SCLC Honors Physician to the Poor

The day that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, German Maisonet was studying in his dorm at Columbia University in New York City. From his window, he could see the first flames of the Harlem riots.

At that moment in 1968, Maisonet decided to become a doctor. “I was young black man born in Puerto Rico, wondering how not to be a mixed-up gay kid,” he recalls. “Yet all I could think about was what would happen to people less privileged than me now that an era in civil rights had ended. I made a promise to serve the neediest.”

Twenty-two years after he saw those fires from his ivory tower, the 43-year-old Maisonet, who practices medicine in East Los Angeles as well as in prisons in Northern and Southern California, has gained national prominence for being “the poor person’s doctor”--and one of L.A.’s leading AIDS experts.

Today, on King’s birthday, Maisonet will be honored for “following in the footsteps” of the civil rights leader. And that honor will come from the very organization King founded: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). When he receives the annual Drum Major award at a 1,800-person black-tie dinner at the Bonaventure Hotel, Maisonet says he’ll show his pride by wearing a silk African caftan.

The banquet will be attended by many of the nation’s black leaders. Previous recipients of the award include: actress Cicely Tyson, radio personality Casey Kasem, congressman Robert Farrell, Brotherhood Crusade founder Danny Bakewell, and singer/composer Stevie Wonder.

“The award is for an individual who uses his or her professional pursuits to advance causes of peace, justice and human dignity,” says SCLC executive director Dr. Mark Ridley-Thomas.

Adds Michael Gottlieb, who is credited with being the first physician to describe AIDS as a new disease in 1981: “German isn’t just one of the finest doctors in the country, but the most moral. He’s helped those whom society considers pariahs and has often gone without getting paid. The man’s a saint.”

But sainthood has its drawbacks. Acting as an advocate for the poor hasn’t exactly made Maisonet rich. Nor has it made him glamorous.

“I have had a rich life by helping the poor,” he says, adding a comical afterthought: “Little did I know that this would make me poorer than them!” Then, a clipped rejoinder: “When you’re in the AIDS trenches, you learn from Gandhi and Dr. King that getting a new fur isn’t going to make the world any better.”

Over the last decade, Maisonet has drafted public and private AIDS grants, helped the Rev. Carl Bean found the Minority AIDS Project, acted as medical director to recovery houses in Los Angeles, advocated on behalf of AIDS patients in governmental hearings, run his own practice for IV drug users, and, last fall, set up the first AIDS program in a U.S. prison.

During a typical day at Maisonet’s East Los Angeles practice, a stream of devoted, if downtrodden, patients came to see the physician who took them as they were: insured or not, sober or not.

A friend wheeled Victor, a Latino patient, into Maisonet’s crowded office, which was adorned with posters of King. Although Victor’s legs were paralyzed, the patient retained his powerful build. When Victor saw his physician in the waiting room, he began to cry quietly. A group of patients crowded around their comrade.

Without a word, Maisonet bent down and examined the purplish bumps of Kaposi’s sarcoma--a skin cancer brought on by AIDS--on Victor’s arm. Maisonet asked Victor about his wife, and his children while he examined his patient.

Later, the doctor said that he was using the “emotional opening” as an opportunity to find out what motivated Victor’s impromptu visit: Was it guilt over backsliding into drug use, or despair over the illness, which was proceeding relatively slowly? Maisonet found out that Victor, a bisexual IV drug user, was “clean,” but feeling “down.”

“ Estoy orgulloso , I am proud of you,” Maisonet told Victor, who beamed. “It’s like my alcoholics have taught me--one day at a time. If you can keep your sobriety under control, we can do our best to tackle this virus.”

Maisonet developed his renowned bedside manner during years as a specialist in childhood diseases. He worked in the Pediatrics Department of Kaiser Permenente Harbor City as a pediatric hematologist-oncologist from 1977 to 1985. Dr. Neil Schram, a noted AIDS specialist at that hospital, calls Maisonet “one of the finest diagnosticians I have ever known.”

But there is another, more acerbic side of Maisonet. He’s never disguised his disgust over government’s inability to educate its citizens about adopting safer sex practices to avoid contracting AIDS.

