San Francisco Chronicle - Sunday, June 3, 2001

BRUCE MIRKEN: "Well, Mrs. Kennedy, do you think the trip to Dallas helped or hurt your husband's popularity?"

No one would have dreamed of asking that of Jacqueline Kennedy as she stepped off Air Force One, still wearing a dress stained with her husband's blood. Yet The Chronicle asks us essentially the same question. My instinct is to grab the questioner by the throat and scream, "IT DOESN'T MATTER!"

Like many gay men of my generation, I've experienced more grief, buried more friends and cried more tears than most people can begin to imagine.

The question is, ultimately, unanswerable. We can't know what the world would be like had AIDS never happened. Would gay and lesbian civil rights have advanced further if Michael Callen, Randy Shilts, Vito Russo, Keith Haring, Tom Waddell and the thousands of other creative, courageous people killed by HIV were still among us? I can't prove it, but I think so.

MICHELANGELO SIGNORILE: Of course it's unanswerable, and the idea of a "debate" about it seems creepy. Should we debate whether slavery was good for blacks because, hey, it gave them something to fight against? How about the Holocaust? Bubonic plague? Hiroshima?

Those names you mentioned made me think of so much. Now, 20 years into this, with so many people dead and so many others believing AIDS is over -- while new generations of gay men become infected with HIV -- I always wonder what Vito Russo or Michael Callen would be saying. And what would they have to say about George W. Bush and his faith-based initiatives, funding fundamentalist church groups to do HIV prevention work? What would they say about our anti- gay attorney general having Bible readings at the Justice Department every morning? And what would they say about that fact that senatorial hatemongers like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond are still kicking around, still wreaking havoc?

MIRKEN: I suspect they would be uneasy at a movement that increasingly eschews grassroots activism for events like last year's "Millennium March," awash in corporate sponsorship. I can't help but think they'd be bothered by gay pride events touting Coors beer as a "presenting sponsor," even as the Coors family continues to fund some of our most dedicated enemies. They understood, I think, that there's such a thing as being too mainstream.

Some of this is, no doubt, a reflection of the hyper-capitalist era in which we live, but didn't AIDS play a role? It broke down some barriers, making it easier for corporations to fund gay-run groups -- after all, who can object to caring for the sick? -- while giving gays and lesbians their first substantial taste of corporate underwriting.

Of course, AIDS also gave birth to some kick-ass street activism, but that certainly seems to have gone out of fashion lately, and I'm not convinced that's a good thing.

SIGNORILE: You make a good point on corporate involvement. AIDS was a kind of back door into the corporate coffers. Same with Hollywood and the celebrity crowd. Took them all of the '80s to finally put their names on AIDS fundraisers. Then, once they did, they began supporting gay groups as well. Of course that's good -- support is always good, particularly from prominent people and institutions. But I hear you regarding the corporatization of the gay movement.

One thing that happened, particularly around AIDS and then on to gay rights, was that many of the gay groups brought in people from corporate America itself, put these people on their boards and on their staffs, so that they could do the kind of fund-raising they felt was necessary. After awhile, you didn't have a lot of people at the top or on some of the boards who came up through queer activism -- just through corporate America.

Yeah, they could speak the language of corporate America and bring in money, but could they speak the language of the gay rights movement? And with what kind of voice? They only know the corporate voice -- diplomacy, tread lightly, compromise. And that's not an activist voice.

MIRKEN: One of the clearest examples of this is the way "our" political leaders have dealt with the major parties. They -- primarily the Human Rights Campaign, which is the largest gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender voice in Washington -- seems to have just one strategy: Suck up to whomever is in power.

The Human Rights Campaign funded an anti-choice creep like former New York Sen. Al D'Amato to maintain its facade of partisanship, while essentially giving the Democrats a pass on the most outrageous actions. It endorsed Clinton's 1996 reelection months before the Republicans even had a nominee, giving him carte blanche to sign the odious Defense of Marriage Act. Last year,

Ralph Nader came out with a much stronger platform on gay and lesbian rights and AIDS than corporate Democrat Al Gore. But instead of congratulating him and using the emerging strength of the Greens to push the major party candidates, the most visible gay political leaders covered Gore's backside and even did his dirty work for him, launching scurrilous (and often inaccurate) attacks on Nader. That's not leadership, it's groveling.

SIGNORILE: Well, we will have to part company on Nader. I was pretty hard on him, though I was much more brutal toward Gore and Bush; I see it as my job as a columnist to be hard on all of them. In the end, I saw Gore as the wisest choice, but I completely agree that gay groups needed to be hard on him, publicly, throughout the campaign.

