Belinda Mason; Served on AIDS Commission

Belinda Mason, a mother who used her position on a presidential commission to dramatize the plight of AIDS victims far different from herself, died Monday of AIDS-related pneumonia.

Mrs. Mason, the only AIDS-infected member of the National Commission on AIDS and an outspoken critic of President Bush’s AIDS research policy, was 33.

Mrs. Mason, who contracted the disease through a blood transfusion, died at Vanderbilt University Medical Center here, said hospital spokesman Doug Williams.

Her husband, Stephen Carden, said she had been hospitalized since Wednesday.

“She brought a depth of compassion and humanity to the National Commission on AIDS that will be sorely missed,” said the commission’s head, Dr. June Osborn.

In an article in the Boston Globe last year, Mrs. Mason said she had become an “AIDS poster child” because she contracted the disease in a socially acceptable way rather than through “the messy realities of sex and drugs.”

“Puritanical squeamishness,” she wrote, “is merely the surface expression of a more profound and ugly truth: that racism and homophobia” resulted in a sluggish national response to the epidemic of AIDS.

A Bush Administration official had told her she was appointed to the AIDS commission because she was “palatable--like mashed potatoes and gravy,” she wrote.

In criticizing Bush’s stance on AIDS, she contended that the Administration treated the AIDS crisis as a moral rather than public health issue.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by two children, Polly, 8, and Clayton, 4, her parents and two brothers.