“If you are straight,” he once railed at a public health hearing, “get down on your knees and thank God he made gays. It’s from them you’ve gotten your AIDS information, not your government.”

In 1987, Maisonet--along with Bean, the ACLU and SCLC--filed a highly publicized lawsuit against the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, charging them with discriminating in their funding for AIDS education in the black community.

Maisonet admits that “there is no love lost now” between him and two of Los Angeles’ most prominent black AIDS leaders: Bean and Dr. Wilbert Jordan, a leading AIDS doctor based at Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center.

Bean agrees that he and Maisonet “parted ways at Minority AIDS Project” after “a mutual agreement that we would work better if we worked apart.” And Bean says that some differences in approach exist between between Maisonet, who has worked at several different jobs over the decade, and Jordan, who has stayed at one.

Bean and Jordan were two other nominees for the Drum Major award. There are those in the black community who say that Bean and Jordan may have been the more deserving recipients, a charge that SCLC’s Ridley-Thomas says he has heard, “but won’t dignify with a response.”

Maisonet says that “the usual disputes that go on within oppressed groups” made him “pull out of the public arena for a while” in 1986 and set up a private practice.

But Maisonet couldn’t stay out of the public arena when a controverisal AIDS issue arose. He has been seen on local TV news, assailing the county supervisors for refusing to approve a 1987 plan presented by their own AIDS commission to distribute clean needles and bleach to IV drug users. “The virus isn’t impressed with you, supervisors,” he said on camera. “And neither are we.”

“I don’t like indulging in paranoia,” Maisonet says later, “but blacks and Latinos in the inner city interpreted the supervisor’s action as a nod of approval to the spread of the disease in their communities.” Last fall, he realized there was a way of implementing his vision for treating all AIDS patients on a broad scale and took a sabbatical from his practice to set up the country’s first prison AIDS program--in Northern California’s Vacaville facility.

Maisonet may make his greatest impact on the way health care is administered to the underprivileged as chief of HIV services at Vacaville’s Correctional Medical Facility--the nation’s largest medical facility within a jail. “The only problem is that I had to go to jail to do it,” Maisonet says.

HIV is the virus believed to cause AIDS. Most doctors, including Maisonet, are abandoning the term “AIDS” in favor of the more all-encompassing “HIV disease,” which takes into account the virus’ 7-to-10-year incubation period. “Our point is to treat HIV early before symptoms arrive so that you can delay, and maybe prevent, a person from coming down with AIDS while also teaching people how not to spread HIV,” says Maisonet.

“This philosophy makes our jail look light years ahead of medical approaches in L.A. where uninsured, law-abiding people don’t have access to care. If you don’t intervene medically while a person still shows no symptoms, then the one million Californians said to be infected will die.

“It’s ironic that a poor person has to go to jail to be treated like a human being in this country,” he adds.

“Not only is it humane to prevent unnecessary AIDS hospitalizations,” he argues, “it’s cost effective.”

For Maisonet’s part, he feels, “AIDS has been a blight for the gay community. But compared to the way it’s going to affect blacks and Latinos, the white, gay male experience will be a breeze.

“White gay agencies have never been able to deal with the blacks and Latinos, even if they are gay,” he says. “And straight black and Latino leaders haven’t heard of a gay person of color. Homophobia is alive and well in the black and Latino community.”

Has Maisonet ever been subject to it?

“Moi?” he laughs.

When he first began establishing his prison AIDS unit last September, Maisonet says the rumor spread among inmates that he was gay. Even a few began to call him “mother.” That didn’t faze him. But one day, while Maisonet was advising the men how to avoid contracting sexually transmitted diseases, a tough-talking bystander murmured “queer” under his breath.

Maisonet pulled the prisoner aside and said:

“ ‘I find it interesting that here I am, a man of color in a position of leadership, and here you are, a man of color trying to put me down in front of other men of color--what does that say about you? Don’t you think it’s time our people deserved better than this?’

“He was as cooperative as could be from then on,” Maisonet says.

“Of course, it’s a great honor to be doing this work for these guys. I’m not judgmental. My job is to administer care.”

Now he’s getting recognition for the care. It’s an honor to receive the King award, he says, then he quotes one of his favorite lines used against his detractors: The recognition may feel great, but the virus isn’t impressed.