‘Government cannot deal with questions of sex.’

There was a coincidence of passing significance last week when a North Hollywood hospital held a community discussion about AIDS on the same day that the National Academy of Sciences proposed a billion-dollar program for education and research to combat the deadly virus.

The handful of doctors, administrators and counselors who made up the panel at Wednesday night’s discussion dutifully nodded their approval of that idea.

But, somehow, they didn’t seem terribly impressed.

Most of them thought that, before the country can put that much money to good use, it’s going to have to learn how to talk straight about sex. The misuse of language, they suggested, is as much an obstacle as lack of money in the battle against AIDS.

Their accusations touched on the government, the medical establishment and even the Baptist ministers of South Los Angeles.

The gathering was put on by the Chemical Dependency Recovery Center of the North Hollywood Medical Center “to dispel myths and ignorance and hysteria about the highly emotional subject of AIDS.”

An audience of about 200 filled the hospital auditorium and spilled out into the hall. Many of those, it turned out, were students in the chemical dependency study program offered by Mission College and will soon themselves become nurses, counselors and technicians in the war on drugs.

The first speaker was Neil Schram, chairman of the Los Angeles City-County AIDS Task Force and the doctor who wrote an article forecasting a United States paralyzed by AIDS in 1991.

Speaking in a clinically cool tone, Schram predicted that the number of people with acquired immune deficiency syndrome will climb from 26,000 today to 270,000 by 1991 and said an “unspeakable tragedy” could occur if the public is not educated on how the virus spreads.

Schram did his best to dispel the idea that AIDS can be caught in public places.

“We have now passed the point of saying casual contact carries little or no risk, and we can say casual contact causes no risk,” he said. “If you can share your own kitchen with someone who has AIDS and not get it, you can share a restaurant with someone who works there and not get it.”

But then he told a story to dispel any idea that AIDS is of no concern to those who are neither homosexuals nor intravenous drug users, the two groups most likely to get AIDS.

He said the widow of a man who had died of AIDS started a relationship with the man next door and they both got the disease and died.

The next speaker, from the L.A. Shanti Foundation, a program that gives emotional support to people who are dying of AIDS, said he is gay and also angry, angry because he feels society has sloughed off AIDS as a homosexual problem.

In a rambling talk, Bob Heinbaugh wondered why, “if we are in fact such a sexually oriented country, are we so reluctant to educate our children who are at risk.”

He recalled a conversation with an Orange County woman who confided in him, “You know, AIDS isn’t going to be real to me until I know somebody respectable who has AIDS.”

“Am I respectable?” he said he asked her. “Is my anger justified? I think it is.”

During an intermission, all the chairs in the room were rearranged into a sunburst pattern around the panel.

In this setting, the discussion heated up.

German Maisonet, an oncologist and instructor in the Mission College program, castigated the national health system for failing to educate about AIDS.

“If you are a heterosexual, get down on your knees and thank God that he made homosexuals,” Maisonet said. “That’s how you got your information, not from your government.”

Phil Wilson of the Minority AIDS Project confessed that he has found it a problem to persuade the black Baptist ministers of South Los Angeles to explain AIDS to their congregations.

“Those of us who are dealing with this issue today are constantly dealing with language,” he said. “It’s not polite to say this. It’s not polite to say that. Well, people are dying.”

As an example, he mentioned the euphemism “bodily fluids,” used to mean semen and blood. People tend to interpret it to include saliva, tears and sweat, which do not transmit AIDS, he said.

“What you do is you create an environment that’s so confusing it makes it that much easier for us all to back into our denial,” he said.

Panelist Bill Green of Community Outreach Risk Education said he runs into a language problem in trying to teach safe sexual practices to transvestites and the leather and sadomasochistic crowd.

His effort includes urging the use of condoms, he said. His problem is finding the words to persuade.

“It goes beyond jargon and slang,” he said. “It’s difficult to get them to accept the fact that they need to use them. Gay men have never had to worry about using a condom.”

Green wanted to cut through the language problem by simply handing out samples to the men he talked to. But he couldn’t get any government agency to provide them.

Someone in the crowd asked why government had let him down.

Schram answered the question with a shrug.

“Government cannot deal with questions of sex,” he said.