Ed Buck’s Lawyer Says Victims Died of AIDS, Heart Attack in Hearing
www.advocate.com/crime/2022/4/05/ed-bucks-lawyer-says-victims-died-aids-heart-attack-hearing
Tag Archives: AIDS
HRC President Calls on Trump Jr. To Apologize for Vile HIV and AIDS Tweet
HRC President Calls on Trump Jr. To Apologize for Vile HIV and AIDS Tweet
Today, HRC called on Donald Trump Jr., son of President Trump, to apologize for his vile weekend tweet stigmatizing people living with HIV.
“Trump Jr. just proved again what we already knew — that he, his father and the Trump-Pence administration don’t care about people living with HIV, are undermining competent care and have no understanding of people living with HIV,” said HRC President Alphonso David. “Trump Jr.’s absolutely disgusting and ignorant tweet only serves to perpetuate the stigma faced by people living with HIV, which HRC and LGBTQ advocates have fought so long to end. Trump Jr. must apologize. And Trump and Pence must put their money where their mouth is and actually sufficiently fund the domestic initiatives aimed at ending the epidemic they claim to be combatting.”
Donald Trump and Mike Pence share a disturbing record on HIV and AIDS. In 2017, the Trump-Pence White House proposed a federal budget that would have slashed $1.1 billion in funding for international HIV-prevention programs. This was slammed by experts, who claimed it would lead to political instability and entirely reverse the gains made against the disease in the past decade. The same budget proposal called for a repeal of Obamacare that included deep cuts to Medicaid and defunding Planned Parenthood for a year, despite the sobering reality that 40 percent of Americans with HIV depend on Medicaid to pay their medical bills.
Early last year, the Trump-Pence Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposed a regulation that would blatantly allow healthcare providers a license to discriminate based on their own personal beliefs, even in cases of life-saving medical care, which would drastically impact patients living with HIV and AIDS.
During Pence’s time as governor of Indiana, he oversaw the worst outbreak of HIV and AIDS in the state’s history due to his refusal to lift a ban on needle exchange programs, only backing down after his approach drew universal outrage from public health experts, including the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). His actions have since been described as “the case study for how misguided health policies can endanger lives.”
Pence has spent his career aggressively demanding Planned Parenthood be defunded, even to the detriment of HIV and AIDS prevention, calling condoms “very, very poor protection against sexually-transmitted diseases” and stated that if Planned Parenthood wanted to provide HIV testing services, they should stop providing abortions.
Donald Trump has demonstrated his own ignorance on HIV on numerous occasions. Microsoft founder Bill Gates says he has had to explain to the President — twice — that there is a difference between HIV and HPV. In 1997, Trump bizarrely characterized his early sex life as his “own personal Vietnam” — a war he avoided through five deferments — and said his avoidance of contracting STDs made him feel like “a great and very brave soldier.” In the same interview, he joked that he could have forced Princess Diana to have an HIV test.
William Barr, the Trump-Pence Administration’s nominee for Attorney General, created an “HIV prison camp” in Guantanamo Bay in 1991, which reportedly held 310 asylum-seekers in dire conditions without adequate healthcare. Barr has also made personal statements promoting a draconian approach to the federal government’s role in responding to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, including the adoption of proven methods of prevention and access to treatment. Barr blamed AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections on “sexual licentiousness,” calling them “the costs associated with personal misconduct.” He disputed public health efforts to inform the American people about the transmission and prevention of HIV and AIDS, opposing public health interventions, such as the distribution of condoms, because “by removing the costs of [sexual] misconduct, the government serves to perpetuate it.”
How Much Credit Should Corporations Get for the Advancement of LGBTQ Rights?
How Much Credit Should Corporations Get for the Advancement of LGBTQ Rights?
Gay pride parades increasingly include marchers representing corporations, from defense contractor Raytheon to telecommunications conglomerate Comcast. During the most recent Pride Month, Starbucks unveiled its “Pride Cup,” while Target released a Pride line of clothing and accessories.
It’s easy to view these gestures through a lens of cynicism – that they’re a way for companies to generate positive media coverage while they continue to pay their workers the minimum wage or build drones. With 63% of Americans now supporting gay marriage, a company that celebrates LGBTQ pride is likely making a sound marketing decision that’s not particularly controversial.
But back in the 1980s and 1990s, when a much lower percentage of Americans were sympathetic to the cause, only a handful of companies stuck out their necks in support of LGBTQ rights. Which companies did so? And what spurred their support for LGBTQ equality? Those are questions law professor Carlos Ball explores in his new book, “The Queering of Corporate America,” in which he details how, over the course of 40 years, gay rights activists and corporations went from adversaries to partners.
