Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1996. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
San Francisco Chronicle - The Voice of the West, 901 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94119 - Saturday, August 3, 1996 - Page A3
Carl T. Hall, Chronicle Staff Writer
The dispute highlights growing tension between profit-making businesses that focus on the AIDS community and long-standing privacy concerns among those who are HIV positive.
Although it is common practice for magazines to rent subscriber lists, some AIDS groups and gay- oriented publications say they either refuse to give out anyone's name or give names only to nonprofit organizations.
POZ, a glossy for-profit publication founded in New York 2 1/2 years ago, claims about 30,000 paid subscribers out of a total circulation of about 80,000. Its pages are filled with ads from drug makers, life insurance concerns and AIDS- related service providers.
The POZ controversy flared up this week when a Minneapolis subscriber posted a blistering complaint on a popular AIDS-oriented computer bulletin board on the Internet.
The subscriber, Matt Butts, 35, said he became upset when he received an unsolicited brochure in the mail from a company touting life-support systems for people unable to eat normally.
He called the advertiser, SIMS Deltec of St. Paul, Minn., and was told that POZ had given out his name and address.
Butts, who canceled his subscription, used a pseudonym on the Internet posting but gave his real name yesterday during a telephone interview.
"I felt betrayed," said Butts, who is HIV-positive. "These people are putting out this magazine under the guise of community service, but they're really just another huckster trying to make a buck out of the fact that I have an incurable disease."
He said his Internet posting generated about a dozen e-mail responses from around the country, "all but two from people just as irate" as he was.
Butts, medical-records transcriber, likened the POZ subscription list to "implied medical information" concerning people's HIV status.
But POZ founder Sean O'Brien Strub said POZ subscribers are not necessarily infected with the virus and that the magazine never discloses anyone's HIV status. It uses revenues generated by the mailing-list rentals to help subsidize a free-subscription offer to low-income HIV-positive individuals.
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