Laguna Beach Mayor Fights Fear, Learns AIDS Virus Test Is Negative

Seven months after his longtime companion died of AIDS--seven months of worrying whether he had the disease too--Laguna Beach Mayor Robert F. Gentry learned Tuesday that he had tested negative for the virus that causes the deadly disease.

The news came in a brief telephone call to his doctor’s office.

He gave the nurse the number he had been assigned--00966--to assure the results were anonymous. And when she said, “Well, Bob, you’re negative,” he thanked her, hung up the phone and began to cry.

“It was very, very powerful for me because this has been on my mind since Gary was ill, but before that, since 1981, when we knew what the virus was,” Gentry said later Tuesday. Gary Burdick, a hair stylist, was Gentry’s “life partner.”

Gentry’s voice faltered, and he choked with emotion as he continued: “My first reaction, after weeping for a couple of seconds, was, ‘I wish Gary were there to share this with me.’ ”

Gentry also said the results confirmed for him that acquired immune deficiency syndrome is not spread by casual contact. After all, he said, in the months that Burdick was ill, they had shared food and dishware. And when they engaged in “very intimate contact,” he said, they took precautions. Gentry said he was thankful that these measures worked.

Hope Expressed for Others

Around Orange County, experts on AIDS said they hoped Gentry’s experience will persuade others at risk of having the disease to conquer their fears and be tested.

“I think anytime a public person like Bob takes an action like going and being tested . . , hopefully that will encourage other people to be tested” for the human immunodeficiency virus, said Tim Miller, acting director of the AIDS Response Program, an education and prevention program in Garden Grove.

Miller added that a positive test for the virus need no longer be considered “a death sentence” because drugs such as AZT can ward off pneumonia and other disabling ailments that accompany the disease.

County AIDS coordinator Penny Weismuller called Gentry’s test results “good news.” She said that he is by now past the six-month period during which, according to officials from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the blood of a person exposed to AIDS will develop antibodies to the virus.

For Gentry, 50, Orange County’s only openly homosexual elected official and an associate dean of students at UC Irvine, deciding to be tested for AIDS was an anguishing choice that he had put off again and again.

Fears Described

Several days after Burdick’s death on Jan. 24, Gentry told an interviewer, “I didn’t get tested when Gary was sick because if I had tested positive, I just couldn’t have handled that and been a good care provider.” With Burdick death, he said: “I’m scared to death. This test is my next big challenge. . . . I have to face it alone.”

In February, he told another reporter: “With Gary being sick, I could not emotionally hide the knowledge of a positive HIV test from him, and I did not want to burden him with that information either. . . . I pushed it out of my mind completely.”

Gentry, who has worked to educate others about AIDS, said then that he would be tested eventually but was not sure whether he would make the results public. “I need to talk to some people to see if it will be helpful,” he said at the time.

Gentry said Tuesday that he had for the past six months been grieving over Burdick’s death and also worrying about whether he might have AIDS or a related condition.

In June or early July, “on the spur of the moment,” he said, he visited Burdick’s doctor in Costa Mesa and had blood drawn for an AIDS test.

‘Powerful Experience’

Gentry called it “one of the most powerful experiences I have ever had.

“You sit down,” he said of his fears, “and from one little vial of blood you’re being told you’ve been infected with the HIV virus. And that can change your life at a very young age.”

The results were ready within a few days, Gentry said, but he did not get around to calling for them. There have been other things on his mind recently, he said. He was not only coping with Burdick’s death but also worrying about his mother, he said. She recently suffered a heart attack, then a stroke. He moved her into a nursing home in July, he said.

This week, however, several events prompted him to call for the results. On Monday, out of the blue, writers from two different newspapers called to ask whether he had been tested. Also on Monday, he received an audiotape from a former student at UC Irvine. On the tape, made in a social sciences class on marriage and the family, were comments by Burdick and Gentry as part of a panel discussion on homosexual relationships.

“I had not heard his voice for several months. It got me thinking,” Gentry said of Burdick. “It kind of set me straight to think more seriously of getting the results of the tests.”

So at 8:50 Tuesday morning while he was at UCI Medical Center in Orange being treated for heart disease, Gentry called from a pay phone for the results of the AIDS test.

He had been expecting the worst, and thoughts about traditional and experimental drug therapies were running through his mind, he said. Also, as a public official, he had expected that he would discuss his treatment publicly.

Grieving Continues

With the results being negative, Gentry said, he was not sure whether he would be tested again. (Some doctors recommend a second test within a year).

Meanwhile, he said, he will continue his role in AIDS education, “and hopefully I will be an example, particularly to younger people who are becoming sexually mature, that safe sex and (AIDS) prevention work, and that casual contact is not a way of getting the disease.”

Still, Gentry said, he mourns Burdick. “Since Gary died, I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night, between 3 and 4, for at least an hour or so.”

Living without Burdick, not being able to share something as important as a negative test for the AIDS virus, “is very, very hard,” Gentry said.