In an interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Ball explains why corporations were among the first targets of gay rights activists and why many of these same corporations eventually embraced their role as LGBTQ allies. But he also points to the limits of corporate advocacy.
In the 1970s, what could happen to you if a company found out you were gay?
You could very easily be fired on the spot. You could be demoted. You could be subject to harassment.
As part of its application process, Coors, for many years, attached candidates to a lie detector test and asked them a whole range of questions, including whether they had ever had a same-sex relationship. Pacific Bell, which back then was the largest private employer in California, claimed that employing openly LGBTQ people would put its customers, employees and reputation at risk.
If you were fired for being gay, you would have had absolutely no legal remedies available to you, unless you lived in a handful of very liberal municipalities that had enacted anti-discrimination ordinances.
Even today, there are about 30 states in the U.S. that don’t explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. And the question of whether federal law – Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is actually before the U.S. Supreme Court right now.
How did some of the earliest activists bring attention to the issue of LGBTQ rights in the workplace?
They simply didn’t have the resources or people power to try to pressure large numbers of big companies, so they had to pick and choose which companies to target. Groups like the Gay and Lesbian Task Force, as it was then known, sent out a bunch of letters asking corporations about their treatment of sexual minorities.
The vast number of corporations refused to answer. But then you had some that replied by saying, in effect, “We do discriminate, and we don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. We don’t think our employees or our customers want to interact with openly gay people.”
Pacific Bell was one of the companies that wrote back saying, essentially, “We discriminate against gay people and we’re proud about that.” And so they became, not surprisingly, one of the first targets of LGBTQ activism aimed at large corporations. There were street demonstrations, meetings with San Francisco officials, letter-writing campaigns – all targeting Pacific Bell for its overt homophobia
The activism worked. By the mid-1980s, Pacific Bell was on its way to becoming a model corporate citizen on LGBTQ rights issues, in particular when it came to how it responded to the AIDS epidemic.
That’s a pattern you note with a few other companies – how activists targeted some of the most outwardly homophobic companies, and, within a few years, they became some of the most visible allies.
Large companies spend millions of dollars marketing their brands. Anything that potentially tarnishes those brands, they pay attention to.
And activists made enough noise and got enough attention that executives made, in some ways, rational business decisions. They realized the negative publicity wasn’t good for their bottom line.
But I think, as the activism continued, executives were also persuaded that supporting LGBTQ equality was the right thing to do. They came to accept the basic argument that their LGTBTQ employees were of equal merit and of equal worth as their heterosexual employees.
Now, this didn’t happen overnight. And it didn’t happen, by any means, at all companies. But it’s a trend that starts in the early 1970s and, as the activism grows, becomes more pronounced as the decades went on.
Why did activists target corporations instead of politicians?
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, it was extremely difficult to persuade a majority of legislators and voters to support LGBTQ civil rights laws. You simply don’t have to convince as many people when you are trying to persuade a company to adopt LGBTQ-friendly policies. All that it really takes is persuading a handful of top executives.
I think market forces also played an important role. First, by the time we get to the late 1980s and early 1990s, progressive consumers are starting to want to spend their dollars on goods and services provided by companies that reflect their values.
And second, I think having these policies in place allowed companies to attract and retain the most qualified employees. An LGBTQ job applicant who had the choice between two companies, one of which offered domestic partnership benefits and one that didn’t, was likely to go with the company that offered the benefits, because that was a signal that the company supported equal rights and treatment.
At the same time, you point to this phenomenon of “corporate schizophrenia.”
Right. Take Philip Morris. The company donated large sums of money to groups like the American Foundation for AIDS Research. But – and I guess this is where the schizophrenia comes in – they were also financially supporting hard-right, homophobic politicians like Senator Jesse Helms, who, at one point, actually called for the quarantining of people with AIDS.
And while corporations deserve a lot of credit for being an important part of the coalition that resisted the transgender bathroom bill enacted by the North Carolina legislature in 2016, many of these same corporations were funding the Republican elected officials who wrote and supported that law.
How did corporations respond to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s?
I would say that the overall track record of corporate America during the early years of the AIDS epidemic was terrible. Like most important and influential institutions in the U.S., large companies responded to AIDS with a toxic combination of prejudice and neglect.
The vast majority of corporations either implemented actual discriminatory policies – like placing health insurance reimbursement caps of US$5,000 for AIDS-related conditions – or allowed discrimination to take place by looking the other way.
