Gays at Crossroads : AIDS Epidemic Reduces Leaders, Opens Door to Militant Generation

AIDS has become so widespread that it is changing the nature of San Diego’s gay community, afflicting many of the old-line leaders while opening the door to angry militants to take their causes to the streets, those involved in gay politics and business say.

Gay and lesbian activists interviewed by The Times acknowledge that AIDS has struck several prominent leaders in gay social and political organizations, forcing them to scale back their responsibilities to guard their health.

And, although sentiment is divided over whether new leaders are poised to take their place, members of the gay community generally agree that the welling frustration and anger over the AIDS epidemic is fueling a movement to abandon more genteel methods of persuasion for acts of civil disobedience.

What they want is for government to help pay to clothe, feed, and provide counseling and other assistance to people with acquired immune deficiency syndrome who are too poor or too weak to help themselves.

“From our point of view, six years of our trying to get something has gotten us nothing,” declared Albert Bell, a longtime gay organizer who is at the forefront of the militant movement.

“It can’t hurt us to scream about it,” Bell said. “At some point in your life, you’re faced with: ‘Are you going to shut up and die quietly? Or are you going to shout about it?’ ”

Added Nicole Ramirez Murray, a columnist for a local gay newspaper and a female impersonator who has recently become active in AIDS issues:

“Going to funerals and memorials has become a way of life for us. How much more can we take from a government that doesn’t seem to care?

“The gay community is changing. People are dying. The grief is turning into anger. The Albert Bells of today, who are being criticized as being too militant and radical, will be the accepted leaders of the future.”

At the root of the militant anger, which is sometimes directed at the old-line leaders themselves, is an overwhelming feeling of helplessness, say those involved in AIDS assistance programs.

AIDS destroys the body’s immune system, leaving it powerless against certain cancers and otherwise rare infections. It is commonly transmitted

through anal and vaginal sexual intercourse, through the sharing of unsterilized hypodermic needles and by mother to fetus during pregnancy.

In this country, AIDS primarily has afflicted homosexual and bisexual men, intravenous drug users and their sexual partners.

‘A Faceless Entity’

“How do you fight a virus?” asked Linell Fromm, executive director of the San Diego AIDS project. “It really comes down to that. It’s a faceless entity. It’s just there. It’s inside of people.

“So what’s happened is that it has made people very, very angry, and a lot of that anger gets displaced,” Fromm said. “People lash out at care-givers. People feel that enough isn’t being done, which in many ways is true.”

The feeling of anger is particularly magnified in the gay community, which is so close-knit that it is not unusual for a person to know of dozens of friends who have either died or are dying with AIDS.

For the Rev. David Farrell, pastor of the 300-member Metropolitan Community Church in Hillcrest, that fact has translated into more than the usual number of funerals and counseling demands for his predominantly homosexual congregation. Last year, there were about 15 funerals more than normal, Farrell estimated.

“From a pastor’s perspective, it’s kind of like wartime,” Farrell said. “It’s the only analogy I can think of when you are burying a lot of young men out of their time.”

The procession of bad news and funerals has cast a more somber mood over the gay community, said Stan Berry, who is active in gay Republican politics.

“People are turning away from the bars,” he said. “There’s not the party attitude there used to be. There’s a seriousness that’s come over the community that’s never been there before.”

Straining Finances

Not only is AIDS causing an emotional strain, but it is also a financial burden. Money that would normally go for gay organizations and causes--such as political action committees--is being plowed into relief groups such as the AIDS Assistance Fund to feed, clothe and house dying gays.

The pinch is already being felt in at least one prominent gay organizations, the San Diego Democratic Club. President Jeri Dilno said the club has been forced to scale back its activities because it is receiving only 75% to 80% of its normal donations.

But the biggest toll has been on people, especially the more visible leaders of the gay community.

(The gay community in 1986 was estimated to number more than 100,000 in San Diego, with about 35,000 gay voters ranging from committed voters to people working in or contributing to campaigns.)

Among those stricken with AIDS have been Dr. Brad Truax, former Democratic Club president and chairman of the San Diego County Regional Task Force on AIDS.

Other leaders with AIDS include Doug Scott, another former Democratic Club president who now sits on the county’s Democratic Central Committee; Randy Spector, a Hillcrest travel agent and president of the Greater San Diego Business Assn., and Berry, former president of the Log Cabin Club and now member of a committee of six gays selected by the state’s Republican Party to brief Gov. George Deukmejian about homosexual issues.

“The gay community has had a relatively small leadership base and that was fine . . . until the AIDS epidemic hit,” Berry said.

“What happened was that people began to lose energy,” he said. “They became sick. There seemed to be all sorts of fires to be put out--from people panicking within our own community, to all sorts of bizarre legislation going through Congress and here in California.”

Forced to Limit Influence

With their skills in greater demand but their strength sapped, gay leaders have been forced to cut back on their activities and visibility just to conserve their own health.

Truax says he no longer sees patients. Although he has not cut back on his political commitments, he has declined to take on new projects and paces himself more carefully during the day.

