San Francisco Chronicle - The Voice of the West, 901 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94119 - Sunday, September 29, 1996 - Page 1/Z1
Teresa Moore, Chronicle Staff Writer

For six years, from the time she revealed her HIV-positive status in the documentary "Absolutely Positive" until a few weeks before her death last month, she reached hundreds of thousands of people as an AIDS educator and policy advocate.

"There are people who go their whole lives and never find something that inspires them to the core," said Rosetta Mullens, Doris's best friend. "She was blessed. She could go into the schools and talk to those children and they were speechless. They couldn't believe this funny, healthy-looking, attractive woman could have AIDS. She chose to be out there and she found something she loved very much. She told me she wished she'd found this work years ago."

Doris, an expert in the art of laughing to keep from crying, would have appreciated her friend's ironic observation: through a killer disease, she found her life's work.

She was terrified she would lose her "church home" when the conservative congregation of Neighborhood Baptist in San Francisco, discovered she and her baby son were infected with a virus their pastor associated with sin.

But after a year of secrecy, she decided to speak out, to share her family's story in the hope of helping others who were suffering in shamed silence. She was like a composer creating not just a new song but an entirely new way of singing.

Despite her fears, Doris realized her spiritual life wasn't confined by the walls of a church or the covers of a Bible. She fused her deep faith and her prodigious understanding of AIDS to challenge assumptions about who has AIDS and what it means to be a Christian.

"You couldn't avoid the fact that Jesus was as important to her immune system as any of her medications," said Marian Conning, who worked with Doris at the World Institute on Disabilities in Oakland. "We don't talk about AIDS in the church and we don't talk about Jesus in the office. One side or the other gets nervous talking about this things. Those are our hangups. They weren't Doris's." Like Doris, Yvonne "Bunny" Knuckles belongs to the fastest growing group of new AIDS patients -- women of color. "I heard her story about how she lost her baby," Knuckles said. "She inspired me. `I saw her sick so many times, and she would come back even stronger. She motivated me to keep going in my life, to stay out there and fight. She was a God-loving woman and she had that love to give."

If crisis is the truest test of character, then Doris' darkest hour was also her finest. And perhaps no one knew that better than her husband, Roderick "Boo" Butler.

"Doris became a different person after she started doing her AIDS work," Boo Butler said. "She could relate to any kind of person. She would light the place up. She could walk into a room full of professionals and just rock that room."

AIDS entered the Butlers' lives in 1988, when Jared, only three months old, was diagnosed HIV-positive. Several months later, Doris, who had tested negative more than once, found out that she was infected too.

In an outtake from "Absolutely Positive," Doris describes riding home on BART and opening a diagnosis letter she'd gotten from Jared's doctor so that she could get AIDS services for her baby.

" `This letter is to confirm HIV diagnosis for Jared Butler' and on the next line, `and for Doris Butler,' " she says. For a long moment, Doris pauses and stares at the camera. Her almond eyes are large with pain and it takes her a while to gather her voice. "The whole world fell apart for a few minutes on that train. But as usual, I had to regroup. I had to go home to my husband and my daughter."

In 1989, when Doris decided to talk to the documentary crew headed by acclaimed director Peter Adair, Jared was one of the first infants to be diagnosed HIV-positive in the Bay Area. The public face of AIDS was still white and male and gay. Magic Johnson and Arthur Ashe were merely superstars, not superstars with AIDS.

"I was mad that I had so many friends," Doris says in the documentary. "I was close to so many people and I was afraid of losing those people."

She had learned the fear and pain of loss young. When Doris was just a girl, her mother died trying to deliver her seventh child. Their father lost custody and the children were sent to three different foster homes. Doris was placed with an older couple. She loved living in a house where she had her own room, dessert every night and pocket money. But when her foster father died 18 months later, she lost her placement. Not long after that, when she was 14, her own father died of cancer.

When she joined Neighborhood Baptist Church in 1983, Doris felt she had found the security she'd always longed for.

"My church had become sort of a savior to me and and my husband and my family after such a life of turmoil," she told the filmmakers. "Church has been there for us and been a backbone for us more than our families have ever been."

Neighborhood Baptist Church is a small, simple building in Hayes Valleey. In the upstairs room where the congregation meets, there are no windows onto the street, only skylights opening heavenward.

It is the kind of church where members kiss and hug when they meet in the aisles on Sundays. When all five of Doris's insurance policies were contested and it looked like Boo wouldn't have the money to bury her, the church paid for half of the $4,000 funeral.

Neighborhood Baptist is also a place where for many, the word "AIDS" is still shrouded in shame.

"My pastor is a very strict, old-fashioned Baptist minister," Boo said. "He doesn't even allow women in the pulpit. There were people in our church who had family members dying of AIDS and they came to Doris. They were afraid to tell the church."

It was one thing for church members to embrace Doris as a Christian -- but they had to travel a long way to accept the fact that she was afflicted with something they'd dismissed as a "gay white man's disease."

When Doris decided to tell her pastor that she and Jared were ill, she sought the advice of Etta Mae Jones, a member who is an HIV-prevention educator in the San Francisco public schools.

"I avoided Doris for two weeks after she approached me," Jones said. "I didn't come to church for two weeks because here I was -- a trained HIV educator -- and I didn't know how I was going to deal with it. I didn't know how we were going to tell this congregation that someone in their midst was HIV positive."