However, there was a handful of corporations – for example, Pacific Bell, Bank of America and Westinghouse – that decided they couldn’t ignore the issue any longer. Like many large companies, they had employees who were so paranoid or homophobic that they refused to work alongside anybody who was gay, because the assumption was that if you were a gay man, you were HIV-positive. Large companies were getting many requests for transfers. They were also witnessing employees walking out of workplaces, en masse, when an HIV-positive employee was allowed to return to work after receiving medical treatment.
But rather than dealing with these problems on an ad-hoc basis, or by siding with their homophobic employees, executives at some corporations looked into the issue, consulted with public health experts and basically decided that it didn’t make sense to treat HIV-positive employees any differently from how they treated employees who had cancer or heart conditions.
It seems so obvious today, but one executive for Pacific Bell said, “Our employees with AIDS are sick, and we don’t fire our sick employees.” In 1985, that mattered. It was a simple statement of humanity, and it made a big difference.
In doing my research for the book, I was surprised to learn that a handful of large businesses were the earliest powerful institutions in the U.S. to respond to AIDS in sensible and humane ways. Before government, before unions, before universities, before many religious organizations, these companies took the lead on AIDS issues.
Companies are usually loath to publicly wade into polarizing political issues. Why, by the 21st century, did so many publicly take a stand in favor of marriage equality?
I think the 30 years of activism aimed at corporations that preceded that public stand made a huge difference. By the 21st century, LGBTQ rights issues were no longer new issues for corporations.
There were about eight Fortune 500 companies that provided domestic partner benefits in 1993. By 2001, the number was over 100. So this revolution was already taking place inside corporate America. Executives and corporate board members were learning that LGBTQ equality measures were good for their companies. But they were also learning that true equality was not possible unless the government itself stopped discriminating.
Large companies had adopted domestic partner benefits, they had adopted these non-discrimination policies, and there had really been no downside for them. Sure, some socially conservative groups were upset and there were a couple of boycotts called by right-wing organizations. But those really went nowhere.
By the time the same-sex marriage issue reached the Supreme Court, hundreds of corporations joined activists to ask the justices to recognize a constitutional right to marriage equality. And this had a tremendous political and legal impact. After all, these were not radical left-wing organizations that were making this demand. What can be more mainstream than Procter & Gamble and General Electric?
What are some of the limits of this public-facing, corporate activism?
That’s a very important question. Large corporations have certainly contributed to the expansion of LGBTQ equality in the United States and have, in the last few years, served as an important bulwark to protect those gains from conservative backlash.
That being said, nothing in the book is intended to suggest that corporations are always on the right side of disputed policy issues. There’s a whole plethora of positions that some large corporations take that are problematic from a progressive perspective, whether we’re talking about labor or environmental or taxation issues.
You’ll also see corporations be supportive of gay rights in the U.S. but then refuse to criticize foreign governments in other countries where they do business for their anti-LGBT laws and policies.
There will be times when the interests of corporations will align with the interests of activists, but you have to keep in mind that corporations, at the end of the day, are going to do what they believe is in their economic interest.
It seems like the gay rights issue is a lot easier for companies to publicly support, compared with other issues, like economic inequality.
Sure, in some ways, LGBTQ rights is an easier issue. But it wasn’t always easy, right? It became easy as a result of 40 years of activism.
You know, this book is being published at an interesting time. The country and corporate leaders have been having this broader conversation about the role of large corporations in American society.
We have the statement by the Business Roundtable over the summer about how corporations need to not just look out for the interests of their shareholders but also their employees, customers and the communities where they’re located. And so we’re starting to see – on issues like gun control, on immigration reform – corporations take more public stances, sometimes supporting progressive policy positions.
I find it kind of promising that there’s this bigger conversation that we seem to be having about the role and responsibilities of companies and large corporations in our democracy. And I’m hoping that this book can be a part of that conversation.
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Nick Lehr, Arts + Culture Editor, The Conversation
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The post How Much Credit Should Corporations Get for the Advancement of LGBTQ Rights? appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.
Gay guys describe their worst experiences with homophobia
Gay guys describe their worst experiences with homophobia
Let’s certainly hope “It Gets Better,” because a lot of men have endured horrific treatment at the hands of peers and strangers just for being who they are. Some of those guys shared their scariest brushes with homophobia in a recent Reddit thread, and their anecdotes are appalling. Here’s a sampling, edited only for readability:
- My so-called friend asked me [if] I am gay because I act very cartoony. I said no. Then he told me I am his best friend. Then he said he will kill me if I’m gay. He said his family shot gays. We lived far apart and went to different colleges, so after three years, I told him I’m gay, and he blocked me. He called me after two months with another number to say sorry, but I was over him at that point. I blocked him again and told him not to call me ever again.
