‘FRONTLINE’ AIDS CONTROVERSY : Documentary Makers’ Relentless Focus on the Lethal Life Style of a Dying Fabian Bridges Puts Minneapolis Station and PBS in the Spotlight

Lights, action, AIDS.

He was Fabian Bridges, a gay man with AIDS, a miserable, wretched, uncaring victim-turned-victimizer who used his body as a lethal weapon.

Even as he was dying, Fabian continued to have promiscuous sex, knowing he could be infecting his unknowing partners with the fatal AIDS virus. “I’m just to the point where I just don’t give a damn,” he said without emotion.

What an awful, awful illness. And what an awful, awful person.

Even before his story aired this week on PBS, Fabian had created enormous controversy, in Houston, in Cleveland, in Indianapolis, in Minneapolis and finally as the announced case-study centerpiece for Tuesday’s two-hour “Frontline” program called “AIDS--A National Inquiry.”

AIDS activists and gay groups protested the 45-minute documentary (produced by WCCO-TV in Minneapolis) showing Fabian’s last lonely, deadly months as he moved from city to city, seeming to frustrate government and health authorities.

The protesters feared that Fabian would be seen by the general public as a metaphor for most AIDS victims, instead of as the aberration that he was. They feared that the visual impact of the documentary would overshadow the talking-heads panel discussion that followed, thus feeding a national homophobia that could increase calls for the quarantining of AIDS victims and carriers.

Feeling was running so high against the documentary--WCCO trailed Fabian with a hand-held camera almost until his death last November--that some AIDS experts declined to participate in the national panel discussion.

As it turned out, “Frontline” host Judy Woodruff, several of the panelists on the national panel and a local panel that followed on KCET repeatedly noted that Fabian was not typical.

But “the image of this man doing what he did, demented as he was, will stay in people’s minds,” argued former San Francisco Public Health Director Mervyn Silverman, a member of the national panel.

We’ll see. KCET, for example, logged 168 calls Tuesday night about “AIDS--A National Inquiry,” the largest telephone response to a KCET program in at least a decade. Of 73 callers expressing opinions, 69 were negative, citing a wide variety of reasons.

Presented by itself, the WCCO documentary would have been dangerously misleading and as lethal as Fabian himself. However, by offering it as part of a wider AIDS discussion firmly guided by Harvard law professor Charles Nesson, “Frontline” wisely broadened the focus beyond Fabian’s continued promiscuity.

In journalistic terms, Fabian was a story , and what he did raised the sensitive issue of personal rights versus public good. But “Front-line” used the documentary to also comment on the isolation and alienation experienced by many AIDS victims and on the uneven care available to them.

Fabian was victimized by “all the institutions that failed him,” said Diego Lopez, director of clinical services for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York.

Some gay AIDS experts had feared that Tuesday’s program would be uncritical of the Reagan Administration’s seeming passivity on AIDS. And, indeed, the subject was only barely mentioned. “We can’t have a President who says this is the No. 1 health problem and then cuts $56 million out of education and research,” said Silverman.

“I would consider my death an act of murder for lack of governmental funding,” said Lopez, who recently learned he has AIDS.

Another issue, unrelated to AIDS, is the Fabian documentary itself, which shows the WCCO crew as an active participant in Fabian’s saga, blurring the critical line between reporter and story.

We in the media are all vultures to some extent, picking at the misery of others to feed an appetite for news stories. Reporters exploit and are exploited. We use subjects to fill newspaper space or air time and subjects use us to get their messages across to the public. It’s a simple give and take. What’s more, bad news is news, and the public likes it that way.

Fabian was bad news. Yet, there seemed something so shabby and voyeuristic about this WCCO documentary, akin to dwelling on a freeway crash.

“He (Fabian) agreed to let us tell his story,” the narrator said. That story began as a close-up of just another AIDS victim. The crew gave Fabian money from time to time, bought him a radio. There he was on the screen, listening to his radio.

But after Fabian disclosed to the crew that he was continuing to have sex, the WCCO people seem to have immediately given this information to the president of the Cleveland City Council--a politician--rather than an AIDS resource group that could have been more successful in getting him off the street.

The result on the screen was a splashy discussion by Cleveland city officials and others--under the glare of the WCCO camera and lights--about what to do about Fabian. Everyone seemed very concerned, very together. It was great TV. And great image.

How honest was this sequence, given the intrusive presence of the camera? About as honest as a later sequence showing members of the Houston vice squad provocatively discussing what to do about Fabian--with the camera in their faces.

Were all these people performing for TV? Was Fabian performing for TV? Was TV performing for us?

And where do TV programs about AIDS go from here? Questions, and few answers.