The New York Times - December 27, 1983
David Shribman

In the past several months, as increasing numbers of victims have been diagnosed, the battle has increasingly been fought in the offices, committee rooms and legislative chambers of the United States Capitol. The goal there: research money.

The causes of and a cure for the disease, which has taken 1,225 lives since it appeared in 1979, have proved elusive, and representatives of homosexuals, who account for three-quarters of the victims, have hired a professional lobbyist to push for increased Federal research money. They say the $48 million in Federal financing currently devoted to the epidemic is far too little and that what financing there is has been spread among so many programs that its impact is minimal.

Because of the special social circumstances surrounding the epidemic, the lobbying effort has required a special approach.

Confrontation Avoided

"When you lobby for civil rights, the tactic often is confrontational and you put someone on the defensive," said Gerald R. Connor, the lobbyist who was hired to guide the push for funds. "That tactic doesn't work in this case. Here you want to develop as many friends as you can. You want people to help you or, at least, to apologize quietly on the phone when they can't help you."

Mr. Connor, a health official in the Carter Administration who has also lobbied for such organizations as the American Public Health Association, has developed a strategy for the AIDS fight that emphasizes the public health aspect of the disease rather than the fact that the rate of AIDS among homosexuals is higher than among other segments of the population.

"We cast it as a public health issue to give it the broadest appeal," he said. "I'm not running away from the fact that this is a gay issue. It would be silly to suggest otherwise. But I have to make the connections to the rest of the health lobby in town."

Other population groups with high rates of incidence of AIDS are abusers of intravenous drugs, Haitians who have entered the United States and hemophiliacs, according to the Centers for Disease Control. But the main effort for Federal funds to fight AIDS is being pushed by homosexual groups.

'Didn't Want To Be Political'

"We felt that we couldn't leave any stone unturned," Larry Kramer, a co-founder of Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York, said in explaining why a lobbyist was hired. "We had little or no experience in anything political. We didn't want to be political."

The Health Crisis organization, which is assisting some of the 2,952 people across the country who have been diagnosed as having AIDS, pooled its resources along with four dozen other groups to hire Mr. Connor. He, in turn, has searched the small print of committee reports and spent hours visiting the cubicles where little-known Congressional staff aides help make appropriations decisions involving millions of dollars.

A main problem, he says, is that so relatively little Federal money has been devoted to AIDS thus far that hardly anyone notices. "It is not something that staff people are accustomed to paying attention to," he added. "Typically in Washington you wonder about billions. We're talking about millions. The appropriations process ordinarily doesn't have room or time to focus on things that small. They don't get into that level of detail."

With the AIDS epidemic now going into its sixth year, homosexual groups are also considering broadening their efforts to provide not only more medical research but also small Federal grants to community groups that are assisting victims of the disease. "We're talking about large numbers of people dying, and research isn't going to save them," Mr. Connor said. "There has to be help for people now."

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