The New Untouchables

By Evan Thomas

There are 946,000 children attending New York City schools, and only one of them--an unidentified second-grader enrolled at an undisclosed school--is known to suffer from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, the dread disease known as AIDS. But the parents of children at P.S. 63 in Queens, one of the city's 622 elementary schools, were not taking any chances last week. As the school opened its doors for the fall term, 944 of its 1,100 students stayed home.

That evening, hundreds of anxious parents gathered in the school's airless auditorium. They chanted, "Two, four, six, eight, no AIDS in any grades!" and waved placards proclaiming OUR CHILDREN WANT GOOD GRADES, NOT AIDS! Local politicians stirred the pot. "This is not meant to scare you," City Councilman Joseph Lisa of Queens began, "but leading medical researchers throughout the world truly believe that this epidemic may well be the most serious epidemic in recorded medical history." Chimed in State Assemblyman Frederick Schmidt: "There is no medical authority who can say with authority that AIDS cannot be transmitted in school. What about somebody sneezing in the classroom? What about the water fountain? What about kids who get in a fight with a bloody nose? They don't know!" The crowd screamed and stomped. Cried Schmidt: "We should not experiment with our children!"

Anxiety over AIDS in some parts of the U.S. is verging on hysteria. The boycott that kept home 12,000 of the 47,000 students in two Queens school districts on the first day of school last week was only the most dramatic display of the panic that has made virtual lepers out of many AIDS victims.

No longer is AIDS regarded as a "gay plague" that strikes down only promiscuous male homosexuals or heavy intravenous-drug users. Now children and heterosexuals are seen as vulnerable. The disclosure in July that Actor Rock Hudson suffers from AIDS has made the public more aware and helped generate more funding for AIDS-related research. Yet the publicity seems to have created more fear than understanding in U.S. communities.

In Miami, a highly successful caterer and floral designer named David Harrison was ruined when word spread that he had AIDS. Old clients, even hospitals, suddenly shunned him.

In Anaheim, Calif., last week, Episcopal Bishop William E. Swing distributed a pastoral letter to counsel the "cautious person" who fears catching AIDS by drinking wine from a common cup. Eating bread was deemed adequate Communion.

In San Antonio, County Judge Tony Jimenez arraigned a prisoner tested positive for AIDS in the man's jail cell, lest the courtroom and staff get contaminated.

In New Orleans, the local AIDS task force gets calls from citizens asking if the disease can be spread by mosquitoes. "If that were true, the whole city of New Orleans would have AIDS," sighs the agency's chairman, Dr. Louise McFarland.

"People are scared--even medical professionals," says Linda Berkowitz, district administrator for the Florida department of health and rehabilitative services. "There are still so many unanswered questions, and myths abound." The fear is greatly out of proportion to the actual risk. Though the disease is invariably fatal, and the number of AIDS cases (now 13,000) has been doubling every ten months, the heterosexual population has scarcely been touched. The vast majority of AIDS victims (73%) are male homosexuals or bisexuals, and most of the rest are drug abusers. Nonetheless, when asked by a CBS-New York Times poll to name "the most serious medical problems facing the country," more people cited AIDS than heart disease, the nation's leading killer (75,961 deaths last year). Experts agree that AIDS can be spread only through intimate sexual conduct, the use of a contaminated hypodermic needle, transfusions of blood containing the virus, or, in the case of a newborn, from an infected mother (see following story). But many people remain ignorant or simply doubt the evidence. The CBS-Times poll found that 47% think that AIDS can be contracted via a drinking glass, and 28% believe the disease can be picked up from a toilet seat.

"This isn't mass hysteria, it's frightened, unified parents," says Annette Maiorana, a Queens mother who kept her eight-year-old out of school last week. "In school, kids share their milk, they share sandwiches, they spit at each other. There's urine on the toilet seats. They chew on a pencil and give it to a friend. I have a little one ready to go to preschool, and it's frightening."