Related: ER nurse who ranted against LGBTQ people is officially unemployed
- I was 13 in a Geography class, and the guys on the same table as me were discussing how much they’d love to torture a gay guy.
- My best friend in high school was really Republican and homophobic, actually, but I guess the worst experience was when I was bullied on the school bus and these guys gathered around my seat and just talked sh*t about how obviously gay I was, despite the fact [that] at that time I was trying my best to hide it, so it hurt even more that being in the closet didn’t spare me the harassment. I also was called f*ggot at a bus stop just by some random passerby. I went the f*ck off on him. You could tell he was not expecting that lol.
When I was on a first date with this guy and a group of people from my background started making fun of us in my mother tongue throughout the entire date. They assumed I was a different background. I had to pretend nothing was off and that I was enjoying myself. When you’re slightly closeted, it was like hearing all of your deep doubts out loud, but I couldn’t even react.
Related: University stands behind professor’s vehemently antigay social media posts
- In elementary school, a group of guys tried to take all my clothes off to find out if I was really a boy because I was so feminine. Those same guys would follow me around town on their bikes and kick and spit on me. I was also forced to play sports by my parents and was on teams with them. They would throw rocks at me constantly. Or the many times in elementary school where we would play various types of tag in gym or recess and I couldn’t play because nobody wanted to touch me.
- In the late ‘80s and through the ‘90s, I was deeply involved in HIV testing, counseling, and prevention. I was also involved in helping isolated and abandoned gay men who were dying of AIDS. This was in a conservative part of the country. On three separate occasions, a gang of gay-bashers came to my house and threatened violence. The first time, a neighbor came out with a shotgun and told them to get and not come back. I ran off the two following groups with my own shotgun. Those were exciting times, in the worst possible way.
Elm Street’s Mark Patton: Hollywood Is Still a Homophobic Nightmare
Elm Street’s Mark Patton: Hollywood Is Still a Homophobic Nightmare
The gay star of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge recounts his story in a sweeping new doc that ranges from the AIDS crisis to (ongoing) bias in Tinseltown.
www.advocate.com/film/2019/10/27/elm-streets-mark-patton-hollywood-still-homophobic-nightmare
Hank Plante on how he channeled his fury into coverage of the early days of the AIDS crisis
Hank Plante on how he channeled his fury into coverage of the early days of the AIDS crisis
5B, the documentary from Acadamy Award nominee Dan Krauss and winner Paul Haggis, tells the story of the first AIDS ward. Located at San Francisco General Hospital, the story is told through the eyes of the medical professionals and volunteers who worked there.
As one of the first openly TV reporter in the Bay Area, Hank Plante reported almost daily on the AIDS crisis. Winner of six Emmy Awards, Plante has become a legend in his field partly by following his conscience: He felt a moral obligation to report on the epidemic ravaging his own community in the 1980s at a time when there was widespread ignorance about how HIV was spread and hatred aimed at the victims.
(Last year we reported on the importance of 5B before it had distribution. Acquired by Verizon Media, 5B hits cinemas this month.)
We caught up with Plante chat about his career, the movie and what it all means for the future.
So when was the first time you heard about, what at the time, was called GRID? Do you recall?
I remember. It was actually a few blocks from here. I was living in West Hollywood in 1981. Yesterday, June 5, 1981, Dr. Michael Gottlieb, who still practices here, wrote about five gay men with unusual symptoms. Symptoms they should not have had. He published it in the CDC journal on June 5, 1981. I saw a guy I knew who was skin and bones. I remember it like it was yesterday. Then I saw more and more friends come down with the symptoms.
Did anyone suspect it was going to be the menace that it turned out to be?
Oh no. We all thought—and by “we” I mean reporters and doctors—we all thought it would be like toxic shock syndrome. It came and went and they got that under control quickly. We had no idea that it would become a pandemic.
Let the record show you were one of the first out-gay television reporters. Had you come out?
Oh yeah, I was out.
What blowback did you personally encounter covering this emerging tragedy?
The blowback came later. In the beginning, the stories I was doing were—they were science stories. The blowback actually came in San Francisco of all places. I worked for a very good TV station with very good managers who let me do what I wanted and cover it the way I wanted to cover it. This was daily in the mid-80s. But there were people inside the station—and somebody actually said this out loud at the station—there were people who thought if we covered it too much it would hurt our ratings.
