problems of big metropolitan AIDS organizations. To some extent, the Institute served as a combination think tank and support group, providing a space within which to articulate the distinctive issues faced by organizations in the rest of the country. While such a space is vital, I hope that the planners for 1990 will consider integrating these workshops into the overall conference in a more systematic way. The larger AIDS organizations could also profit from these discussions.

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Many of the education workshops focused on safer sex programs for gay men. In spite of the official notion that the gay community has been "taken care of" so far as HIV prevention is concerned, workshops demonstrated the need for continuing, more innovative, and more focused efforts. Even among white, professional men in their thirties and forties-presumably the most educated group-studies revealed a continuing problem in translating information into practice.

Between these sessions, educators debated the ethical implications of safer sex programs. Was all the talk about lack of communication skills, lack of "hands on" skills in applying information, resistance to changing behavior, inadvertently incorporating all the old psychiatric stereotypes about gay men? Did educators focus too heavily on a "don't do" message, and thereby contribute to the sex-negative feelings raised by the epidemic even among gay men? These questions were not resolved. But these questions usually aren't even recognized at AIDS conferences.

A second issue that ran through the conference was the relation between AIDS organizations and gay men and women of color. Presenters spoke of the dilemma they faced choosing between predominantly white organizations sensitive to gay issues but not racial concerns, and minority organizations which denied or ignored their needs as gays. "Where will gay minority persons with AIDS turn for support?" was a repeatedly raised question.

A workshop on "Social Issues of AIDS in the Deaf Community" raised similar concerns about the lack of services and programs addressing the needs of hearing impaired people. Despite im-

D.C.

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about the survey, and NIH does not know what modifications, if any, it will be forced to make.

Sullivan is still something of an unknown quantity to AIDS lobbyists. He was president of Moorehouse College of Medicine before his appointment, so he may be sympathetic to preserving the scientific integrity of the survey.

A letter to Sullivan from the NORA coalition called Sullivan's attention to the real agenda at hand: "Political and personal ideology should never be permitted to impair the scientific rigor of a

pressions that HIV infection is growing in the deaf community, services are recent and limited. Only after a Dallas PWA sued the Centers for Disease Control, for example, did the National AIDS Hotline institute TDD/TTY service. Few HIV testing centers have counselors with sign-language skills. Presenters spoke of the need to involve local hearing impaired communities and service agencies in AIDS efforts; they also spoke about the homophobia and the general sexnegativism engendered by state institutions which have to date inhibited such efforts.

The morning of April 7 was devoted to a plenary session on medical advances in AIDS. Unfortunately, the overall message from presenters was that there were no substantive advances from one year ago. Presenters were very cautious about new treatments, especially treatments for HIV infection and replication itself. This essentially depressing message remained in tension with some of the ad hoc speculation about the meaning of recent news reports, concerning preliminary results from trials of drugs such as CD4 and GLQ223. But the early trial status of such drugs may have left these official spokespersons hesitant to offer more than tentative and highly qualified statements about progress in treatments.

Nonetheless, the conference overall gave one the sense of accomplishment and growth in AIDS-related and lesbiangay health activity. In spite of last year's concern about the so-called "de-gaying" of AIDS activity, it is clear that lesbian and gay AIDS workers possess a wealth of experience and expertise in both risk reduction and service provision. While old and new AIDS organizations are struggling to diversify into truly multicultural programs, that expertise will remain a source of vitality in the future.

data collection process There is no value to ignorance in any field of science, including human sexuality." Hopefully Sullivan will get the message that NORA's considerable influence will be behind him if he chooses to stand against the political pressure being mounted by the conservative lobby.

Chai Feldblum is an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union's AIDS Project.

Laura Markowitz is an editor of a na tional magazine and a lesbian activist.

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