Elizabeth Glaser, Activist for AIDS Treatment, Dies at 47 : Advocate: Speech telling of disease hushed Democratic Convention. She co-founded Pediatric AIDS Foundation.

Elizabeth Glaser, whose agonizing story of how she and her two children became infected with the AIDS virus brought a tearful silence to the floor of the 1992 Democratic presidential convention, died Saturday. She was 47.

She died at her Santa Monica home of the complications of AIDS, said Carol Pearlman, an associate at the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which Mrs. Glaser helped found.

Since she disclosed her tragedy to The Times five years ago, the wife of actor-director Paul Michael Glaser (of “Starsky and Hutch” fame) and upper-middle-class suburban mother had become an unlikely but highly visible lobbyist in the international battle against the disease that eventually claimed her.

Mrs. Glaser told The Times that her family’s nightmare had begun in 1981, when she was nine months pregnant with Ariel, her first child.

She had been hemorrhaging and was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where she received seven pints of blood. The baby was delivered successfully.

Weeks later, Mrs. Glaser read a newspaper article telling of the dangers of acquiring AIDS through blood transfusions. She consulted her doctor, who told her the chances of contracting the disease through a transfusion were highly unlikely.

At that time scientific awareness of AIDS was in its infancy and her physician apparently believed that the risk was minimal. She was not tested.

But in 1985 Ariel became seriously ill. Tests showed her red blood count low, but even then doctors assured the family that she would recover.

Ariel did not respond to treatment and the girl and her family were finally tested for the human immunodeficiency virus. Mrs. Glaser tested positive, and it was determined that she had passed the virus to Ariel through her milk. She also had transmitted the virus to her second child, Jake. Her husband was the only family member who remained uninfected.

“We had been dealt the worst hand of cards any family could have gotten,” Mrs. Glaser told The Times in the interview she agreed to only because the family had become aware that their story was to be published in the tabloid press.

“I thought about throwing up my hands and giving up. But we decided to play that hand offensively.”

After her daughter’s death, Mrs. Glaser--knowing that her privacy was at risk--went to Washington and cornered legislators seeking help to fight the AIDS battle and raise the public’s consciousness about who was at risk.

She had set up meetings with then-President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Kitty Dukakis and Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.

She concluded that Washington was not doing enough.

Mrs. Glaser turned to newfound friends in Congress, and because of the efforts by her and others, the budget for fighting pediatric AIDS was raised from $3.3 million to $8.8 million.

She also co-founded the Pediatric AIDS Foundation with Susan DeLaurentis and Susan Zeegen and helped raise millions of dollars for care and treatment of young AIDS patients. In eight months she acquired $2.2 million to finance 40 research grants.

In 1990 she and her husband were featured on “60 Minutes” and she was featured in a cover story in People magazine.

Then in 1992, after countless personal appearances and pleas for assistance, she was asked to share the Democratic platform in New York with a gay man who also was a Bill Clinton aide--Bob Hattoy. He too had the AIDS virus.

They followed Jimmy Carter and Jesse Jackson to the podium and after the soaring political rhetoric of those two national leaders, an uneasy quiet began to settle over the delegates.

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

The silence--captured on national television--continued as both of them spoke. Normally boisterous politicos wiped their eyes and fought off sobs so they might hear each word.

“She taught me to love,” Mrs. Glaser said of her little girl, “when all I wanted to do was hate; she taught me to help others when all I wanted to do was help myself.”

After the devastating stories had spilled over the cavernous hall, the Democrats--who prided themselves on supporting gay rights and increased funding for the AIDS struggle--broke into a sustained ovation that bystanders said was usually reserved for presidential acceptance speeches.

Mrs. Glaser, born Elizabeth Meyer in New York City, held a degree in psychology from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s degree in early childhood education from Boston University.

She had been a Head Start teacher in Denver and taught at the Center for Early Education in Los Angeles before being named director of programs and exhibits at the Children’s Museum in Los Angeles.

She met the man who was to become her second husband in 1980 when he was one of the best-known TV actors in the country. They married the same year.

Both remained dedicated to each other throughout their years-long travail. In 1989, he said: “We have grown up a helluva lot. It was either grow up or perish.”

“Lesser men would have walked,” she said very simply of him. “He didn’t (even) flinch.”

In September, in one of her final public appearances, Mrs. Glaser returned to New York for a Pediatric AIDS Foundation benefit. The weak and emaciated woman received a presidential citation from First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

On Saturday, President Clinton spoke with the Glaser family and issued a statement from the White House in which he called her “an inspiration.”

“Elizabeth confronted the challenge of AIDS . . . at a time when our government and our country were too indifferent to this illness and the people who had it. . . . We need more like her. We must honor her memory by finishing the work to which she gave everything she had.”

Shortly after Mrs. Glaser made her tragic drama public, she also made a decision to break the news to her preschool-age son and to her 91-year-old grandmother before the balance of the family learned about it from other sources.

Together, she and her husband stood before 200 parents at their son’s preschool to tell them that a boy their children played with each day had tested HIV-positive (although Jake, now 10, shows no evidence of AIDS.)

The stunned silence that followed was at first interpreted by the Glasers as another in a sequence of rejections. But then, in what the grieving parents remembered as one of the most satisfying moments in their often frustrating fight, one of the other parents raised his hand and asked:

“When can your son come and play?”

Services will be private with a memorial service pending.