City AIDS Official Resigns for Health, Personal Reasons

Dave Johnson, Los Angeles’ first AIDS coordinator, is resigning, both for health reasons and a desire to be a “full-time activist” in the battle against the fatal disease.

Johnson was appointed to the $45,000-a-year city post in July, 1989, to help address housing, education and medical needs of AIDS victims.

In a statement Tuesday, Mayor Tom Bradley said Johnson “has been compassionate, forthright, and determined in his efforts to improve access to AIDS education and treatment to those who might otherwise not receive this assistance.”

Johnson, 35, himself was diagnosed with AIDS-related complex three years ago. In an interview Thursday, he said he had been taking treatments, such as the drug AZT.

“The existing treatments only last two to three years,” the Van Nuys resident said. “For me, some of the existing treatment options are wearing off. The disease is progressing.”

Johnson has lost 15 pounds from his normal 185-pound weight in the last six weeks and, he added: “It’s very difficult to keep a 50-hour-a-week pace running temperatures every day.”

A tall, dark-haired man with rings under his eyes from evident fatigue, Johnson spoke in his office at the Community Development Department.

The room was simply furnished, with no personal touches, except a bulletin board filled with lists of AIDS-related “tasks” to accomplish. People who know Johnson say such “tasks” as public advocacy, housing, and public awareness have occupied most of his time.

“He knew there was so much to be done and obviously it’s taken a toll on his health,” said Rick Abeyta, associate director of Being Alive, a Hollywood-based AIDS support group, after learning of Johnson’s resignation. “It’s disheartening.”

Johnson said he will stay in the job until September, when he hopes a successor will be in place. But he still plans to “be involved, as a writer and as an activist. . . .

“I see this as a freeing thing. I can devote myself full time to activism, as I have the energy.”

Although he was in the coordinator’s job--which he believes is the only one in the country held by someone from the AIDs-affected community--for only a year, Johnson said, “I feel secure a firm foundation has been laid.”

The city has made several advances in the battle against the disease, Johnson said, including:

* $2 million of city funds budgeted for construction of AIDS hospices, or other shelters for victims.

* $85,000 in the last fiscal year, and $500,000 in the 1990-91 fiscal year, allocated for the distribution of AIDS prevention kits--including condoms and bleach for sterilizing needles used by intravenous drug users; early treatment and awareness programs in minority communities such as South-Central and East Los Angeles.

Johnson also brought attention to the converging issues of AIDS and homelessness.

“We’re finding alarming rates of HIV positive among the chronically homeless in places like Skid Row,” he said, “as high as 20%.”

Johnson also sought to expand services to minority sufferers of AIDS, among whom, he said, “the disease is progressing faster, because of a lack of access to information and treatment.” At the same time, he added, “People with color will soon be the majority of people with AIDS.”

Johnson believes AIDS awareness is “mainly a matter of communication.” He said it is a constant battle to get people to recognize that it is “their problem. People don’t want to look at it, first because of who it affects, and because nobody wants to look at a frightening, contagious, fatal illness. That’s human nature.”

Johnson first became an activist for gay and lesbian rights in the early 1970s as a student at UCLA, he said, heading the UCLA Gay Students Union and helping to create the first Gay and Lesbian Awareness Week, which has become an annual campus event.

By the early 1980s, Johnson had taken on a “mainstream, fairly regular career path” as a data processing project manager for May Co. department stores. “ I settled on a wonderful relationship,” he said, “and then friends began to die. . . .”

First his lover, and then an old college friend, succumbed to AIDS. Johnson quit his job in 1987 to work against the disease.

“I remembered my old political activism . . . ,” he said. “The analogy I used was how the war must have been for my parents’ generation. . . . I had to enlist until it’s over just as my father did after Pearl Harbor was attacked.”

Despite his accomplishments, Johnson said he believes even more activism is needed now, “more likely in the streets, which is where the battle is going.”

In the past year, in fact, Johnson has been arrested three times while participating in public demonstrations for more medical treatments and more funding for AIDS patients. Last month, he was among seven protesters arrested at a county Board of Supervisors’ meeting, part of an ongoing set of demonstrations to persuade board members to increase funding for AIDS services. He faces a city attorney’s hearing in August for disrupting a public assembly.

“The epidemic is getting worse and the government is turned off and the media has been turned off,” Johnson said. “The only thing that works is taking to the streets. I think there will have to be much more civil disobedience in the best tradition of the civil rights movement.”

Such tactics, Johnson believes, are the only way to break the tide of indifference toward the disease and its victims.

Many people in power, he said Thursday, “do understand what a holocaust this is. And it’s fine with them.”

“I think, ultimately, the gay community and other communities affected by this disease have to face the fact and mount an eloquent, powerful political response.”