Amid Tensions, L.A. AIDS Group Evokes Love, Anger : Health: AIDS Project L.A. deals with grief and high expectations. Improvement needed, officials concede.

To stroll past the handsome first-floor exhibit in AIDS Project Los Angeles’ rambling new building is to get a sense of what people love and loathe about the place.

There, in the photo blowups and big-print text, is the remarkable story of an organization that in a little more than a decade has evolved from a volunteer hot line run out of a borrowed closet into an institution rich enough--and some say, misguided enough--to spend $50,000 on a display of its own short history.

Second only to New York’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis in size and budget, APLA represents the face of AIDS charities to much of the Southern California public. Every year thousands trudge through the shabby streets of Hollywood for the organization’s AIDS walk. Thousands more crowd into Universal Amphitheatre for the annual Commitment to Life benefit, an evening so thick with flashy stage shows and Hollywood glitterati that it rivals the Academy Awards.

Within the local AIDS and gay communities, perceptions of APLA are far more complex and frayed. There are those who call it their salvation and those who vow to never give it another red cent. The disaffected talk of an agency grown aloof and unwieldy--too concerned with glitz and fund raising and not enough with clients and staff.

Woven into those notions are all the frictions and frustrations that riddle what is ambivalently referred to as “the AIDS industry.”

Along with dedication and caring, there is turf protection, bickering and jealousy. There is smoldering fury over the widening circle of disease and death that transforms the young and able-bodied into gaunt, diapered figures curled into fetal positions. There is tension between gay and straight, between the haves and have-nots.

In this landscape, APLA is an inviting target, burdened with perhaps unrealistic expectations and irresolvable grief. Yet even while APLA leaders complain that the agency is often unjustly criticized, they concede the need for improvement.

There is a new executive director. Programs are being reworked. Efforts are being made to mend relations with other AIDS agencies and adjust to the tumultuous growth that has left APLA with more than 4,000 clients, a $20-million budget and a headquarters replete with security guards and parking attendants.

“We’re making headway,” says Dana Miller, APLA’s new board chairman. “It’s not as fast as people would like, but I think the criticism of yesterday is not as valid as it was.”

*

Paul Gronberg sits with a cup of coffee under the awning covering the back entrance of APLA’s Vine Street building in Hollywood. It is a Tuesday night and the parking lot is full. Volunteers are training, support groups are meeting, benefits counselors are explaining the mysteries of government forms.

Gronberg rattles off the programs he uses, sounding like a mini-catalogue of APLA services. There are about 20 of them, most tending to the non-medical needs of people with AIDS and HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The agency runs everything from Southern California’s major AIDS hot line to a lobbying program and AIDS prevention workshops.

This evening Gronberg is attending his support group for people with HIV. Other days he gets groceries from the food bank and calls the agency’s client line for advice on untangling the cobweb of government and private programs he needs to survive.

He pauses. Then, remembering something else, he blurts out, “My teeth! My teeth!”

He opens his mouth into a gaping yawn and points. “See,” he commands.

“They fixed my teeth. They were very good,” he says of the dentists.

It took eight visits to APLA’s dental clinic to make up for 15 years of neglect.

“I was a drug addict, it’s not high on the list,” explains Gronberg, who came to Los Angeles a year ago after fleeing San Francisco. So many AIDS deaths there, he says, it seemed like Vietnam.

“I hear people bitch a lot (about APLA) and I heard them bitch a lot in San Francisco,” Gronberg says. “I guess they just need to go to Carson City, Nev., and get their AIDS services there.”

Gronberg is happy with APLA. He has been given food, dental fillings and counseling, all for free. How, he wonders, can one complain about that?

There are, in fact, many clients who are happy with APLA.

A 26-year-old hairstylist recently diagnosed with HIV says he has stopped by the building simply to say “Hi,” to be in a place where he does not feel so suffocated by the fear you can see in his eyes.

He has just been to a workshop on how to fill out forms for Social Security benefits, something he had not planned on doing for another 40 years.

“There are so many things I’m not ready to do and have to,” he says quietly. “You know they’re giving you support, a chance to keep fighting, for survival.”

But there are also plenty of people whose involvement with APLA has left them chewing a cud of bitterness and anger.

“Any time you have a problem and you go to a case manager you know she’s going to tell you she can’t help, or call next week,” grumbles a commercial artist on disability who has been an APLA client for the past year.

Waiting to pick up his groceries in the food bank, he sneeringly recites his complaints.

It took the legal department four months to hook him up with a “real lawyer.” By then, he had lost his lover’s estate to the man’s family, who successfully contested his partner’s will.