Dear lord.
We actually had a guy who was in the PR department at the station said in a staff meeting “If you put gays on TV this much nobody is going to watch.” So there was that kind of blowback.
But having said that, it did not affect our coverage. Our bosses thought it was a compelling story and a public service. They let me cover it and do whatever I wanted. So is that blowback? I don’t know.
Did you ever feel that you might lose your job?
I did not. I wouldn’t have cared about it, to be honest with you. I mean, to me, I feel really fortunate to have covered it, weird as that sounds because it was a way for me to channel my grief and my anger into something. So it was more than just a story to me. We all felt really powerless. There were no drugs. I mean, there was AZT, but, you know…
It barely worked, didn’t work forever, and had deadly side effects.
And so it was just a chance for me to feel like I was doing something, which was night after night, telling people what’s the latest on the disease. How do you not get it? What drugs look promising? I felt like I was doing something. By the time I got to San Francisco, which was ground zero for the epidemic with more per capita cases than anywhere in the country. I got there in ‘85 and had honed my skills as a reporter enough, and was out enough so that I was just ready. I was ready.
So how did the film come to you? Did Dan [Krauss] and Paul [Haggis] reach out to you?
I got a call out of the blue when they started doing their research, maybe two years ago. They said they were doing this film on 5B which I knew very well and said: “Will you be in it?” And I said, “I’d love to do it.”
So what guidance, if any, did you offer them as someone who had already done extensive work on the subject?
Fortunately, I had kept a lot of my early AIDS stories. I had them transferred to DVD because tape, the medium of the time, disintegrates. And I had three discs at home because I knew at the time, it was something. I didn’t save every story. But there were significant stories that were important to me to have to show in my old folks home…
[Laughter]
…that I wanted to keep. So I was able to send them three discs that had a lot of my early stories on them. And you’ll appreciate this as a reporter: When you do a news story and you think it’s dead, you know, people read it and it goes away.
Yeah. That’s especially true now.
If it’s a really great story, they’ll praise you for a few months. I look back at my early work, and I’m really proud of it, but me and my husband are the only ones that remember it. So now to have the stories come back to life on the big screen, and to see it like this, or at Cannes, I’m so grateful. I thought it was gone.
And that underlines the public service element. People will look at it 200 years from now.
Yes, I hope.
So when you agreed to participate in the film were you nervous about revisiting that whole time in your life?
I had compartmentalized a lot of it, like a lot of gay men my age. It’s interesting, there are two groups of people who will react very differently to this film. One is people your age who did not live through it. Then there are the others my age who did live through it and put it out of our heads, otherwise, we’d just be crippled with PTSD. I started to get choked up a little bit when we were doing the interviews. So yeah, I had cut a lot of it out of my head.
There aren’t too many gay men of that generation who lived to tell their story…
I lost most of my friends, yeah.
The few men of that generation I do know say the same.
Yeah.
For so many of us, our friends are our family, our support network. The idea that they would all be gone…?
There’s no substitute for people who “knew you when.” I have a lot of friends now, but very few of them knew me way back when we were all coming out together and making our way in the world, at least my gay male friends. So it’s pretty sad.
I think a lot of people have a hard time understanding what the crisis was like at its worst when 5B was at its peak. What was it like to walk through the ward?
Many times it was very upbeat, believe it or not, because the nurses were upbeat. You had people like Rita Rocket [a cabaret entertainer] coming in and cheering people up. It was not as funerial as you might expect. And the patients were getting very good care. It wasn’t like going into a hospice which is a whole different deal. I went to plenty of those as well. It was very reverential experience. And when I would go there, they were helping me with my stories.
Sure.
I tried to say this in the film, but I don’t know that it came across. When you are working in daily news you get an assignment, kind of panic at the beginning of the day. You’ve gotta find people to interview. I gotta find someone with AIDS to interview, like now. I’m on the air at five, so like, now! And so I almost was unappreciative of what it was like to call these people and say, “Can you go on the air and talk about AIDS?” What I was really asking—Jesus Christ—was will you go on camera and talk about a deadly disease? And they would say yes, always, knowing that they don’t look well, or that they have lesions. Or that their co-workers or their family and their neighbors were going to see. Or that their landlords would see. And they would say yes because they wanted to help other people who were trying to deal with it. That’s why I say I was always appreciative when I would go into the ward or into apartments.
