In commemoration of City Weekly's 40th anniversary, we are digging into our archives to celebrate. Each week, we FLASHBACK to a story or column from our past in honor of four decades of local alt-journalism. Whether the names and issues are familiar or new, we are grateful to have this unique newspaper to contain them all.
Title: The Quiet Killer: AIDS
Author: Richard Barnum-Reece
Date: August, 1988
It was, the mayor's press secretary will tell you, much ado about nothing. The daily press, that roving wolf pack, hot on the warm blood of a good story, were turning the city upside down. Front page stuff. It seems the mayor, that crypto-Catholic priest with his collar turned down, had a run-in with Ben Barr, director of the Salt Lake AIDS Foundation. Or maybe not.
"The reporters came to us and asked us about our response to the Salt Lake AIDS Foundation position, that is was a violation of Freedom of Speech if we were against them dispensing condoms along with their literature at the Neighborhood Fair after the Pioneer Days Parade," says Lynne Zimmerman, press secretary to Mayor Palmer DePaulis. "We learned a good lesson."
Ah yes, a good lesson about AIDS is hard to find and if you happened to be one of those who wandered around the Neighborhood Fair on July 25, you'd be hard pressed to get information about AIDS at all.
Which is similar to the action you get if you drop in at the Salt Lake County Health Department and ask for information about AIDS: booklets, simple stuff that has been photocopied and put into a manila envelope. "That will be five dollars," the waterhead who runs the front desk says.
"What?" Five bucks for public information that you people should be giving away? Five dollars so we can put it in the newspaper and get out information on what the Surgeon General has referred to as a current epidemic that can only be controlled by educating the public?
"I'll have to ask the Assistant Director, Kent Williamson," the secretary says.
She comes back: "He says you can't have it unless you pay the five bucks." Brain-dead.
Which is part of the problem: education. It's part of the evils of sex education in Utah cum Medieval Europe anyway. Witness that poor school teacher in Alpine, Utah County, Lower Slobovia, who was recently drawn and quartered by the principal and the local school board for giving her students a Masters and Johnson text in response to their inquiries about sex.
Sex, she didn't know, isn't discussed, if ever practiced, in Utah. Not right here in the state. Sure, maybe by those who hang out at night, maybe by those who have special written permission from the Lord; but, hey, you certainly don't bring it up in school of all places and the last thing you want to do is pass out condoms at the Neighborhood Fair with booklets from the Salt Lake AIDS Foundation called "Condom Sense Rules." Or some such.
"We both agreed that it wasn't the appropriate place to pass out condoms," says Zimmerman. "You could get kids who would use the condoms for water balloons...."
"Isn't that what they're for?" I ask.
"That's what I use them for," she says. She pauses. "Listen, you're a sick person. Maybe you should spend some time at the Salt Lake AIDS Foundation."
"I can't," I reply. "I just went over there and they've put newspapers up to block off the windows in the office. I called the number and they say they've moved and they'll get back to me. I'm on deadline. There are people out there who want to know if this whole AIDS business is just another marketing scheme cooked up by another local marketing guru...."
"I have a friend, a gay friend, who tells me he spends every month, at least once a month, going to a funeral of a friend who has died of AIDS. He's sick of it. He's sick to death and he says people are passing it off because in our country the homosexual community are the people who are dying of it and the majority in this country, the heterosexuals, figure if the homosexuals die from it, it's their own fault. They deserve to die because they're homosexuals and not heterosexuals and homosexuals are evil, they deserve to die...."
Well, the enemy is real for both homosexuals and heterosexuals, despite the reluctance of the mayor to violate simpleminded community queasiness about looking the enemy right in the face and telling folks that it has to do with unsafe sex practices. This is the word nationally: one million people are estimated to have AIDS, a virus that destroys your ability to combat diseases, and of that one million, the chances of them dying are from very good to 100 percent.
Since 1981 when the death count began, 66,464 people have been reported as having tested positive to AIDS; of that number 37,535 have died. Probably more by the time you read this over a ham sandwich and a beer.
"Right now we're saying that the life expectancy is an average seven years after contracting the disease," says a woman at the national AIDS Hotline (That's 1-800-342-AIDS if you have any questions). "The disease is so new that we don't know what to say. But right now we're saying the chances of dying of AIDS are as much as 100 percent."
