Women Speak Out on Effects of AIDS : Books: Anthology emphasizes that gay white men are not the only targets of fatal virus.

Tema Luft, a 36-year-old telephone company employee, took pride in never missing a day of work. She exercised five days a week, watched her diet and didn’t drink or smoke.

Then her doctor told her she was infected with the AIDS virus.

“I kept saying, ‘This is all a mistake,’ ” she recalls. “It’s not supposed to get people like me. I’m not gay. I’m not a man. I don’t do drugs.”

It was no mistake. Luft, of Baltimore, now believes she was infected during a two-year sexual relationship with a former state trooper.

“My doctor said the man could have used drugs or he could be bisexual and that never occurred to me,” she says. “You can’t judge a book by its cover.”

Luft is one of 41 women who tell their stories in “AIDS: The Women,” an anthology from Cleis Press, a small publisher of feminist works in Pittsburgh and San Francisco.

Like Luft, some of the women in the book have been infected by acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Some have watched a husband, son or other loved one die of AIDS, and others are working to stop the disease from spreading.

All of the stories challenge the myth that women are largely unaffected by the disease because they are just 9% of the 99,000 adult AIDS cases reported in this country.

“AIDS is not just a disease affecting white gay men,” says Ines Rieder, co-editor of the book. “It’s something that concerns all of us, including women, and not just some particular risk group. Women really share in this disease.”

In New York City, AIDS is the leading cause of death among women aged 25 to 39, according to the city’s health department. Besides killing these women, the disease is infecting their newborn children, who often die following a short, painful life.

AIDS is caused by a virus that damages the body’s immune system, leaving victims susceptible to infections and cancer.

It is spread most often through sexual contact, needles or syringes shared by drug abusers, infected blood or blood products, and from pregnant women to their offspring.

Luft’s ordeal began more than two years ago when a co-worker noticed a lump on her neck. Three doctors were unable to determine why her lymph nodes were swollen. A fourth doctor finally tested her for the AIDS virus in February, 1987.

Since then, she has continued to work as a technician at C&P; Telephone Co. despite chronic diarrhea, fevers and fatigue.

The job helps her forget.

“I had long-term plans and I don’t any more,” she says. “I’m never going to have a relationship. I obviously never could consider having children.

“It’s like, ‘Gee, do I keep working? Do I die at the phone company?’ ”

Despite the opposition of her mother and other relatives, she went public with her story to help other women.

“I wish more women like me would come forward,” she says. “I’m not going to say it’s easy. I took a lot of heat from my family, my friends and some business establishments.”

Luft has been thrown out of two beauty shops where she had her nails manicured and “got nicely uninvited” from a baby shower when the father-to-be learned she carried the AIDS virus. Still, she continues to speak at schools and anywhere else she is invited.

“Women are just not aware that their partners could be IV (intravenous) drug users or could be bisexual,” she says. “Let’s face it, the average man is not going to come home and say to his partner, ‘By the way honey, I was with this guy last night.’ ”

Lynn Hampton, a 39-year-old former prostitute, writes in the book about her experiences tracking down prostitutes in Atlanta to hand out condoms and test for the AIDS virus as part of a federal study.

One 23-year-old prostitute told Hampton she bought used, bent needles to shoot cocaine into her veins and laughed at the suggestion she should be concerned about the threat of AIDS.

“Honey, I’m amazed I’m alive right now,” the woman told Hampton. “I’ve got to come up with $400 each and every day, just to put in my arm. . . . That’s what I have to worry about, not some disease that may kill me in five years. Get real.”

Another woman, Judi Stone of San Francisco, watched her homosexual 19-year-old son, Michael, die of AIDS in 1984. He had told her that after he died and was cremated he wanted her to be creative with his ashes.

“I used them as fertilizer and I planted three bottlebrush (bushes),” she wrote. “I believe in recycling. Life goes on in different forms.”

Rieder, 34, also of San Francisco, began considering how women are affected by AIDS after spending three months at the bedside of a friend who died of the disease in 1986 in Paris.

“You expect to grow old with your friends,” she says. “You have this idea that you’ll be 70 and sitting around a kitchen table chatting. AIDS really takes young people away.”

Rieder says she agreed to work on the book after research convinced her that men have been the focus of most books, television documentaries and news stories concerning AIDS.

“Women cannot afford to say we’re not going to deal with the question of AIDS because it does not concern us,” she said. “That doesn’t correspond to reality any more.”