Miami Herald - June 11, 2006
Jacob Goldstein

Q: When did you come to The Miami Herald?

A: I arrived in November of 1981.

When I got to Miami and there started to be rumblings that this disease had arrived in South Florida, I went to the city editor and I asked for time to talk to people and get a fix on what was going on. The Miami Herald, being a hard-driving, aggressive daily newspaper, gave me a week. On Wednesday, The Miami News, which was an active competitor, published a story saying six people in Dade County had this new disease. I was reporting on AIDS from then on.

This was a disease that had a heavy social overlay because it affected [a] disenfranchised population of gay men. You found yourself having to write about a population that hadn't heretofore been a focus of news coverage.

When you're working for any sort of a mass media organization, you're trying to focus on stories that impact the bulk of your readers. A lot of the stories in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times were relegated to inside pages early on because the editors did not feel like they affected a large enough number of people, and they had the added onus of affecting gays -- an even smaller segment of the population.

Q: AIDS was relegated to the inside of The Herald as well.

A: In the early days, it was. The story presented as much of a challenge to The Herald as it did to other news organizations. AIDS presented a special challenge because I had to educate myself as well as my editors. And even the experts were puzzled by this disease.

Q: So if there was an underreporting initially, in part because AIDS was perceived as a gay disease, it seems that by the pendulum swung to a kind of hysteria by 1984, when where Broward County was firing an employee because he had AIDS, and a set of triplets with AIDS were not allowed to go to school in Dade County with other children. How did that shift transpire?

A: I'd like to distinguish between hype in the reporting and hysteria in the community. I think most of the reporters that I knew were very concerned about not hyping this story. I remember staying at the paper late to read the headlines that were finally going to be published at the top of the story because we were so concerned about scaring people.

But once stories break, they take on a life of their own. And there have been a number of eruptions that I really can't explain in which public panic takes over.

Q: Talk about some of the stories you wrote during the first years of the epidemic.

A: One of the stories that sticks out in my mind early on concerns a Haitian woman named Solange Eliodar. Solange was interned at the Krome Avenue detention camp, and while she was interned there, she went crazy. She developed dementia, and no one knew what was wrong with her. She was clearly sick. The Haitian activists in the community -- and they were extremely vocal -- began screaming that this woman had been abused by the guards and [her illness] was a result of her treatment in this camp.

She was eventually whisked off to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where she was diagnosed with a really strange disease -- toxoplasmosis, an infection of the brain. No one knew what to make of this. It was part of the emergence of this new disease among Haitians, which completely baffled everyone, because clearly Haitians are not all homosexuals. No one could figure out the crossover.

Needless to say, Solange Eliodar -- I read her autopsy report years later at the morgue -- had been diagnosed with what was one of the first cases of AIDS in South Florida. And her case was a bellwether in my mind of what we would see with AIDS throughout the world.

While the U.S. was focused on the gay community, and on other, smaller communities that had blood contact with the postulated virus that was causing this disease, we were seeing in South Florida the emergence of a heterosexually transmitted disease that affected people of color, that devastated women, that had incredible political overlay -- exactly what we would see throughout Africa, and in parts of Latin America, and increasingly now in the black community in the United States. And we didn't really know what to make of that case.

Q: Later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention added Haitians to the list of risk groups. Can you talk about how that played out for you as a reporter in South Florida?

A: I was a green reporter. I came to the newspaper just as this story broke. I was learning from every story I wrote. . .

It's interesting, thinking back now. When I think about other sexually transmitted diseases -- gonorrhea, syphilis -- you don't really have risk groups with those diseases. This disease was different because it had the overlay of stigma. The first cases were in gays. Then all of a sudden you had this disenfranchised population of Haitians, which added another layer of stigma. It took a long time before health authorities sorted this out.

In a way, it sort of sorted itself out only because the disease began to spread heterosexually in a much broader way in the '90s. In '91 or '92 you had Magic Johnson, which was a wake-up call for everybody. The broad spread of this virus carried an unmistakable message: These categories we assigned in the beginning . . . were constructs of the epidemiologistsEverybody is potentially at risk.

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