Political, Personal Toll High for Foes of AIDS Initiative

Inside the elegant, restored Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, a scene last week dramatized a tragic side of the campaign against the Lyndon LaRouche AIDS initiative that makes it different from every other political fight in America this year.

The campaign’s chief strategist, David Mixner, was pitching for money to a group of gay political leaders, some Democrats and some Republicans. His voice cracked.

“I don’t think there is any of us in this room who don’t know someone who has passed away from AIDS,” Mixner said quietly.

Someone cleared his throat. Otherwise, the room was silent. Nearly all had lost a close friend to AIDS. Some had even held sick friends in their arms at the moment they died. Some, perhaps, were dying themselves.

Key Players

No initiative campaign in California, or anywhere perhaps, has been waged with the key players under the kind of strain that is faced by the gay men and women leading the campaign against Proposition 64, the latest project of extremist presidential hopeful LaRouche.

As of Aug. 31, 2,796 people had died of AIDS in California, most of them gay or bisexual men. The disease has struck all over the state but exacted a special price in Los Angeles and San Francisco, often cutting down healthy men in the prime of their lives and careers.

The measure seeks to force health authorities to test for the AIDS virus, collect the names of the 300,000 people believed infected and restrict them from schools and some jobs. Many gays, aware of frequent reports of reprisals against AIDS victims, fear it could be used to launch a witch hunt against homosexuals. Rumors are also rampant that the measure could result in the internment of gays in special AIDS camps, although lawyers say the initiative would not alter existing quarantine laws.

Terrifying Toll

For gays the terrifying toll has been political as well as personal.

When Mixner sat down last July to plan strategy, he went over his list of names from past gay political battles. What he found shocked him. More than a dozen of the key activists and contributors who helped defeat the anti-gay Briggs initiative in 1978 were dead, including three directors of the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles, the group that met at the Hollywood Roosevelt. They were the ones he had hoped to ask for the seed money to get the campaign against Proposition 64 started.

“We’re busy burying our dead, and we have to defend our right to work,” Mixner said of the initiative. “There is no crueler initiative that has ever been on the California ballot.”

Yet with a month to go, the state’s gay leaders appear to have built an electoral juggernaut against Proposition 64.

LaRouche’s forces trail badly in most polls. The opposition has raised more than $1 million and has collected a sweeping array of support that far outstrips the bipartisan effort unleashed against the Briggs measure, which would have required the investigation and firing of suspected homosexual schoolteachers.

Led by the California Medical Assn., which represents most of the state’s doctors, the medical community has actively campaigned to defeat the measure on grounds that it will dry up research on a cure for AIDS and speed the spread of the disease. Every major group of doctors, nurses, hospitals and government health officials--plus the American Red Cross, which seldom gets involved in politics--has signed on as an opponent.

In addition, LaRouche’s involvement has generated almost unanimous opposition among politicians. Leaders in both parties, including Gov. George Deukmejian and all the major candidates on the ballot, have also denounced the initiative.

The local LaRouche followers who wrote the initiative and gathered signatures last spring at shopping centers and airports appear stymied. Spokesmen have appeared regularly on radio and television to urge support for the initiative, but they attracted the support of only a handful of LaRouche-affiliated doctors; Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), a longtime foe of the gay community, and most recently, the Los Angeles Central Committee of the American Independent Party.

Even though the opposition cuts across most of the state, gay men and women fill most of the top spots in the anti-64 campaign. The statewide co-chairs are Harry Britt, a San Francisco supervisor and former close ally of slain gay Supervisor Harvey Milk, and Los Angeles attorney Diane Abbitt, a past chairwoman of the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles. Gays have also contributed the biggest share of the more than $1 million that has been raised.

But putting the campaign together has not been easy, for the measure came along at a bad time for the California gay community.

After winning new political acceptance and dozens of appointments and elections in Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego in the 1970s and early ‘80s, gay political strength has waned. The replacement of Democratic Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., who named gays to several key jobs, with Deukmejian, a Republican who has kept his distance from gays, proved crucial when Deukmejian vetoed a bill that would have protected gays from job discrimination.