A damn scary batting average if you happen to have picked up a touch of AIDS off a doorknob at the local school board meeting. Frightening.
Luckily, of course, AIDS can be avoided and it doesn't live on doorknobs, or used cups, or in the vast reaches of the stratosphere. It hangs out in bodily fluids: saliva, for example, blood, for another. And if you want to avoid AIDS you either avoid having sexual contact with a person who does have AIDS or you make damn sure you have an FBI check run on anyone you pick up at a local bar.
"The major problem right now isn't the homosexual community," Surgeon General Koop recently reported. "They've made some remarkable changes in their sexual behavior to fight the disease."
The major problem is with drug users, prostitutes, and bisexuals—who may be using drugs, engaging in prostitution, and bisexual behavior all at once. These are people who live on the fringes of human existence and do not care if they infect another human being: the junkie in hot search of a fix; the prostitute junkie in hot search of a John to solve her need for a fix; the heroin-hot bisexual prostitute now infecting a promiscuous female who then infects "straight" males, all of whom are linked to a chain of death.
In Utah, the latest word is this: five hemophiliacs have AIDS, 88 homosexuals have it, 22 junkies have it, nine more are infected who class themselves as both homosexual and addicted to a needle. And one heterosexual male has it.
In Central Africa and Haiti, the homosexual population is not the main victim of this disease. It's the heterosexuals. The "straight" community. And chances are if you are one who has multiple sex partners, if you aren't monogamous by nature, you're playing with a loaded pistol, Jack, and you could easily become a victim, a statistic, another dead cracker.
The good side of this sad tale of lack of information and "turn your watch back 100 years, you've just entered Utah" is the state legislature has recently mandated AIDS related sex education in the high schools. Do you believe it?
"Well," says Cheryl Archibald, a reporter for the Ogden Standard-Examiner, "it's like this: they will have two curriculums, one for the high-risk kids, who have permission from their parents to take the high-risk curriculum, a curriculum that will have more graphic sex. Then there's the other curriculum, which doesn't have the graphic sexual content.
"The important thing, the way they were able to get it through the legislature is that abstinence is taught as the way to prevent AIDS," she says. "That made Joy Beech happy. She could sign off on it then."
Joy Beech, you might want to know, is a mover and shaker in the halls of the state legislature. She comes wrapped up in the bloody flagging of matronly morality and few legislators refuse to give her a serious listen when she clears her voice and utters truth-as-only-she-knows-it.
She don't cotton to no Playboy magazines, no X-rated movies, no X-rated videos in the privacy of your home, and she certainly doesn't think much of faggots, queers, and jitballs.
"Did you know," she said with a gleam in her eye to one legislator at a recent session, "that of all the AIDS cases reported in Utah not one involves a heterosexual."
Of course we know better than that now. The heterosexual population has been infected and chances are heterosecuals are just as stupid as homosexuals. Chances are good that if education doesn't change the sexual revolution of the Sixties which drew down into the Seventies and now the Eighties, that the Modern Black Plague, as it has been referred to, will be an ugly reality for all Americans. As ugly as Vietnam, as ugly as a drug-cranked sex maniac on the prowl for new meat.
Which reminds me of a woman I once knew, but I won't get into that now, it's not the sort of discussion that needs to find its way into a respectable publication.
So. How do you beat the rap? Clean up your act, Jack. Here are the high risk groups, avoid casual sexual contact with them like the plague: Prostitutes, paid or not; bisexuals; homosexuals; intravenous drug users; and, yes, heterosexuals recently removed from Central African countries or the Caribbean country of Haiti, as well as those heterosexuals who have engaged with the high-risk groups. And, also, get monogamous if you already aren't.
"If communities want to help prevent AIDS they can only do so by a vigorous effort to educate and inform their populations about the illness ...." (Surgeon General Koop)
"The mayor is, by policy, very much in favor of educating the general public about the problem of AIDS in the community," says his press secretary. "He's very supportive of a policy that gives out information to the public on a broad scale. He was recently involved in the Westminster College seminar on AIDS.
"It just seemed that the Neighborhood Fair was not the place to distribute condoms and Ben Barr, with the Salt Lake AIDS Foundation, agreed with us so we issued a joint statement to that effect."
