2 AIDS Patients Denounce GOP as Negligent

The devastating stories of two Southern Californians and their struggles with AIDS took center stage at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night, setting off an emotionally charged response from their audience at the Democratic convention.

The normally boisterous convention floor frequently fell silent as Los Angeles residents Bob Hattoy and Elizabeth Glaser took to the podium to tell of their experiences and feelings and to attack what they contended has been the negligence of successive Republican administrations in confronting the AIDS crisis.

Glaser, who was infected with the virus through a blood transfusion and unwittingly passed the disease to her two children, commanded especially rapt attention.

Firmly and with emotion, she said: “Twenty years ago I wanted to be at the Democratic convention because it was a way to participate in our country. Today I am here because it’s a matter of life and death.”

She also talked of her daughter’s death from the disease.

“Exactly four years ago, my daughter died of AIDS. She did not survive the Reagan Administration,” Glaser said. “I am here because my son and I may not survive four more years of leaders who say they care but do nothing.

“I am in a race with the clock.”

Throughout the hall, men and women listened in silent respect, some brushing tears from their eyes. When she finished, the delegates and others in the audience erupted into one of the longest and loudest ovations any speaker at the convention has received.

Glaser was infected 11 years ago and learned later that she had passed the virus through breast milk to a daughter, Ariel, who died in 1988, and through the womb to her 7-year-old son. Her husband, television actor and director Paul Michael Glaser, is not infected.

Glaser became an AIDS activist after her daughter’s death and helped establish the Pediatric AIDS Foundation in Los Angeles.

Preceding her at the dais was Bob Hattoy, an environmental activist who learned last month that he has AIDS-related lymphoma.

Hattoy, an aide in Bill Clinton’s campaign, praised Clinton for having the “courage” to designate him as the first known AIDS sufferer to address a political convention.

“I could be an African-American woman, a Latino man, a 10-year-old boy or girl,” Hattoy said. “AIDS has many faces. And AIDS knows no class or gender, race or religion, or sexual orientation. AIDS does not discriminate.”

In line with the political message he and Glaser sought to deliver, Hattoy added: “But George Bush’s White House does.”

Hattoy charged that it “took 40,000 deaths and seven years for (former President) Ronald Reagan to say the word ‘AIDS.’ It’s five years later; 70,000 more are dead. And George Bush doesn’t talk about AIDS, much less do anything about it.

“Eight years from now there will be 2 million cases in America. If George Bush wins again we’re all at risk. It’s that simple. It’s that serious. It’s that terrible.”

Glaser said she had cried out for help and been ignored by the Administration and by people who think the disease is “not their problem.”

“When you cry for help and no one listens, you start to lose hope,” she said. “I began to lose faith in America. I felt my country was letting me down--and it was. This is not the America I was raised to be proud of.”

She said her health care bill is $40,000 a year--an impossible price to pay for someone who has no health insurance. The drugs that keep her alive are simply not available to the poor, she said.

“Is their life any less valuable? Of course not,” Glaser said. “This is not the America I was raised to be proud of--where rich people get care and drugs that poor people can’t.”

Glaser closed her remarks with a homage to her daughter, whose “wisdom shone through” even in her last year, when she could no longer walk or talk.

“She taught me to love when all I wanted to do was hate,” Glaser said. “She taught me to help others, when all I wanted to do was help myself. She taught me to be brave, when all I felt was fear. My daughter and I loved each other with simplicity. America, we can do the same.

“This was the country that offered hope . . . . We all need to hope that our dreams can come true. I challenge you to make it happen, because all our lives, not just mine, depend on it.”