When word did get out, most people were accepting and supportive.

But friends and family say that some of the congregants were ill-prepared to face the realities of AIDS -- especially after Jared died and Doris began to lose weight and look sick.

"We didn't get invited as much as before to dinner at other people's homes," Boo said. "People didn't know how to treat us."

Nevertheless, as long as she had strength, Doris continued to sing in the church choir, go to Sunday school and attend services.

"One time I came to pick Doris up from choir practice and she was sitting up in the choir stand crying," Boo said, wiping away his own tears. "She had overheard the choir discussing invitations. Out of about 30 women, Doris was one of only three who wasn't invited to this party. And there'd been a time that Doris was the last word in that church -- a party wasn't a party without her. That thing really hurt her. She cried. Oh, man, she cried."

When 4-year-old Jared died in 1992, a guest minister at his funeral advised the Butlers to try to conceive again and to consider the Biblical example of Elizabeth, who "was of an age" and was blessed with a child.

Boo believes that those who hurt his family were acting out of ignorance, not cruelty. "I don't think they realized our position," he said. "Just a few months ago, a new minister said the reason people get AIDS is because they are being disobedient to the Lord."

The congregation looks to Reverend Peter Williams for guidance. He spoke with great warmth of his love for Doris and her family.

"I didn't kiss her on the cheek, I kissed her right on the mouth, every time I saw her," he exclaims. "I wasn't afraid."

He said the minister Boo heard got it wrong, AIDS is not a punishment from God. "I've heard some ministers say that AIDS is a punishment for sin," he said. "Christ died to save us. If I've got AIDS, Jesus didn't give it to me, the Devil did. I really do believe AIDS comes from the Devil."

Friends say that even though this kind of talk hurt Doris, she loved Neighborhood Baptist.

Reverend Williams has been pastor of Neighborhood Baptist for 46 of his 73 years. Doris Butler may not have changed his core beliefs about AIDS and sin, but it is clear she changed his sense of what it means to be a Christian.

"I looked up to her," Williams said. "She ministered to me."

Boo Butler, 43, is a big, bearded man with large, sad eyes. He shares his Emeryville home with what is left of his family, his step-daughter Kelli and grandson Myles. He sits by the living room window in the brown recliner that Doris practically lived in the last months of her life, when she was so afraid of dying that she wouldn't lie down to sleep.

"She would sit up all night in this chair. She was afraid if she got in the bed, she'd never get out again. She was right," he said.

Doris was close to death many times before she finally died on August 16. Friends say she was afraid to die before she felt sure that Boo and Kelli would be all right.

Family and faith were the most important things to Doris and over time, her conception of these two powerful forces in her life grew deeper and more complex.

Doris had had two miscarriages before Jared was born on January 2, 1988. Although he was several weeks premature and terribly underweight, he grew into a beautiful child with glossy black curls and glowing eyes. But the child the Butlers had longed for was chronically ill his entire short life. He never even had the strength to walk.

Soon after Doris and Jared were diagnosed with HIV, her nuclear family nearly imploded. Kelli, then a teenager, was acting out; Jared was in and out of the hospital; Doris lost her job at Kaiser, and Boo, miserable over their son's condition, turned to crack.

"When we found out he was HIV-positive, I went zonkers," said Boo, who is HIV-negative.

Boo went on a four-month crack binge before he checked into a rehab program. He has been clean now since June 10, 1992, ten days after Jared's funeral.

"While I was in rehab, my wife was out here dealing with the fact that she and Jared had AIDS and nobody knew," Butler said. "Before all this happened, our life was real good. I had a good job working for a realtor. The guy I worked for treated me like a son. I had a credit line in my name for $25,000. I was a teacher in our church's brotherhood class. Our life consisted of church and home. Life was at its best then. That's why this hit us so hard."

During his eulogy for Doris, Boo spoke in awe-filled tones of what his wife meant to him.

"I had a powerful wife," he said. "I sometimes think that her mission was to make a man out of me. . . . The way I was raised, a man didn't say, `I love you.' I didn't tell my wife of 18 years until 18 months ago, `I love you.' I held her and I said, `I love you.' "

AIDS was never mentioned at Jared's funeral.

But things were different at Doris's memorial service four years later. For Doris, Reverend Williams shared the pulpit with many guest pastors, including Reverend David Martin from the Marin

AIDS Interfaith Network.

Her husband was the only member of Neighborhood Baptist who used what he called "that taboo word AIDS," but church members and Doris's friends from the AIDS community took turns during the ceremony to speak of her strength and faith.

Boo also spoke of the changes he had seen in their church.

"I've seen my pastor grow by leaps and bounds. Doris would have it no other way."

There are plenty of Bay Area churches with more progressive approaches to AIDS, but Doris chose to remain at Neighborhood.

"It was not always a comfortable place for her," Martin said. "She may not have spoken on AIDS in that church but they sang with her in the choir, they sat with her in the pews, they prayed at her bedside. They knew her reality. I see the fact that they could have the funeral service they had as a transforming moment."

Neighborhood Baptist Church embraced Doris and she embraced the AIDS community and for a while, these worlds were joined in her name.

"We can't go back to the way we were," said Rowena Kendall, an old church friend of Doris's. "We watched Jared die. We watched Doris go downhill with that disease. Her presence forced us in the church to deal with it. We tend to hide behind the church.

"You can't let somebody like her come through here and not have it change you."
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