Related: Director Dan Krauss on AIDS doc ‘5B’: “History is, in a very frightening way, repeating itself.”
One thing particularly astonishing in the film is that Dr. Lorraine Day [an orthopedic surgeon who advocated mandatory HIV testing and the option of not treating AIDS patients] is very forthcoming about her reservations and about the criticism that she had for the ward, the way that the hospital staff conducted themselves. Did you ever interact with her?
A little bit, and with Dannemeyer [anti-gay congressman William Dannemeyer, who later married Day]. A little bit. You know, the film is really good with her. This is the mark of a good editor because when you first see her, she makes sense.
She doesn’t want to get splashed by blood, is that so unreasonable? Then you peel the onion more, and more and more and by the end of the film you know she’s a wack job. [In addition to her antigay animus, Day has advocated “holistic” treatment through diet for cancer and denied the Holocaust ever happened.]
She has nothing but contempt for these people.
Yes, that’s exactly right. Then when you finally learn the connection to the husband, who was really antigay, and that’s always what it was about. It was never about AIDS.
Later on, yes, it’s about something more. There’s this weird resentment.
And there are a lot of people like that. She represents a lot of people. I talk in the film about the guy who died of AIDS at a company in San Francisco. They took his desk out to the parking lot and burned. It was bad. Lots of people got kicked out of their apartments before it was illegal to do that and fired. Fired from their jobs.
It’s a testament to your ability as a reporter, the scene in the film from your archives of you interviewing insurance agents who are asking potential policyholders if they’ve ever been a hairdresser, or a choreographer, or a florist.
And that guy said to me, “Why didn’t they just ask if I could lip sync to Judy Garland?”
[Laughter]
Can you imagine sitting as a reporter and somebody says that?
How do you hold it together when something like that happens?
I loved it. I loved every second of it. Chasing the lawyer down the hallway…I loved it.
That’s the thrill of the job, but at the same time, it’s like this is where we are!?
I just take great joy in putting on camera and letting people see where we are. My job wasn’t to react to it, my job was to facilitate. I loved it so much. And the [man in question] won his case.
It’s also a good argument for universal healthcare. So when you’re going back through all of this, you talk about compartmentalizing all the pain. Is that how you carry it day to day, for you as a person? How do you live with that?
I feel like I made a difference. I don’t know how to answer that without sounding arrogant. I felt like I made a difference. I’m proud of the work that I did, and I did it for my friends who aren’t here. This was an opportunity. It was handed to me. I just happened to be a gay reporter in San Francisco. I don’t want to pretend to be altruistic. I wanted to work in that city. But yeah, I’m really proud of those years. It’s the best work I did in my life.
Does that help you deal with the anger?
Yeah, it did then and it does now. Absolutely.
So reliving it all, what catharsis did you find? Because when you relive something like that, you don’t just confront the people you lost, you confront yourself—who you were, the choices you made. What did you learn about yourself?
Wow.
[Long pause]
I learned I could do the job and put my emotions over here, and go on TV and report what was happening and not cry or say “f*ck you,” which was on my mind. I could cover people like Reagan, and interview his health secretary who was doing nothing at the time. I could really focus and use all that anger. Anger is a good motivator. I could use that anger to kind of let people at home know how absolutely terrible [the Reagan administration] was for their inaction. I liked confronting people on camera. I felt like I was standing up for my brothers and sisters. I really did.
But I couldn’t say that. I couldn’t go on TV and say “This is for you.” But that was in my heart, and I think they got it.
People are grateful.
It’s the proudest work that I’ve done. And believe me, I’ve been blessed with a lot of stories. I’ve been to the Oval Office and on Presidential planes, but nothing tops [my AIDS reporting] because it was so personal for me, and because I think I made a difference. I honest to God believe we saved lives. Reagan was silent for six years. He didn’t say the word (AIDS) for six years.
And I was in the room when he said it for the first time in 1987, I made a note in my reporter’s book that 21,000 people had already died. Contrast that with what was going on in San Francisco for those six years, going on TV every night and saying “Don’t share needles. Don’t have sex without a condom. It’s spread by blood, not by mosquitos. Not by kissing.” Just telling people how to not get it—and by “we” I mean all of us—we saved lives.
This film is about the nurses. They’re the heroes. I hope people remember, they were doing this when people didn’t know how the disease was spread. They didn’t know if they were passing it to their kids, to their lovers. They just knew intuitively how to respond with skill, love, and compassion.
How many of us would have the guts to do that?
5B opens in theatres in June.
