Page 10 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE July, 1989

INSIDE THE WASHINGTON LOBBY

by Chai Feldblum

and Laura Markowitz

What Makes a Disease a Public Health Threat?

The way the laws are currently set up, the government is allowed to refuse visas to immigrants and visitors who have dangerous, communicable diseases.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency that implements laws concerning immigration, came up with a list of six or seven dangerous, communicable diseases, including such diseases as tuberculosis and syphilis, based on recommendations from the Public Health Service. An amendment offered by Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., in June 1987 ordered the INS to add HIV infection to that list.

The INS drew up new regulations to implement the law. The regulations required that all immigrants had to be tested for HIV infection, including refugees and those applying for permanent residence under the Amnesty Legalization Program. If the immigrant or refugee tested positive, the person was to be refused entry.

During the discussion in the Senate before the amendment was passed, it was clear that senators thought they were voting for a law that would not necessarily apply to visitors. The amendment itself, however, did not make that distinction clear and the law passed applies equally to immigrants and visitors.

The INS regulations don't require that visitors be tested for HIV, but if INS officials find out or are told that a visitor is infected with the AIDS virus, they can bar the visitor from entering the country.

There is another catch to this. For refugees who are HIV infected and for those applying for permanent residency under the Amnesty Legalization Program who are HIV infected, the INS may grant a waiver and allow them entry. But for regular immigrants, the law demands exclusion, with no possibility of a waiver in any circumstance.

It is unfortunate that such a law was passed, since HIV infection is not the same kind of disease as the others listed as "dangerous and communicable." HIV is not casually communicable, like tuberculosis, for example, which is transmitted through the air when the infected person is in a contagious state.

AIDS lobbyists contend that the law should be changed to drop HIV infection completely from the list, or at least to allow immigrants and visitors liberal waivers if they are HIV infected.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., has introduced a major immigration reform bill that allows, for the first time, the possibility of waivers for immigrants with HIV infection (although it is a restrictive waiver) and maintains the current waiver provision for visitors. Rep. Bill McCullum, R-Fla., plans to offer an amendment to this bill that would exclude all waivers for both immigrants and visitors with HIV. All of this is on the horizon for the coming months.

In the meantime, the treatment of visitors who are HIV infected is a continuing source of controversy.

There have been about ten known cases in which the INS has refused visitors entry into the United States because they were told or somehow knew that the foreigner had AIDS or was HIV infected.

None of those cases was officially challenged until Hans Paul Verhoef, a Dutch visitor, flew to Minnesota on his way to the Gay and Lesbian Health Conference in San Francisco last month.

The INS office in Minnesota refused Verhoef entry because he had AIDS, but when Verhoef fought the ruling, the local office relented and agreed to let him enter. The INS office in Washington, however, overruled the Minnesota office decision and refused Verhoef permission to enter. Finally, an immigration judge heard the case and ruled that Verhoef could enter the United States.

Can the INS keep visitors who are HIV infected out of the United States? Under their own regulations, the INS's key factors in allowing a waiver are that the danger to the public health must be minimal, the possibility of spread of infection minimal, and the U.S. government must not have to bear any costs in caring for the person.

In the case of a person who is HIV infected and who practices safer sex and does not share contaminated needles, the threat to public health and possibility of spread of infection are minimal. The cost to the government is nothing.if the

National museum founded

The New York Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center has announced the founding of the National Museum of Lesbian and Gay History there. It will be the first museum in the United States devoted to lesbian and gay history.

"This is a crucial step in preserving our heritage," said Executive Director Richard D. Burns, who convened a sixmember committee to help organize the

museum.

The center is acquiring a substantial portion of the contents of the International Gay History Archive, a major collection amassed over 10 years by John Hammond and Bruce Eves, including periodicals, books and memorabilia.

The archive will be stored in the center's basement. It will be exhibited in the center's meeting space on a rotating basis, with all of it accessible to students, scholars, historians and writers by appointment.

