Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1986. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
The New York Times - November 1, 1986
Jane Perlez
The 20-minute tape, "Sex, Drugs and AIDS," largely financed by the board, had been sitting on a shelf, Mr. Wagner said, pending changes requested by senior board officials.
The tape mixes candid talk from the actress Rae Dawn Chong with scenes of addicts using drugs and short explanations from AIDS victims about how they got the disease.
Mr. Wagner said officials at the board, including Chancellor Nathan Quinones and a deputy chancellor, Charles I. Schonhaut, were concerned that the tape insufficiently emphasized "saying no" to sex as the best way to prevent AIDS.
Mr. Wagner, who had been unaware of the tape until yesterday, said after viewing it that he agreed with the administrators. But, he said, he urged that the changes be made immediately, so the tape could be distributed.
The producer of the tape, O.D.N. Productions Inc., a nonprofit group in Manhattan specializing in educational films, said it had not heard of any request from the board to revise the tape on decisions about sex.
Early in the tape, Miss Chong says: "You don't have to worry about all the things you share with people, like food, makeup, toilet seats, telephones. AIDS is hard to get.
"For you to get AIDS, the virus has to get into your blood."
There are, she says, two main ways for the virus to get into the bloodstream: drugs and sex.
The presentation, hailed by the Health Commissioner, Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, as a "four-star film," has been purchased from the producer by youth agencies and school districts in 26 states. An education specialist at the Federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Robert Kohmescher, described the tape yesterday as "one of the best educational films on AIDS I have seen." Last week the Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. C. Everett Koop, called for education about AIDS to schoolchildren older than 6. The New York City tape, which was originally intended to be shown last May, is for 11th graders, according to O.D.N. Productions.
A producer of the tape, Lynne Smilow, said it had been made with a $97,000 grant from the Board of Education and $2,000 from a foundation.
The executive director of curriculum and instruction of the Board of Education, Charlotte Frank, who worked closely with the tape's producers, said after seeing it with an advisory panel last spring that she had recommended distributing the tape.
The symptoms and transmission of AIDS is already being taught in junior high and high schools as part of sex education.
Two Kinds of Sex
In the tape, Ms. Chong asks: "What does sex have to do with getting AIDS? Well, I'll tell you. There are two kinds of sex that we're talking about, intercourse and anal intercourse. During intercourse - that's your standard guy-girl form of sex - sometimes, when you're making love, you can get a small cut inside and you won't feel it. If your partner is infected, the virus can enter the bloodstream through the cut.
"That's why guys got to wear condoms and girls got to make sure guys wear them, to keep infected semen out of the body.
"Now the other kind of sex - anal intercourse. This is the riskiest."
From Miss Chong, the tape moves to a conversation among three ballet students limbering up in a studio. One girl, according to O.D.N. Productions, is a New York high school student.
They discuss the pros and cons of the condom and the pill as contraceptives and discuss several times not having sex at all. "Maybe I just won't have sex at all - I don't want any diseases, and I don't want to get pregnant," is the end of the conversation.
The last segment of the tape, in an effort to teach tolerance, tells the story of a man who discovers his brother is homosexual and has AIDS.
Aids, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome, results from a virus that cripples the body's immune system, opening the way for a variety of infections, cancers and neurological disorders that strike patients in different patterns. For each of the 25,000 patients already diagnosed with AIDS, many more suffer swollen lymph nodes and, in some cases, severe, even fatal illnesses that together are designated AIDS-related complex.
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