The Examiner (San Francisco) - April 3, 2001
Dan Evans, The Examiner Staff

Michael Bellefountaine and David Pasquarelli, convicted last month of starting a riot at a Project Inform meeting, were previously interviewed in this space. Delaney says the disturbance pushed many of the city's AIDS organizations to start AIDS Activists Against Violence and Lies. AAAVL, comprised of 1,500 members, was founded in May 2000, and created specifically to debunk ACT UP San Francisco's methods and tactics.

Dan Evans: What is Project Inform?

Martin Delaney: There are two aspects of our mission. One is providing information on the treatment of the disease to patients, doctors, anyone involved. The other side of it is what we call research advocacy, trying to represent the patient's point of view in AIDS research.

Q: How does Project Inform fit into the greater pantheon of AIDS advocacy groups in San Francisco and the Bay Area?

A: The key word is treatment. That's what unites all of what we do, and there is a real history as to why that is. If you go back to the early 1980s, the earliest AIDS organizations were primarily involved in either directly dealing with the sick or helping people prepare to die. Nobody was really working on the issue of keeping people alive. We were really the first.

Q: Because of your involvement in treatment, you have been criticized, specifically by ACT UP San Francisco, as being beholden to drug companies. How is Project Inform funded, and how do you ensure this doesn't happen?

A: We're primarily funded by private donors, our constituents, and to a lesser degree from corporate donations. Within that is where the pharmaceutical-funding stuff comes up.

The limit we set is that no more than 25 percent of our funding can ever come from drug companies. And remember, these companies are all in competition with each other. It would be one thing if we got all of our 25 percent from one company. That would be a fairly significant chokehold. But in fact it comes from companies that hate each other as much as ACT UP San Francisco hates us.

Q: About ACT UP San Francisco -- Where did the feud start, and why are they targeting you and Project Inform in particular?

A: They target me because I'm sort of a figurehead. I'm a very viable person in the epidemic here, and so that makes me somewhat of an easy target. Also, we work in the field of treatment, something which runs deeply counter to their beliefs.

Q: Where does it go back to?

A: In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there started to be different factions within ACT UP San Francisco. One wanted to focus on treatment, while others wanted to focus on broader social issues like prevention and poverty. Neither of those sides is wrong -- they are both important sides of the issue. The groups split up, one calling themselves ACT UP Golden Gate, while the other kept the ACT UP San Francisco name.

So around that time is when people like Michael Bellefountaine and David Pasquarelli showed up. These guys came to town in about 1992 and I don't know what started them doing what they did, but when they started showing up at ACT UP San Francisco meetings, they basically drove everybody else out. These guys came in and shouted everyone else down. Within a matter of six months, the organization as it had existed was completely dissolved.

Q: How did that connect to Project Inform?

A: My first exposure to them was at Project Inform town meetings. From the first day, they were a disruptive element. They started becoming a fairly regular nuisance at meetings, turning informational meetings into debating contests.

But they blew it over the top at a fund-raising dinner we had in 1995. We brought in Dr. Anthony Fauci from the National Institutes of Health, and Larry Kramer, the founder of ACT UP, to speak. We did that very deliberately, to have different points of view. Just after dinner and before dessert was served, (ACT UP San Francisco) came bursting through security with about 10 people with banners, cards, signs and things, shouting, yelling. That was OK enough. People weren't happy about it, but it quickly went from that to them overturning tables.

These were tables filled with dinner glasses and plates, and a room full of 600 people. It got ugly real fast. People were shocked to see what was happening.

Q: So there is a history of ongoing antagonism on the part of ACT UP San Francisco. What brought it to the point of creating a group dedicated to combat them?

A: In spring 2000, they burst into a forum we were holding with the remnant of ACT UP Golden Gate. They came to the front, where I and the researchers were, and they started throwing what we thought at first was gravel. It turned out later it was pills.

Q: So that was the last straw?

A: Literally days after that, in May 2000, we invited a number of AIDS organizations to a meeting. In the course of that meeting, many people pored out what had happened to them. Many things we weren't aware of. People had been harassed on the street, attacked in supermarkets. ACT UP San Francisco people chased them to their cars and their homes.

At the conclusion of the meeting, there was a lot of anger. People said, "That's it. We're going to fight this."

Q: What is the organization's purpose?

A: Every time these guys put out what we consider lying statements or bull, we will counter it. They're trying to act like a truth squad. And that covers not only how they act, but also the content of their claims. A lot of the information that they put out is simply, easily, provably, wrong.

Q: What is your hope for ACT UP San Francisco?

A: I hope that they will grow up. We don't challenge their right to have these contrary views. They can believe anything they want. But we don't feel they have a right to disrupt other people's views or other people's forums or to terrorize people on the street. That stuff has got to stop. And for every time they push that an inch, we're going to push back a foot.

Hopefully, they've spent so much time and money in court over the last six months, maybe they've learned their lesson. I don't know.

Q: What is your hope for Project Inform?

A: I hope that we can get back to doing our work. We're struggling to address a number of issues, such as international issues, trying to do a better job in reaching out to minority communities that we haven't reached before. There is a lot of work that has to be done.

We're trying to work with the development of better drugs. The public has this image that today's AIDS drugs have solved the problem. But it's just not true. The drugs are just a short respite, and they're not going to get people through a lifetime by any means.

There is a huge amount of work that has to be done, and dealing with ACT UP San Francisco has been a huge distraction. I hope somewhere in this is we can get past the content of their message, that HIV is harmless. Even though they have a right to it, it's a harmful and stupid message.

We are particularly worried about how their message is affecting young gay men, where we are seeing increased infection rates.

These are people that didn't live through the 1980s, they didn't see the death and destruction that we saw in the city, long before treatment came along. These guys claim that AIDS is caused by the drugs we use to treat it. The only person that could believe that is someone that wasn't here before we had the drugs.

I used to go to memorials every weekend. I haven't been to one in months.

E-mail Dan Evans at devans@sfexaminer.com
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