"The center will serve as a safe place to store the archive and the many items we expect to add to it in future years," Burns said.

The museum's first independent project, a multi-media exhibition commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, took place in June,

Lesbian and Gay Pride and History Month. Entitled "Imagining Stonewall," the exhibit included audio, video, picture and documentary displays.

To assist the museum committee, Burns has assembled an advisory committee of people prominent in lesbian and gay culture and politics, including Virginia Apuzzo, Allen Berube, John Boswell, George Chauncy, Judy Grahn, Lee Hudson, Jonathan Katz, Audre Lorde, Armistead Maupin, Joan Nestle, Barbara Smith and Randolph Trumbach.

Committee member Nancy Seaton, an assistant conservator at the Pierpont Morgan Library, first applied her skills to lesbian and gay subjects when working on last June's "Prejudice and Pride" exhibit in the Tweed Courthouse in New York City, which chronicled gay and lesbian history from World War II to the present. That exhibit is part of the Center Museum.

Richard Wandel, an archivist with the Bettmann Archive, worked with Seaton on "Prejudice and Pride" and was on the board of the International Gay History Archives. Now a member of the museum committee, he said, "There's a real need for a place to collect and preserve papers

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important to our experience. My coming out process was enormously influenced by reading. We owe it to future generations to protect and make available everything we can accumulate that documents our past."

Center board member Florence V. Pincus, a psychologist with an active interest in art, brings a wealth of experience in various struggles for civil rights and human dignity to the Museum Committee. She has worked with Vietnam veterans and the survivors and children of survivors of the Holocaust and has long been active in the struggle for lesbian and gay rights.

"The museum represents an important opportunity for bringing another dimension to the center," said Pincus. "The Stonewall commemoration has the potential for giving us a sense of identity based not only on lesbian and gay concerns, but within the much broader context of dissent, nonconformity and the nontraditional. It will help establish our rightful place in the history of the universal struggle for human rights."

John Copoulos, an artist and member of the museum committee, works for the Center for Constitutional Rights, a public interest law firm with a growing

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person has other forms of health insurance or will need no medical care.

What the Verhoef controversy showed is that the central INS office is applying its regulations strictly.

The National Organizations Responding to AIDS, a coalition of health, social service, research and advocacy organizations, has been asking members of Congress to ask the INS to clarify that anyone with HIV infection that understands safe sex and drug practices and agrees to abide by them should not be considered a threat to public health. That would take away any reason the INS might have for keeping out visitors who are HIV infected.

The INS policy poses a threat to international AIDS conferences, including the Sixth International Conference on AIDS scheduled for next year in San Francisco. The city expects at least 10,000 foreign delegates to attend, including many with HIV, but conference organizers are concerned about the current INS problems and might discuss changing the location.

Time is short, but if enough members of Congress voice their concerns to the INS, perhaps the problems can at least be ameliorated so that U.S. immigration policies do not become an international embarrassment.

Chai Feldblum is an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union AIDS project.

Laura Markowitz is an editor of a national magazine and a lesbian activist. ▼

docket of lesbian and gay rights cases. At the CRC, he has watched a case with important implications for historians of the gay liberation movement wend its way through the courts.

A CRC attorney and former center board member, Joan Gibbs, successfully represented Michael Scherker, who is writing a book on Stonewall. Last May, Scherker's request for access to the New York City Police Department files under the state freedom-of-information law was denied. In a recent ruling in State Supreme Court, the NYPD was ordered to turn over confidential files on the Stonewall raid as well as files gathered on various gay and lesbian groups active through 1973. The NYPD has begun turning over the records.

For artist/designer Mark Johnson, the museum and archive will serve two purposes. "The archival material will enable scholars to give an accurate historical perspective on our culture, while the museum will allow us to learn about and celebrate that culture through art. The exhibits will draw artists from the community to the center, bringing the work of artists of all gay and lesbian perspectives to everyone who passes through the building."▼

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