Scott is still active in local Democratic politics, but he closed his business as an antique dealer when he was diagnosed as having AIDS in early 1987 and went on Social Security disability.

“It’s every other person who tests HIV (Human Immune Deficiency Virus) positive who is scaling back to take care of themselves,” said Rick Moore, a public information officer at San Diego State University and Scott’s lover. “They are taking care of themselves because everyone is waiting for this miracle cure.”

That same kind of drawing back can be felt in the rank and file of many gay organizations, Dilno said. “I can’t tell you how many people who held, not even committee positions, but who were the workers--who stuffed the envelopes and made the phone calls--who are impacted by AIDS,” she said.

As gay leaders will be forced over time to cut back even more, opinions are divided on whether enough gay leaders are waiting in the wings to fill the shoes of the old guard.

Truax said he remains optimistic that that will be the case. “One of the greater benefits is the increasing role that women are taking in directing gay and lesbian organizations,” he said.

Others, such as Berry, predict that the slow progression of AIDS provides enough “lead time” that ailing leaders can choose and groom their successors. For instance, as president of the Log Cabin Club, Berry said, he made sure last year that a number of budding gay Republicans accompanied him to the state convention to meet legislators and party officials as a hedge against the future.

Yet others have their doubts.

“It’s becoming more difficult for us to get out and find new blood, and burnout and AIDS is taking its toll on the older leadership,” said one prominent gay who asked not to be identified. “The enthusiasm by new blood coming in has not been strong.”

Part of the reluctance, suggested Nicole Murray, is that the new generation of leaders now has to face two stigmas in dealing with the straight world.

“If you’re gay and you become a leader and go on the television and get in the newspaper, that is heavy enough,” Murray said. “Now, there’s a second set of baggage in people’s minds--that of having AIDS or being a carrier.”

However, the growing anger over AIDS is causing some to leap over those barriers and take more militant action to confront local governments over AIDS funding.

Within the last few months, Bell has taken steps to tap the anger in the local gay community and organize it for the kind of “direct action” tactics that are reminiscent of the 1960s anti-war movement.

Last fall, he returned from a march on Washington--where an estimated 750,000 people gathered from around the country to demand more federal government attention to AIDS--and founded a local chapter of Act-Up, a new organization based in New York.

The goal of the group, Bell said, is to force government attention to AIDS by employing a number of activities, ranging from informational pickets and noisy demonstrations to sit-ins, disrupting public meetings and engaging in other acts of civil disobedience.

“We are a committed group of people willing to go to jail to bring this issue to the attention of the public,” said Bell, who himself was arrested with 862 others during a demonstration at the U.S. Supreme Court at last year’s march on Washington, D.C.

One of Act-Up’s first targets was Mayor Maureen O’Connor, who was accused by Bell of failing to pursue city funding for AIDS patients.

In January, the group mobilized hundreds of people--media estimates were 500, Bell claims 1,200--to demonstrate outside the Old Globe Theatre where O’Connor delivered her State of the City Address, unveiling her plan to bring Russian performers to San Diego for an arts festival.

As the crowd left the gathering, considered a keynote event in local politics, the demonstrators angrily shouted “shame” and “AIDS funding now” while waving nearly 400 cardboard tombstones to underscore the number of deaths in San Diego County caused by AIDS.

The next day, three city councilmen issued a memo referring to the demonstration and called on their colleagues to spend another $250,000 for AIDS assistance this year. The city had already approved a $160,000 one-time grant for local AIDS programs.

When the proposal worked its way to the full City Council last month, Bell and 16 other Act-Up members showed up at the meeting and broke into a chant after council members pared the $250,000 request to $140,000, bringing the total for the city to $300,000.

Bell said San Diego’s amount pales before the $6 million, $3 million and $1 million that local governments in San Francisco, Boston and Houston, respectively, have given so far to AIDS sufferers.

Perhaps the most notable action taken by Bell and other Act-Up supporters came in February during a San Diego County Board of Supervisors meeting to consider banning sexual activity in gay bathhouses.

Truax was speaking to the supervisors, urging them to enact health regulations that would essentially close the bathhouses.

A bathhouse owner shouted Truax down, and Bell and other Act-Up members joined in, prompting the supervisors to adjourn the meeting and call on county marshals to clear the chambers. The supervisors passed the stricter health requirements.

Although Bell said the disruption was spontaneous and not formally encouraged by Act-Up, he said it underscores the anger some in the gay community even have against their own leadership.

“For six years of this epidemic, those leaders have been negotiating, talking in the back room and making deals--working behind the scenes is what they call it--and they have produced nothing.

“And it is those leaders who are urging Act-Up to be quiet,” Bell said. “They are the same people who would have asked Rosa Parks to be quiet and sit in the back of the bus, they would take care of it.”

Yet some leaders say they can understand Act-Up’s militancy. Dilno said she has no problem with the group’s stress on civil disobedience, although she “disagrees with their targets.”

But at least one other leader, Republican Berry, predicts the militancy will not bode well for the gay community itself.

“It’s going to divide up an already splintered community to where it is difficult to rally the gay community around any one issue,” he said.