The New York Times - June 18, 1984
Eric Pace

The meeting, the First International Lesbian/Gay Health Conference, brought more than 700 people - physicians, psychologists, social workers, physical therapists, physicians' aides, nurses, students and homosexual activists, from the United States and a dozen foreign countries - to New York University's Loeb Student Center.

"The whole purpose," Fern H. Schwaber, a lawyer and one of the conference's sponsors, said in an interview, "is to sensitize health care providers to the needs of the lesbian and gay communities and also to improve health care delivery services."

Government Intervention Asked

One of the main speakers at the conference, which continues today and tomorrow and is being sponsored by the privately financed National Gay Health Education Foundation, was Arthur Felson, a founder and leader of People with AIDS-New York.

Mr. Felson stressed the gravity of the AIDS problem and contended that the Federal Government should do more about it. But he said homosexuals have "come to a time when we need to broaden our concerns" - to dwell more on alcoholism, drug abuse, hepatitis and other diseases, as well as health-related political issues.

Mr. Felson and other scheduled speakers and participants in the conference's dozens of meetings and workshops called for more effective efforts to control such ills and to provide services for lesbian and male homosexuals afflicted with them.

In addition many speakers advocated a wide variety of health measures ranging from simple matters of hygiene to complex questions of psycotherapeutic technique.

Increase in AIDS Reported

But AIDS, the often-fatal disease whose full name is acquired immune deficiency syndrome, constituted the conference's largest single area of concern. Participants warned packed and silent meeting rooms that the number of cases continues to increase in the country.

Rodger McFarlane, executive director of Gay Men's Health Crisis Inc., an AIDS education and service organization whose activities are largely in New York City, said in an interview that his organization had 650 clients - the great majority of them people with AIDS - up from 200 in the winter of 1982-83. The group is planning to provide services to at least 1,000 clients by September, he said.

Larry Kramer, the writer who was a co-founder of the organization, vehemently told participants that many male homosexuals felt wrongly that "this epidemic has gone away." He suggested that homosexuals strive to get the press and the city to put more emphasis on AIDS' continuing spread - and to get the Koch administration to spend more on AIDS problems.

There were other notes of dissonance, including complaints of racial prejudice among homosexuals and of controversy about ways of reducing the health risks involved in certain sexual activities in bathhouses.

Policing Viewed as Improper

Dr. Roger W. Enlow, director of the City Health Department's Office of Gay and Lesbian Health Concerns, contended at one meeting that government "really has no business trying to regulate individual behavior - these things are totally unpoliceable." But other participants suggested that city health officials should be more assertive.

In a keynote speech Saturday, Pat Norman, coordinator of Lesbian and Gay Health Services for the City and County of San Francisco, said that "self-hatred has supported our continued feelings of worthless and inadequacy," and that it has spurred alcoholism, drug abuse and suicides.

Maury Weil, an expert on alcoholism and director of prevention of the Georgia State Division of Mental Health and Mental Retardation, estimated that about 25 percent of lesbians and male homosexuals in the nation were either active or recovering alcoholics - more than double the percentage of the rest of the population.

John E. Ryan, a New York psychotherapist who spoke at a workshop on male homosexuals' shame, self-contempt and rage, said "the most important and necesary change" that psychotherapists can achieve in working with homosexual men is to alter "the negative self-beliefs, self-feelings and self-attitudes that are internalized" - that is, taken in as part of the self - "through imitation and identification." Problems as Mothers

Discussing lesbians' specific problems, Audrey I. Steinhorn, another New York psychotherapist, said young lesbian mothers, living as part of lesbian couples, have in some ways a particularly difficult task in defining their individual roles as parents because "they're starting from scratch" without role models.

As for the problem of aging, Philip M. Kayal, associate professor of sociology at Seton Hall University, said that at some nursing homes, where sexual activity was not approved of, "gay men or women who may be sexually active are stigmatized twice" - for being homosexual and for their sexual activity.

Other speakers at a workshop on problems of the aging said that numerous male homosexuals were aging as happily as others, however, and that lesbians who "develop a strong sense of self-esteem" through contact with other women in feminism or lesbian activism are likely to age successfully.

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