The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta advises that most children suffering from AIDS, unless they are handicapped, unable to control body secretions or given to biting other children, should be allowed to attend school. But many local officials wonder if the experts are underestimating the threat. Protests Marvin Aaron, a district superintendent in Queens: "I don't want all the medical experts telling me 'Don't worry.' I'm worrying." His School District No. 27 went to court last week to block the enrollment of the student with AIDS, apparently a girl whose disease is said to be in remission. The case is pending.

Some local schools have already barred AIDS patients from the classroom. Washington Borough in New Jersey turned away a four-year-old girl with AIDS- related complex (ARC) and her nine-year-old brother, even though he is not ill. In Washington, a child with AIDS is tutored alone in a separate room at school, and in Kokomo, Ind., a 13-year-old hemophiliac with the disease has been instructed at home over a phone hookup.

In Swansea, Mass., a boy suffering from AIDS was allowed to attend his eighth-grade class earlier this month, and only half a dozen of the school's 630 students were kept home by parents. But many parents bitterly railed against "the fancy talk" of experts who use vague terms like "shared bodily fluids" and speak of "probabilities" and "percentages" instead of giving yes or no answers.

Concern is growing over the possible spread of AIDS in prisons. In Denver, nervous officials quarantined a 16-year-old, convicted of carrying a concealed weapon, because he had tested positive for the AIDS virus. He ate off disposable plates, which, along with his bed linen, were incinerated after being handled with gloves and double-bagged. Later tests showed he did not have the disease. In prisons where sodomy and drug use are commonplace, some inmates are fatalistic. Says Nadim Khoury, chief of health services for the California department of corrections: "They say, 'What more can happen to us? I'm sentenced for life.' " Many AIDS victims have nowhere to go: they have been turned out of their homes by fearful roommates or families, and their money has been exhausted by heavy medical bills. The problem is especially poignant in the case of orphans and abandoned children; in Florida's Dade County, one of these youngsters with AIDS is being raised in a county hospital. In New York City, the Roman Catholic archdiocese tried to set up an AIDS shelter in an unused convent on the Upper West Side, but backed off when parishioners refused to send their children to the neighboring parochial school. The privately run AIDS Resource Center in Manhattan managed to find housing for 21 victims in four buildings, and persuaded the city to pick up part of the cost. At $700 a month, it is cheaper to house them in these apartments than to leave them in city hospitals (cost: at least $4,000 a week).

The search for housing can become blackly absurd. When an AIDS crisis center in Atlanta tried to rent a home for victims, real estate agents refused to help them. One even ordered the center's representative, who did not have AIDS, out of his car. "There's just too much I don't know about this disease," the panicked agent protested. "I have kids. I didn't know what you wanted this property for." The center finally found a house for AIDS victims by keeping their ailment secret. Bounced around by unnerved officials, some AIDS sufferers have become pitiful nomads. Fabian Bridges, diagnosed in Houston as having AIDS, wandered to Indianapolis, where he was arrested for stealing a bicycle. When a local judge, John Downer, heard that Bridges had AIDS, he reached into his pocket, gave the defendant $20 and told deputies to put him on a bus for Cleveland. Bridges, 30, was supposed to visit his mother there. Instead, he took to the streets, where he began peddling sex. The city offered Bridges medical aid and lodging, but he drifted from one shelter to another before getting arrested on a street corner for disorderly conduct. Released, he was last reported heading for Houston to "pick up his van." Cleveland officials, who cannot find any legal authority to incarcerate him indefinitely, were noticeably relieved to hear that he had left town.

When their condition is found out, AIDS victims often encounter severe discrimination on the job. Hairdressers, barbers and food handlers are routinely fired. In New York, AIDS victims fired from their jobs have brought more than 150 cases of discrimination. All have been settled with back pay or reinstatement.

Some AIDS victims endure their ostracism with remarkable grace. A 34-year- old Memphis man, who has requested anonymity, whiles away his hours playing contract bridge at the M.A. Lightman Bridge Club. When other club members learned that he had AIDS, they began to avoid him. The management forced him to wear rubber surgical gloves. "I don't like this reaction because I happen to be the brunt of it," he says, "but I do understand it. A lot of people in the club are older, and they simply don't know how to take it. Their doctors have not helped by telling them not to get close to me." His presence "has been a nuisance," sighs the club director, Nate Silverstein, "even though he's been very, very nice about it. Personally, if people treated me the way they do him, I wouldn't show my face around this club , anymore."