That, to me was the worst aspect of the Human Rights Campaign's early endorsement: It pandered, rather than making him work for the gay vote. Then he dropped gay issues entirely after the primaries. But agreed: In the end, the group wasted time attacking Nader. Meanwhile, Gore lost gay people to Bush -- 25 percent of the gay vote went to him -- because Gore, like Bush, didn't speak to gay issues in the campaign and didn't emphasize the difference between him and Bush. And gay activists didn'tpublicly push him to do so.

That is the corporate strategy, and that is also what the Human Rights Campaign's backing of D'Amato was about, literally. I wrote a piece for the New York Observer at the time, looking at how a lot of that was payback.

D'Amato had helped to get the Human Rights Campaign's former board chair through Senate confirmation hearings for the No. 2 slot at the Small Business Administration. Many of the Campaign's board members and others close to the group are lobbyists for companies such as AOL Time Warner. That can present a lot of conflicts of interest.

MIRKEN: I want to come back to something you mentioned earlier: The people who believe that AIDS is over. San Francisco, of course, has been subjected to a particularly psychotic variant of that theme, espoused by people who claim -- despite mountains of data to the contrary -- that HIV is harmless and the whole epidemic is a fraud.

But some of the stuff coming from more rational-sounding writers like Andrew Sullivan strikes me as almost as dangerous. They keep telling us that AIDS is no longer a crisis and dismiss reports of increasing high-risk behavior and rising rates of new HIV infections. That's just insane. There is enough similar data coming from enough different places that it's highly unlikely it's just a statistical fluke.

And what no one likes to mention is that in 1999 -- the last year for which reasonably complete stats are available -- the number of new AIDS cases actually rose in the Northeast and Midwest. And even in places where AIDS rates were still declining, the rate of drop slowed markedly.

With higher rates of infection and more people burning through all the available anti-HIV drugs, there is every indication that the numbers for 2000 and 2001 will be worse. I hate to interrupt anyone's party, but the second wave of AIDS isn't coming. It's here.

SIGNORILE: That is absolutely on target, sadly. The same exact thing is playing out all over again. There were rational-sounding gay men during the first wave back in the '80s, too, who didn't want to face that it was happening while the epidemic was exploding.

Facing reality has never been Andrew Sullivan's strong suit. He's an eloquent writer who spins out meticulously crafted rationalizations -- the kinds of things people want to hear rather than the truth. He wants so much for AIDS to be over, and that's understandable. But I believe the weight of the studies of the international science community is now too much even for him to deny.

MIRKEN: I wish you were right, but I'm not so sure. Sometimes it seems like denial is the most powerful force in the universe. Case in point: Reactions to the successful effort by a coalition of San Francisco AIDS activists, epidemiologists and public officials to get the drug companies to stop selling AIDS drugs with glamorous, sexy images that suggest living with HIV is a breeze. Sullivan promptly called the San Franciscans "Stalinists."

And the letters pages of the gay press have been peppered with letters from gay men saying, "How dare they take away our positive images?" Anything that challenges the prevailing fantasy that AIDS is now a chronic, manageable illness is deeply frightening.

This could have political consequences. When the second wave of AIDS becomes obvious, some on the right will rush to blame "those promiscuous, irresponsible homosexuals," even though they wouldn't dream of blaming fast- food consumers for the rise in heart disease.

SIGNORILE: So if people want to deny it's happening, if some people are trying to point to the reality but to no avail, what do we do? I hate to shrug my shoulders; I'm just not the type to do that. But what do we do?

MIRKEN: I was actually hoping you would have the answer to that. It seems to me that two levels of response are needed. Within the queer community, all of us -- especially "opinion leaders" such as writers and activists -- need to speak honestly about everything that is happening, good or bad, and combat misinformation.

On the wider societal level, it gets much more complicated. When the media sensationalize this stuff -- as a few outlets (including The Chronicle, sadly) have already done on occasion -- they need to be held accountable.

And our political leadership needs to start thinking about long-term strategy. Bush's budget already effectively cuts services funded by the Ryan White CARE Act by not keeping up with inflation. A growing call by conservatives to actually reduce funding is not only conceivable but likely in coming years.

You're closer to the Washington scene than I am. Is there any indication that someone is developing a strategy to deal with this?

SIGNORILE: Not that I'm aware of; all I see is a strategy to run from it. The numbers in the African American gay community and Latino gay community are staggering.

I feel that many gay white men got their insurance, got their drugs and are back to their parties and sex joints. That's harsh and is too much of a generalization, but it's true that the AIDS epidemic in the black gay community is raging even more, and no one's doing anything.

What have gay men done for lesbian health issues, after all the years that lesbians have focused on AIDS? Do we just pack up and leave now that some people are doing better on their drugs? These are the issues that I think are confronting us in this 20th year of the epidemic, back under a Republican regime. We won't have a strategy until we wake up.

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