Bay Windows - February 17, 2005
Susan Ryan-Vollmar, srvollmar@baywindows.com.

Twenty-one years ago, this newspaper ran an interview with Larry Kessler, who was then the director of the AIDS Action Committee, which had been around for all of two years. Knowing what we know now about how AIDS was to decimate a generation of gay men, ravage the African-American community and leave untold numbers of children orphaned in Africa, the article, titled "Helping People To Live," is almost painful to read. It says, in part, "While only five persons in the Boston area had AIDS in November of 1982 (when the groundwork for the committee was laid) the number of diagnosed AIDS cases in Massachusetts has risen to 108 - 59 in Boston alone."

One hundred-eight. Do you think Kessler and the others who gave so much to the fight against AIDS throughout the 1980s and 1990s would have had the strength to continue if they knew that number would grow by 25,334 to 25,442? Or do you think the shock would have paralyzed them?

"If we knew then what we know now, I think I pretty much would have done the same but would have been more direct," says Kessler, who stepped down as director of AAC in 2002 but still works with the organization as its founding director. He adds that much of the resistance about early AIDS education efforts came from the gay community. "I remember early on collecting money from Metro, which is now Avalon, and people at the door were hostile saying, 'Oh, get out of here, that's a New York thing.'"

Sound familiar?

This week has seen a rash of stories on the gay community's continuing struggle with AIDS after the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene issued a news report about a potentially drug-resistant strain of the HIV virus. In his article this week about the "superbug" (see "Crying Wolf," page one), staff writer Ethan Jacobs reports that AIDS experts are both dismissing the story of a "superbug" as old news and calling for additional discussion around HIV transmission, crystal meth abuse and the efficacy of drug regimens.

It's true that additional discussion is needed, but at a certain point - when we know how the virus is transmitted, when we know what it will do to you, when we know that alcohol abuse and the use of crystal meth increases the likelihood of infection - really, what more is there to say except, perhaps, smarten up?

As Christian Grantham, an activist and writer, wrote on his web log (www.christiangrantham.com) this week: "I'm tired of irresponsible gay lifestyles so obsessed with sex that the value of other people's lives come second to personal pleasures. The incessant appeals by a handful of community leaders for liberal sensitivities on crystal meth abuse and the willful spread of HIV is nothing short of complicit neglect and murder."

Kessler, not surpringly, is more conciliatory. "I think, unfortunately, where we are today, we have a whole new generation who didn't live through the 1980s when it was one funeral after another." As for older gay men who did, in fact, live through that dark period when the discovery of AZT - AZT! - was heralded as a breakthrough, who knows what can help?

"I think we need to get a lot of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, behaviorists all involved in the next level of discussion that's about to break out," Kessler says. "I still believe that voluntary efforts can be successful. I still think peer pressure can be important. Peer pressure is currently working against us in terms of safer sex and drug use. But once you turn it around you need to have the resources in place to support those people."

Good points, all. But it is absolutely and utterly deflating to hear Kessler, who is a hero without peer in the fight against AIDS, essentially repeating what he told us 21 years ago, when he lamented the "lack of awareness" of the AIDS crisis.

In 2005 there's simply no excuse for a lack of awareness.

Susan Ryan-Vollmar is the Editor in Chief of Bay Windows.

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