Commentary : Breaking a Taboo : A journal’s no-nonsense approach to AIDS

The AIDS crisis is almost a decade old and the toll within the arts community has been catastrophic, but only now has a major national arts service organization addressed the widespread fear and confusion that AIDS inspires.

“AIDS in the Dance/Arts Work Place,” a 32-page special issue of the trade journal Update, produced by Dance/USA, offers a no-nonsense approach to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and the disease’s traumatic impact on the world of dance.

Its point? To train dance management to look at AIDS as if it were any other catastrophic illness afflicting dancers, who are feeling more vulnerable and stigmatized than ever before.

“A publication like Update could help make all of us deal with AIDS not just more compassionately, but also more justly,” says David White, executive director of New York’s Dance Theater Workshop and emcee of the recent Bessie Awards (which thoroughly addressed the crisis of AIDS and dance).

“AIDS, particularly on the national level, had always been a taboo subject in the dance world. . . . With Update, that’s changing.”

Normally, the 2,000-circulation, Washington-based Update journal deals with such subjects as dance funding, government support and taxation issues, career moves and new technologies. But Update editor Garth Tate had heard stories about dancers and AIDS as early as 1983 and hoped, he says, “to take a leadership role with Update . . . (and) be pro-active policy makers in this crisis.”

Last November, his hopes were realized. With funding from the National Endowment for the Arts’ Dance Program, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, and the members of Dance/USA, Tate compiled and edited what he called “the most gratifying experience in my career as a writer”--a booklet that deals with the “ABCs” of AIDS as if the epidemic had just entered the national consciousness.

The issue opens with a thorough, if at times emphatically basic, discussion of what AIDS is and how it’s prevented. There are statistics, charts and diagrams about the states and cities hit hardest by AIDS. (New York has the most AIDS cases with 17,997; California is at a close second with 15,185). There is also a bare bones list of basic treatments, but “alternative therapies” are left to physicians and community-based underground “buyer’s clubs.”

It includes mainstream addresses of AIDS service organizations nationwide, but is grossly incomplete when it comes to leading individuals to the community-based organizations that can best serve them.

(For example, the organizations that are overlooked in L.A. include Minority AIDS Project, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), the Women’s AIDS Project and Being Alive: a Person with AIDS Action Coalition).

Most strikingly, the publication seeks to puncture the AIDS paranoia still ballooning outside major cities by dealing with questions about possible modes of transmission among dancers. For instance, Update says that sweat does not transfer HIV, (or Human Immunodeficiency Virus, which most scientists believe causes AIDS), and dancers should not feel at risk if they share costumes. However, the sharing of dance shoes should be monitored:

“Sometimes dancers’ feet bleed, and one could conceive that if a dancer were to borrow another’s shoes that were still bloody, and she has open sores on her own feet as well, that transmission could be possible.” All the same, the publication suggests that it is unlikely that AIDS could be transmitted through shoe exchange.

Essentially, however, Update’s focus is on ethics: philosophical guidelines to coping with AIDS in the workplace. “There is no relevant difference between the way employers should treat employees with, say, lung cancer or kidney disease and the way they should treat people with AIDS or HIV infection,” it insists.

The heart of the publication is the 10-page transcript of a Dance/USA 1988 National Round Table in January 1988 called “Addressing AIDS in the Workplace,” chaired by Gary Dunning, executive director of the Houston Ballet.

Dunning counsels against “permitting prejudice to be masked as sound economic policy.” Most important, he argues vehemently against “dealing with AIDS on a case-by-case basis.” He says “the lack of a consistent and iron-clad policy could leave a company open to potential legal action and charges of unfairness.”

Anyone who harasses a co-worker about being HIV-positive should be reprimanded or eventually dismissed, says the booklet, and a company manager should not make the mistake of asking an HIV-infected dancer how she or he feels so often as to be oppressive or fatalistic. As Tate recognizes, “there is a clear distinction between AIDS and HIV.”

Update consistently counsels that, “the relevant standard is job performance, which should be applied fairly and consistently.”

Given the praise from management in the dance world, Tate hasn’t received nearly as much feedback from individual dancers. He’s worried that the “artists may have no idea what their rights are.”

His fears are well-founded. The weakness of the booklet is that it addresses AIDS as if it were an occupational hazard, avoiding the personal touch that the publi-cation itself calls for.

Update’s greatest faux pas is that in all of its 32 pages, the only person who speaks openly about having AIDS is “a well-known Hollywood hairdresser.”

While the hairdresser’s advice is well taken (“Don’t monitor my health: The most annoying thing is when people continually ask you how you are with that very concerned tone in their voice”), it’s undercut by the fact that he does not speak as a representative of dancers or their managers.

Still, Tate’s the first to admit that the publication isn’t “complete” and “the last word on the subject.” He is aware that it’s geared less to individual artists than it is to companies. “But we have to begin somewhere.”

In the dance world, the tendency is to applaud any gesture that attempts to confront the magnitude of AIDS--no matter how “safe” and non-controversial it is. In fact, the Update booklet on AIDS shows how far the dance community has yet to go and how much AIDS denial clouds any truly aggressive leadership.

If, as Tate argues, there was such a pressing need for direction during this epidemic, why wait until 1988 to publish an AIDS guide?

“It would be dishonest to suggest that there was no denial on the part of the dance community in dealing with AIDS,” Tate answers. “For years we heard horror stories--especially as regards insurance companies refusing to represent dance companies. It took even longer for dancers to talk about AIDS.”

Tate argues that a “lack of leadership on the national level” caused AIDS to be immediately stigmatized as a gay disease. “Not only did this make it difficult to be gay in the mid-’80s,” he adds, “it also made it very difficult to be a male dancer.

“I have no doubt that in many ways this publication may be somewhat dated--AIDS treatment and legislation change everyday--but there may be a dancer in Kansas somewhere who wants to take an AIDS test but is frightened about the consequences. This booklet can help him or her. It can help dancers inform their company mangers about what they should be doing to prepare for the AIDS hurricane about to hit.” Although as many people have died from AIDS in the last nine years as died in the Vietnam War, Tate says “We haven’t even seen the tip of the AIDS iceberg in this country.” “Millions of people are infected because our President did not go all out and call for AIDS education. Every corporation, every work place, will have to address the very same issues we’re addressing: How to be fair, consistent and compassionate. How do deal with finances and hysteria? How to be aggressive leaders? “My message to the dancers and company managers out there is to take the initiative and educate yourself.”

Dance/USA has received a grant from the Dayton-Hudson Foundation to reprint another 2,000 copes of “AIDS in the Dance/Arts Work Place.” It is available to dancers free of charge and to the general public for $2. Information: Dance/USA, 777 14th St., NW Washington, D.C. 20005; or call: (202) 628-0144.