AIDS began its lethal sweep through the gay ranks at about the same time, increasing the reluctance of politicians to be seen as favoring gay rights and exacting a toll among activists.

“People are gone, and people are exhausted, and people are spending a lot of time at the hospital with their loved ones,” said Richard Pabich, a prominent gay leader in San Francisco who is Northern California chairman of the anti-64 campaign. “They are finding that political activity is not as important as getting through life right now.”

Impact Remote

To the general public, while the numbers are dizzying, the impact is remote. Pleas from medical officials to take the threat seriously have not been widely embraced. But not so in the gay community, where the special-interest newspapers have added obituary pages to the usual fare of community and entertainment news.

“It’s like being in a war and having your high school class decimated,” said Steve Schulte, the mayor of West Hollywood, who has watched more than 35 close friends die in less than five years. “It’s sort of like an acid, eating away and taking some of the best people . . . and taking your spirit. And there’s no end in sight.”

Some gay leaders say they fear that their movement for social acceptance, which brimmed with optimism even after Milk was slain, along with Mayor George Moscone, in San Francisco City Hall by disgruntled ex-Supervisor Dan White, is losing its leaders.

Hits Hard

“People who I have counted on for years are dead or ill--you can’t imagine how hard that hits you,” said Larry Bush, a gay activist and deputy to Assemblyman Art Agnos (D-San Francisco). “And the numbers keep going up. Are we going to get 25,000 new people signing up with gay rights groups and paying dues? The answer is no.”

Nonetheless, the campaign against Proposition 64 seems to be succeeding in the face of the crisis. It has drawn many of its volunteers from people who lost friends or family to acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

These include Helen Gorman Kushnick, a talent manager whose 3-year-old son died of AIDS contracted from a blood transfusion. She signed a fund-raising ad in the entertainment newspaper Daily Variety and may appear in television spots for the campaign. Big names in the entertainment field, including Bob Hope and Gene Kelly, have lent their names, while Screen Actors Guild President Patty Duke and others have taken a more active role in the campaign.

Early in the campaign, the opponents’ organization suffered a personal tragedy when the media director, longtime Los Angeles gay leader Peter Scott, was hospitalized and diagnosed as having AIDS. Friends said the trauma was aggravated when Scott’s condition was reported against his wishes in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and repeated in other media, including The Times.

Special Workshop

Psychologist Robert Eichberg held a special half-day workshop for the campaign staff and volunteers after Scott became ill to relieve the depression. Eichberg, who has raised more than $150,000 for the campaign through friends and an out-of-state mailing, knows the special stress of AIDS--he has seen 200 acquaintances die.

“I dedicate a lot of what I do to them,” Eichberg said. “I’m dealing with this every day.”

Most gay leaders talk angrily about the money and time diverted from research on AIDS to fight the LaRouche measure, but Eichberg and others say there is some benefit from the public discussion of the AIDS issue.

All the attention generated by the initiative is educating people about AIDS, they contend. By the election, they say, many more people will have learned that the killer virus is spread by sexual contact and the exchange of infected blood and not by working or living alongside someone with the disease.

‘Money Well Spent’

“Since the government won’t do it, we’re doing it,” said Larry Sprenger, a Los Angeles businessman and the campaign’s treasurer. “I have to believe it’s money well spent.”

Some also say that the campaign could be the catalyst for a new surge by gays into politics. The initiative for the first time has allied gay groups with mainstream health organizations, and the more optimistic leaders say those ties could be long-lasting.

The successful campaign against the Briggs initiative in 1978, for example, established a political relationship with teacher unions around the state that has proven mutually beneficial, gay leaders said.

The list of political supporters in the campaign includes not only Democrats, who have been the biggest friends of gays in California, but also Republican Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.), who has agreed to make campaign appearances against the initiative, and Rep. Ed Zschau of Los Altos, the GOP nominee against Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.).