Many nurses and doctors have shown courage and compassion in caring for AIDS patients. But in big-city hospitals, patients are sometimes left unwashed, lying in their excrement, their food trays stacked outside the door. In Plainfield, N.J., Doris Williams, the foster mother of a four-year-old girl, recalls that nurses at first held and cooed over the child. "But as soon as we got the AIDS diagnosis, they were dressed up like 'Ghostbusters' in gloves and masks."

Dentists are especially reluctant to treat AIDS victims. So great is the fear that some dentists have taken to wearing surgical gloves and masks with all patients. In some California communities, fire fighters and lifeguards use special equipment for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Those who help AIDS sufferers sometimes become the targets of intimidation and violence. In the past month, the Edmund D. Edelman Health Center of the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center in Los Angeles has received three bomb warnings, and its director, Hugh Rice, has been threatened with death. Just over a week ago, a carload of people threw a vial of acid at a woman employee, burning her face, shoulder and arm. The victim said one of her attackers screamed, "Die, you AIDS faggots!"

Many gay activists fear that the stigma of AIDS will wipe out almost two decades of progress in homosexual rights. Tales of AIDS-related homophobia abound: in New York City, some diners avoid restaurants that have gay waiters. In Washington, D.C., a doctor requires gays to be tested for AIDS before he will give them hair transplants. In Louisville, city detectives donned rubber gloves before entering a gay bar to check for underage drinkers. Says Ken Vance, director of a gay counseling center in Houston: "It's going to get worse before it gets better. As more people become aware of AIDS, there will be a bigger backlash against gays."

The fear and uncertainty have at least in some cases spurred more public funding for research, care of AIDS patients and education programs. In Massachusetts, Governor Michael Dukakis has budgeted $1.8 million for AIDS education. The federal appropriation for AIDS research has jumped from $5.5 million in 1982 to $106.5 million this year. And last week the Administration acknowledged the gravity of the disease when Vice President George Bush told the San Francisco Chronicle that AIDS was a "critical epidemic."

But government efforts have not been without controversy. After a gay group began distributing Mother's Handy Sex Guide, an explicit manual on "safe sex," at Los Angeles bath houses, gay bars and clinics, Los Angeles County Supervisor Peter Schabarum denounced the eight-page brochure as "plain, hard- core pornography." Under his prodding, the Los Angeles County board of supervisors last month began to "review" its $1.1 million in funding for local gay community agencies.

More heartening is the example of San Francisco, one of the cities hit earliest and hardest by AIDS. (In the past month alone, 67 new cases were diagnosed, bringing the city's total since 1981 to 1,463.) There the scare stories have begun to disappear from the newspapers, and public panic has abated. "We're past the concern with casual contagion," says Holly Smith, spokeswoman for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

Last week San Francisco TV station KPIX aired an hour show called Our Worst Fears: The AIDS Epidemic, which carefully explained what is known about the disease. The program was watched by nearly a million people, the largest audience ever for a public-service broadcast in the Bay Area. The Westinghouse Broadcasting system aired the program in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Boston as well. Says Boston's WBZ-TV Station Manager Tom Goodgame: "The problem with AIDS is really two epidemics--the real health epidemic and the epidemic of the mind. We're trying to make some sense of the false rumors."

Nonetheless, the fear of the unknown that caused thousands of parents to keep their children home from school last week is bound to spread. After broadcasting a news story about the New York boycott, Memphis TV station WHBQ conducted a phone-in poll asking viewers, "Would you send your child to school with a child who has AIDS?" Results: 493 yes, 701 no.

The Queens neighborhoods where the boycott erupted are solid middle-class communities, very much like scores of neighborhoods all over the U.S. "I'm sure there are people in Tennessee who think this is just a big-city problem," said Mary Lorraine Napoli, who helped organize the boycott of P.S. 63. "But it's a worldwide problem. Why else have Swiss TV and the Canadian and Japanese press been here? It's not just our children we're worried about. It's everybody's."

With reporting by Cathy Booth/New York and Michael G. Riley/Los Angeles