Making Crucial Inroads After Naive Start : Hollywood: Powerful executives formed Hollywood Supports in 1991 after they were dismayed to learn that the industry wasn’t as enlightened regarding AIDS as they had believed. The organization has since thrived.

In an industry where last year’s charitable cause is as dispensable as last year’s blonde, Hollywood Supports has been quietly but deliberately making inroads against AIDS and sexual orientation problems in the workplace since 1991.

And in a business where the cardinal rule is that you spend other people’s money and never your own, the organization has followed its mandate precisely because it’s largely funded and overseen by its founders, Sidney Sheinberg, president of MCA, and Barry Diller, now chairman of QVC. The birth of Hollywood Supports in 1991 is a direct result of the two executives’ naivete, they say.

While Sheinberg and Diller have a reputation as two of the savviest men in the entertainment industry, both admit that they labored for far too long under a delusion: That attitudes about AIDS and homosexuality in Hollywood were more enlightened than elsewhere in the country.

This fools’ paradise was shattered in 1991 when Diller, then chairman of 20th Century Fox, was viewing footage from a four-part Fox News series on AIDS in Hollywood, which revealed some alarmingly arcane prejudices. “Is it possible that if people declare their HIV status they won’t be able to get work?” Diller asked himself. “And I thought, no, it can’t really be that bad.”

But after several disquieting reports from friends in the industry and actor Brad Davis’ posthumous letter about his own secret battle with AIDS, Diller confided his findings to Sheinberg, who was similarly nonplussed.

“I’m still accused of being naive, because I still have trouble believing that these things happen,” says Sheinberg.

The two hatched a plan for an organization that, through education, would help alter these misinformed perceptions. As part of his acceptance speech at the 1991 AIDS Project Los Angeles annual awards benefit, at which Sheinberg was lauded for his contributions, he announced the creation with Diller of Hollywood Supports.

The significance of attaching their names to the nascent organization--and the fact that they’d fund it from their own resources--was not lost on the entertainment community. “One of the good things is that there’s nobody we can’t get to,” says Diller. “And from the start we didn’t want to ask anyone for anything. By not having to raise money, we knew we wouldn’t have to compromise. We could just do it.”

Unlike other similarly well-intentioned but hopelessly muddled enterprises that are begun with a great deal of sound and fury and end up signifying nothing, Hollywood Supports has already had some far-reaching impact--most significantly in the ever-growing number of entertainment companies that now offer domestic partner benefits to their employees.

Sheinberg’s MCA led the pack, announcing his company’s new policy shortly after Hollywood Supports was begun. Since then such companies as Capital Cities/ABC, Sony Pictures, Viacom Inc., Time Warner, Home Box Office and Ticketmaster have followed suit. Only the high-tech industry is currently ranked as more progressive in this area.

Operating on a modest $450,000 annual budget, with a paid staff of four and about 100 volunteers, Hollywood Supports has been relatively politics-free, other than some of the ego struggles that emerge when too many chefs contribute to the broth. With a standing commitment from Permanent Charities of $100,000 annually for 10 years and unsolicited donations from individuals, it has been freed from having to fight for visibility in an entertainment community replete with political, health and environmental causes, according to Sheinberg.

“Absolutely nothing has gone wrong,” says Diller, unable to resist a bit of unabashed boasting. “And for that you have to acknowledge our executive director, Richard Jennings.”

Jennings, a 39-year-old former attorney, says the start-up was a bit daunting. Hollywood Supports’ initial emphasis was to disseminate solid information about AIDS as a way of combatting apprehension and misunderstanding about the immune system disease, and to tackle anti-gay attitudes that often accompanied these unfounded fears.

“We expected the seminars to be a hard sell,” says Jennings. “And they were, initially. The main obstacles were that people didn’t want to take the time. And most didn’t think they had a problem. Then a month later we’d get a panicked call from them that someone in their office was HIV-positive and could we come right away and talk to the employees.”

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Hollywood Supports has conducted almost 900 AIDS awareness seminars around the country in all areas of entertainment since 1991. In the last year, however, the organization has moved beyond that through the introduction last February of a Sexual Orientation in the Workplace program. Developed with the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, of which Jennings was a past executive director, it is the first seminar of its kind anywhere in the country.

“There were other entities dealing with HIV discrimination,” says Jennings. “But there was no one else dealing with sexual orientation as a workplace issue.”

So far Hollywood Supports has conducted about 60 seminars on how gay issues are treated in places of employment. Most are voluntary and solicited by the various studios and entertainment companies. A measure of its success is that there have been requests for their help from outside the industry including several prominent law firms, insurance companies, banks, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office and the Olympics Committee in Atlanta.

“We have pushed our frontiers,” says Sheinberg, observing that “we in our business communicate images and ideas better than other businesses do.” Yet there are challenging frontiers in even Hollywood. Tamra King, assistant director for gay and lesbian programs for the group, observes that “the industry thinks it’s open-minded--but only in a ‘not in my back yard’ way. If a lesbian of color walks in for a job, they still do mental back flips.”

The seminar facilitators--all volunteers--come mostly from different areas of the industry and often have firsthand knowledge of the problems facing gays and lesbians in the business environment. “I work in a corporate setting,” says facilitator Jim Noonan, an executive at MCA, “and I know how badly these seminars are needed. I just wish they’d been around five years ago.”

To those who say that a person’s sexual orientation is his private life and private business, Noonan says, “We always turn that around and show that work is about their personal life. That if they’re married with kids, they bring their personal life into the workplace. That makes them realize that some people don’t feel comfortable sharing their lives with their co-workers. That impacts on the teamwork that is crucial in most offices.”

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The seminars focus on aspects of inappropriate behavior in the workplace, which inevitably brings up other areas of discrimination and sexual harassment. Some of the more challenging participants have been those who think “that their workplace environment is perfect,” according to Noonan.

He relates the story of a senior executive who, toward the end of one seminar attributed the perception of discrimination to “gays and lesbians making excuses because they’re not successful.”

“That was scary, because he was a senior manager,” says Noonan. “He was more dangerous than the people who don’t get it at all. He thinks he’s open. In reality, he’s not.”

Another bonus of Hollywood Supports’ efforts has been the mushrooming number of gay and lesbian support groups at large companies, and perhaps the comfort level of all gays and lesbians in the company. It also serves as an accessible sounding board for day-to-day problems that may arise.

The next step, say Sheinberg and Jennings, is to broaden the domestic partner benefits to include the industry’s guilds and unions. Also, adds King, the seminars have largely reached white-collar employees and she would like to take it out to all workers in the business, including TV and film crews. The economic practicalities of having access to crews given the demands of their work schedules have thus far been a roadblock.

“The most pressing issue right now is working with creative people in the industry who want to be involved in awareness of AIDS prevention to get the attention of young people,” says Jennings. He cites the large increases in HIV infection among men and women in their early 20s.

Diller says he aspires to a time when Hollywood Supports will have made itself obsolete. “I hope it doesn’t always have to exist.”

But adds, Sheinberg, “I don’t see the issues of educating people about AIDS and diversity in the workplace going away any time soon.”