Washington Blade - October 12, 2001
Laura Douglas-Brown

"We have no plans to do so, we have never been asked to do so, nor would we consider such a request if it were made," said Richard Socarides, vice president of corporate relations for AOL Time Warner, who previously served as White House gay liaison under former President Bill Clinton.

But the pledge from AOL comes in the wake of charges that a top official with San Francisco's health department wanted the rooms closed, and also during a time when more and more HIV educators across the country are turning to the Internet to spread prevention messages.

Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a top official with San Francisco's Department of Public Health, "has urged Virginia to use its æpublic health powers' to shut down the online chat rooms of AOL, which is based out of Virginia," according to an Oct. 3 letter from congressional aide Roland Foster to the federal Centers for Disease Control & Prevention in Atlanta.

"When the Virginia health department did not take action against AOL, [Klausner] threatened to contact the CDC and ask the agency to intervene and force the closure of AOL's chat rooms," Foster wrote in the letter requesting information on the issue from Dr. Robert Janssen, head of the CDC's HIV prevention division.

As some gay rights activists sounded alarms about the fate of AOL, Klausner said this week he never asked for the rooms to be shut down.

"We have just tried to work with AOL to initiate some education and prevention activities online," Klausner said.

Possible ideas include posting messages in specific chat rooms that may be linked to disease outbreaks, as well as providing hotlinks to safer-sex Web sites, Klausner said.

Virginia denies request

Foster, a staff member with the House Committee on Government Reform, said he sent his letter to gather information for a staff-level investigation on the issue. Foster said Dr. Robert Struve, a Virginia department of health epidemiologist, confirmed to him Klausner's request to close the rooms.

Yet both Klausner and Casey Riley, director of the Virginia Health Department division of STDs & HIV, said the request never was made.

Riley said as director of the division, he returned calls placed by Klausner to Struve, and Klausner asked for Virginia's help because "they apparently tried to have conversations with AOL to get them to put educational messages on their chat rooms ... and according to them AOL had not been responsive."

The idea that Klausner and the San Francisco public health department actually wanted the chat rooms shut down "probably was misconstrued," Riley said.

"We were asked to see what legal recourse we had to make AOL respond [since AOL is based in Virginia], but legally they had done nothing wrong and there is nothing we can do," he said. "Maybe that was interpreted as trying to shut them down."

Klausner, meanwhile, attributed the story to San Francisco activist Michael Petrelis, who sent out dozens of e-mails about the issue to media outlets and other activists.

Petrelis, a frequent critic of Klausner, "perpetuates a lot of misinformation," Klausner said. "By trying to cast us as in this diabolical shadow of trying to close down chat rooms and being against freedom of speech, that's not only a personal attack -- it's an attack on the city and county of San Francisco."

Petrelis in turn compared Klausner to Jerry Falwell, saying the San Francisco official is bent on "demonizing gay male sex spaces."

Syphilis outbreak sparks concerns

Klausner said he specifically wants AOL to post warnings about syphilis infection in the chat room SFM4M, which San Francisco health department officials linked to an outbreak of the disease in 1999 and to several cases since then.

In the 1999 outbreak, the San Francisco health department eventually identified eight infected men who used the chat room to meet dates. Those men -- whose number of sex partners ranged from three to 47 -- had sex with a total of 99 men.

Of the 99, 34 came forward for treatment, and at least six were infected with syphilis. Five of the men said they were also HIV-positive, raising concerns that AIDS could also be spread through contacts made in the room.

At the time, Klausner said his department considered asking for a court order to force AOL to disclose the names of people using the chat room, after attempts to e-mail those individuals at their screen names were not successful because many messages went unread.

The ultimate solution came in the form of a suggestion from AOL, which put the San Francisco department in contact with PlanetOut, a San Francisco-based online service for gays. PlanetOut Chair Tom Rielly said the service trained 60 volunteers to visit the chat rooms and post messages about the outbreak.

Since then, however, San Francisco health officials say they have continued to trace syphilis infections to the SFM4M chat room on AOL. This year, the department has traced 13 cases of the disease in men who met on the Internet, with seven in that specific AOL chat room, according to the San Francisco Examiner.

"San Francisco has seen a doubling of new cases of syphilis in men who have sex with men every year since 1998," Klausner told the Blade. "No doubt meeting partners on the Internet plays a role in that, as well as people meeting in sex clubs, bookstores, and private parties.

"But those more traditional venues have always been involved in prevention education and safer sex promotion, and to date we have not seen that in chat rooms," Klausner said.

Petrelis, who disputes the existence of the chat room syphilis outbreak, said it is "hypocritical" for San Francisco public health officials to focus on the sexual behavior of others when some of their own employees have publicly acknowledged having unsafe sex. That includes Seth Watkins, an HIV-positive prevention worker who told the New York Times in August that he seeks sex on the Internet and sometimes has unsafe sex in bars.

Klausner refused to comment on the issue.

AOL to use online prevention

In a letter dated Oct. 4, the day after the congressional aide's letter to the CDC about AOL and Klausner, Socarides sent a letter to Klausner detailing the online provider's "long history of supporting organizations that are working to fight HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases."

Socarides' letter said AOL has published public service announcements in the past and noted that AOL allowed PlanetOut workers to use AOL accounts to place messages in chat rooms. The letter also offered complimentary AOL accounts to San Francisco health department staff to use in outreach efforts.

Klausner said he had been trying to contact AOL for almost two years about the issue, but Socarides said the letter and AOL's offer were not prompted by specific concerns from Klausner.

"For over a year now, we have been talking with various people in the HIV prevention community," Socarides said.

Klausner and Socarides discussed online prevention efforts in a phone call Wednesday, the first time the two had talked directly.

"It was the first conversation we have had with AOL since summer 1999, so that is progress right there," Klausner said.

Klausner said Socarides asked him "to provide prevention messages related to the risk of syphilis among persons using AOL's SFM4M chat room" and Socarides "agreed to figure out how to put them in the chat room."

But Socarides said the two had a "good conversation" about providing public service announcements in "appropriate areas," but AOL agreed only to "evaluate the appropriateness of specific suggestions" that were made.

There was "no commitment beyond that," Socarides said.

INFO

America Online

P.O. Box 29521

New York, NY 10097

1-888-265-8003

www.aol.com

San Francisco Dept. of Public Health

Jeffrey D. Klausner, MD, MPH

1360 Mission Street, Suite 401

San Francisco, CA 94103

Michael Petrelis

mpetrelis@aol.com

In AOL's original letter to Klausner, Socarides said the company had contacted the CDC to "obtain [public service announcements] on the issue of STDs and place them in appropriate areas of the AOL service and elsewhere."

Socarides said such "appropriate areas" might include AOL's health and gay and lesbian programming, but there is no assumption that messages would be posted in any individual chat rooms, he added.

"I think what we will try to do in all of this is find the right balance in which we can provide relevant information to subscribers who want it, without interfering with anyone's privacy rights," Socarides said. "Finding that balance will be key."

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