San Francisco Chronicle - Sunday December 17, 1989
John Stanley, Chronicle Staff Writer

In a December 17 article entitled "A Look at Ethical Challenges of Epidemic," the protest that shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in 1988, the disruption of this fall's opening of the opera season at the Opera House, and vandalizing of Catholic churches in Los Angeles and San Francisco, were erroneously attributed to the group ACT UP, and to some of its members. In fact, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Opera House incidents were carried out by a group calling itself SANE, and the vandalizing of churches was committed by unknown individuals. The Chronicle regrets the error.

TEXT:

"WE'RE ENTERING a new phase of the AIDS epidemic. The old way of looking at things through a black-and-white prism, and seeing the good guys separated from the bad guys, just doesn't work anymore."

If anyone is qualified to talk about the shifting issues of AIDS, and the new dilemmas that the 1990s will bring, it is probably Randy Shilts. From the earliest stages of the disease, he has been involved professionally and personally. While he became one of the first reporters in America to cover the disease on an ongoing basis for a major newspaper, The San Francisco Chronicle, he also watched as at least a hundred of his friends slowly die. His contribution has included the 1987 award-winning book "And the Band Plays On."

Now, Shilts is hosting and narrating a major documentary from KQED, "Wrestling With AIDS" (9 p.m. on Tuesday), which deals with six "complicated social issues" for the '90s, a time when "we will count cases in the hundreds of thousands . . . not in thousands": the controversy surrounding new militant moralist groups, fear, rising costs, drug trials, children's rights/abortion, and euthanasia/suicide.

"A year ago," he explains, "I would have said that not enough was being done about AIDS, there wasn't enough urgency. The good guys wanted to do something about it, the bad guys didn't. But now the issues are getting more complex. It's harder to categorize the players.

"The issues we now associate with AIDS," continues Shilts, "are melding into broader social issues. None of them is unique to AIDS. AIDS has just given them new immediacy. Who's going to pay rising costs? That question is hitting everybody, but AIDS has thrust the issue to the front burners for some businesses. In this sense, AIDS is illuminating the larger issues that society will need to grapple with in the '90s."

What TV usually offers "is a diary of the obvious," says Shilts. But, he adds, "what I like about this show is that it's ahead of the story; it's dealing with issues just now emerging and accelerating."

It used to be, he points out, "that we'd chat about some of these issues, such as euthanasia, at cocktail parties, but rarely would it affect anyone's life. But more and more, people must decide where they stand, and they have to decide by tomorrow."

"Wrestling With AIDS" is a documentary that packs a wallop. KQED executive producer Michael Schwarz and supervising producer Georgia Smith have done an admirable job of amassing news footage, interviews and background material and condensing it down into an informative, fast-moving one hour.

A large staff of producers contributed to the individual segments: Spencer Michels, Michelle Riddle, Jim Greenberg, John Roszak, Scott Pearson, Donald Bull, Steve Zansberg and Keris Salmon.

Some portions of the program had been begun for KQED's "Express" series, but then left incomplete with that show's cancellation recently. When Shilts joined the project this past fall, he wrote his own on-camera segments to give focus to, and to bridge, the various topics.

Shilts was especially moved by interviews that already had been done on the subject of suicide, for Shilts himself had been touched by the suicides of about 25 AIDS-stricken friends and acquaintances.

Most of those friends, he says in the show, "didn't commit suicide out of despair. The experts call it 'rational suicide,' because the decision to die is fairly well-thought-out weighing the risks of life against the benefits of death."

In a recent survey taken of 500 doctors, according to the program, "79 admitted they had taken the lives of terminal patients who asked to die." Shilts points out that "while suicide is legal, helping someone commit suicide is not."

The interview footage that so moved Shilts is with AIDS patients Keith Sparks and Gery Anderson, who have been lovers for 10 years. Shilts reveals "they have no intention of dying from AIDS. They have made a pack to commit suicide together when one of them is close to dying."

The footage of Sparks and Anderson is certainly the dramatic high point of the special, putting the tragedy of AIDS on a very personal level. "I've caught myself fantasizing about our death," writes Sparks in his diary. "You know, how we're gonna do it, when we're gonna do it, what a relief it will be." Anderson: "The psychiatrist tried to talk me out of it. The people in my group tried to talk me out of it. Everybody was going, 'This is an emotion; you're in grief right now; it's all part of the process.' "

But Anderson refused to change his mind, and neither would Sparks. "That's still my decision," says Anderson. "And now even more so since I'm sick. There's no way I would wanta get up every day and go through this alone."

"Wrestling With AIDS" extends its scrutiny to the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), a militant group that believes drastic tactics are called for in response to the government's bureaucratic slowness and indifference. Members of the group have been responsible for closing down the Food and Drug Administration in Washington, D.C., during a 1988 protest; shutting down the Golden Gate Bridge for a morning; and disrupting this fall's opening of the opera season at the Opera House.

Some members of the gay community don't support ACT UP. As Shilts points out, shortly after ACT UP had vandalized Catholic churches in Los Angeles and San Francisco, "What if Catholic militants vandalized the headquarters of the San Francisco Aids Foundation? Wouldn't ACT UP be screaming, 'Nazis!' ACT UP says every act of science should be based on the standard of saving lives. But does the blocking of the Golden Gate Bridge do anything to save lives?"

Another question posed: How do you do what is ethically correct if society subverts your aim? "I had a friend, HIV positive, who simply wanted his teeth cleaned. Every dentist he called turned him down, even though the dentist knew the situation and could take protective measures. Finally my friend called a dentist and outright lied -- and got his appointment. Who's right and who's wrong?

"Or what about the HIV-positive children who're kicked out of school or harassed at school. Is it ethical not to tell those schools of the child's condition? Or is it better not to tell and avoid the abuse? Given this lack of ethics on the part of schools, it's harder to find the guys in the white hats, isn't it?"

THE COST of AIDS health care, as Shilts points out, is climbing out of sight. And nobody wants to pick up the check. "Next year it will take more than $100,000 to keep just one AIDS patient alive, and in two years, the total cast of care nationally will approach $10 billion."

Other issues include the controversy over the accessibility of new drugs not yet sanctioned by the Federal Drug Administration, drug testers who don't stick to their program, children with AIDS (more than 2,000 youngsters have been diagnosed with the disease), and whether pregnant women in high-risk groups should be tested.

Shilts says all these "painfully complicated" ethical issues "will be played out in headlines against the backdrop of the more orthodox debates that will also decide whether thousands live or die . . . What makes these debates striking is that they will be played out at a time when it's clear that the most affected will be among the most disenfranchised in our society. AIDS is moving with harrowing speed into America's underclass, the poor, the black, the Hispanic, the people with whom our society does not have a great track record when it comes to ethical behavior."

THE COMPLETION of "Wrestling With AIDS" comes on the eve of Shilts taking a year's sabbatical from his coverage of the AIDS story. In January, he will begin writing screenplays about the genocide of California Indians, and an alcoholic rehabilitation center. "I'm totally burned out," he admits, "I'm feeling completely depleted. Until this year, I hadn't felt burned out, and I didn't have a lot of sympathy for those who said they were burned out. I thought they were weak. Then I started having nightmares. In my dreams I was wandering around funerals, screaming, 'I can't take it anymore.' I've spent eight years recording the decimation of my generation. I need a break."

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