None of the three “buddies” he was assigned through the buddy program--which pairs clients with volunteers who call and visit--worked out. He doesn’t like the food bank fare, too many canned goods and not enough fresh fruit.

“You can be treated like dirt,” he continues. “It’s an agency that could really do much better. Maybe too big, getting too big,” he muses.

Cory Roberts went to APLA in 1992 and 1993, after years of AIDS activism.

“When I became very sick and lost my job and my apartment and my car, they weren’t there to help. They really weren’t,” he says wearily. “I felt like a nuisance when I called.

“You go in there and you feel like cattle,” he adds. “That was my experience and I left.”

In making that choice, Roberts has a good deal of company. A number of APLA clients and unhappy employees have gone to smaller--and from their perspective--friendlier AIDS organizations in the region.

*

Jimmy Loyce speaks rapidly and forcefully. He is all business--no time for chitchat.

A veteran social services administrator from San Francisco, Loyce, 46, assumed the executive director’s job in January. He carries the high hopes of the board of directors that he can help redefine APLA’s role, repair its fractious relations with other AIDS organizations and, along the way, fix its festering management problems.

“I think change is necessary and has occurred and it will continue to occur,” Loyce says. “I am not going to accept the same ol’ warmed-over matzo ball soup,” he adds, repeating the message he says he delivered to his managers.

Finding a new recipe won’t be easy.

So many executive directors have come and gone that there is a 7-Eleven joke: seven executive directors in APLA’s 11 years of existence. (The number is actually nine, counting acting directors.)

Not only is there a history of friction between staff and administration--”management is often brazen, insulting and unpleasant,” is the way one worker put it--but employees worry that reorganization will cost some of them jobs.

Loyce “came into a bed of alligators, he really did,” observed another staffer.

So far, Loyce has not lost any limbs to the snapping.

Indeed, the board--which quickly became disenchanted with his predecessor, Lenny Bloom--remains generally supportive of its current executive director.

To many on the staff, however, Loyce has yet to make much of a mark. “It’s depressingly more of the same,” a third employee said of management’s tone.

“I have no intention of jumping out there and making a big splash,” responds Loyce, who previously worked as associate director of the San Francisco Department of Public Health AIDS office. Referring to both the perception and the reality of APLA, he says, “I’m looking at a three-year journey just to get it changed in some real way.”

Whatever he does, there will be detractors. APLA is constantly being pulled in contradictory directions.

It is condemned for trying to do too much and for not doing enough. For years it was criticized as being the province of middle-class gay white men. Now that it no longer is, gay men complain that it is losing touch with its founding base. AIDS activists deride the star-studded fund-raisers as inappropriate to a cause steeped in death, and then covet the money they reap.

Whether profound or not, change is in the wind, spurred in part by a 1993 consultants’ report that gave the agency mixed grades. Some programs, such as benefits counseling, the food bank and dental clinic, were praised. Others were faulted for not being responsive enough to clients.

Against that background, board members say they are taking seriously a mantra that APLA leaders have chanted for years but done little about: That the agency should not try to be all things to all people. “Let’s put that Pollyanna dream away forever,” says film producer Steve Tisch, who during his two years as board chairman lured such Hollywood powerbrokers as studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg and QVC Chairman Barry Diller onto the board, greatly strengthening its fund-raising clout.

“Let’s really acknowledge . . . what we do well and what we don’t do well,” continues Tisch, who passed the chairmanship to Miller last month but remains on the board. “We have been, I think, much more open today to let other (AIDS organizations) do things that we don’t do effectively.”

Some revamping has already occurred. The client loads of case managers are being trimmed to more workable levels--though that has prompted complaints from clients who are being dropped. Alterations to the food bank operation are more popular. Grocery pickup was streamlined and a San Fernando Valley food bank site was expanded. Other programs are still being evaluated to determine how they might be revised.

Outside the agency, Loyce is making overtures to other AIDS groups, attempting to chip away at the resentment and rivalry that have marked their dealings with APLA. For years, smaller organizations have accused APLA of being an arrogant bully that gobbles up the public’s donations, refuses to share its riches and spends too much money on fund raising and administration.

APLA’s Hollywood connections have given it visibility and fund-raising powers that other agencies can only fantasize about. The annual Commitment to Life gala, started seven years ago with the help of Elizabeth Taylor, raised more than $4 million in a single evening last January--more than the entire annual budget of some AIDS groups.

“There are so many AIDS agencies around Los Angeles that are so strapped for cash they can’t even buy an extra computer,” says Keith Brier, a former board member of Being Alive, a comparatively tiny organization that runs support groups and a speakers’ bureau. “When I went into APLA I saw rows of computers that weren’t being used. . . . The mentality was, this is ours and we’re going to keep it,” complained Brier, who worked briefly at APLA last year.

APLA has begun doling out more money to other organizations, nearly $600,000 in this year’s budget. But it clearly does not intend to become a bank for other Southern California AIDS agencies.

“We’re not financiers,” Miller emphasizes. “That’s not our job.”

Instead the buzzword is collaboration: working with other groups to avoid program duplication and help them develop services in their own geographic areas, whether by giving them seed money, staff help or assistance in applying for grants. There is also talk of establishing an AIDS coalition, under which the roles of different agencies would be formally defined. That way, the theory goes, the collective could ensure that people with AIDS get what they need.

Given the history of competitiveness and the size of some egos in the AIDS service world, it remains to be seen if true collaboration is possible. But there are signs of a thaw.

“Suddenly program directors at APLA who were being very reticent about working with us are calling us,” said Lorri Jean, executive director of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center. “I think Jimmy has made a tremendous amount of progress.”

Others are skeptical. “With all the rhetoric about collaboration . . . I don’t think any practical strides have been taken,” said Michael Weinstein, president of AIDS Healthcare Foundation.

As for what APLA does with its money, the agency’s most recent federal tax forms--for fiscal years 1991, 1992 and 1993--show that 35% to 37% of its total expenditures were devoted to fund raising and administration. The comparable 1993 figure for Gay Men’s Health Crisis was 30%.

Bill Misenhimer, APLA’s chief financial officer and one of its first executive directors, agrees that fund-raising costs are too high.

“I think we have to shift our focus from being so heavily reliant on these expensive events and donor acquisition programs” such as direct mail solicitation, he says, citing cheaper ways of raising money: getting it from major donors, corporations and foundations.

The board’s desire to move in that direction is said to be a reason for last summer’s departure of development director Bill Jones. Jones had an extremely successful tenure--the budget more than doubled during his six years at APLA--but a hefty chunk of that income growth stemmed from special events.

*

It has been a long 11 years since APLA’s beginnings. Death has been the one constant as the expanding epidemic has foisted often chaotic growth and change upon the agency.

The middle-class white gay male caseload has evolved into a client base that is 7% female, 26% Latino and 18% African American. There are diaper-changing tables in the restrooms for infected mothers with babies.

Homeless drug addicts with AIDS park their shopping carts outside the front entrance and nap in the lobby under the large pale letters that proclaim the building Geffen Center, after David Geffen, the record and film producer who donated $1 million toward the purchase and renovation of the one-time television studio.

The Los Angeles County death toll from AIDS now exceeds 17,000, a number that includes not only APLA clients but staff members and half of the agency’s four founders.

Thom Mosley remembers many of them, though he confesses that the more recent deaths are all a blur. “I was part of that nucleus of people who are all dead,” says Mosley, who spent eight years at APLA before leaving in January. He has escaped HIV, but sometimes wishes he had gone with the others.

“It’s so boring now,” he says with a slight sigh. He is nostalgic not only for the libertine, pre-AIDS era but for the good ol’ days of APLA.

“It’s such a surrealistic time as I look back at it,” he recalls. “We were sort of stumbling in the dark. It was a seductively stressful period. You could hardly wait to go to work.”

Now, he says, APLA is like the Red Cross, a bulky, entrenched bureaucracy fighting an entrenched disease. He left angry, no longer willing to work in such a place.

He has since mellowed a bit. He returned for the first time last summer and was surprised at his reaction. When you see people leaving the dental clinic and the food bank, he allows, it helps balance out the failures and missteps.

He will remember APLA, he says, with fondness, remorse and “hopefully not so much rage.”

More AIDS Information

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A Helping Hand

AIDS Project Los Angeles is the largest private provider of AIDS-related social services in California and the second largest in the nation. It offers about 20 programs, most of them dealing with the non-medical needs of people with AIDS and HIV. Here is a look at the organization.

EXPENDITURES Current annual budget: $20 million Staff: 220 Clients: 4,300 Founded: 1983 Program services: 65% Fund raising: 31% Administration: 4% ***

MAJOR PROGRAMS (In millions of dollars) Home health care: $2.9 million* Food bank: $1.8 million Education: $1.8 million Case management: $1.6 million Public policy: $1.2 million** Dental clinic: $1.1 million Mental health: $0.8 million

* APLA contracts with professional services to provide at-home nursing and attendant care for people with AIDS

** covers federal, state and local lobbying on AIDS issues

Note: Expenses based on fiscal year 1993 filings with the Internal Revenue Service and IRS records

Source: APLA, IRS records