A Positive Vision : Through His Year-Old Magazine POZ, Sean O’Brien Strub Is Challenging the View of AIDS as a World of Suffering and Hopelessness

Lighting momentarily on a cushioned banquette at a West Hollywood cafe, his back to the wet blur of Sunset Boulevard, Sean O’Brien Strub, pub lisher and executive editor of POZ magazine, has placed his New York Times (one lifeline home) on the cherrywood table, then poured himself another cup of herb tea.

In town on business, Strub has had a long day, one of many. This morning at the Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Tomorrow he’ll host a direct-sales seminar as president and creative director of Strubco, his marketing agency specializing in the gay and AIDS markets.

The literate and provocative POZ shares the latest medical news and health advice with people living with AIDS and HIV. From the New York home offices, assistant Johnetta Alston urges him to follow some of that advice, to “calendar in” some rest, but knows he won’t.

Now, a pause, but most certainly a brief one. This Strub communicates through the language of his body. Not restless, but fluid. Eyes like pale glass, wide, aware, steadily recording yet always singularly focused. But even while feigning repose, he’s still firmly locked into activist mode.

A couple, escaping the slanting rain, take a seat at an adjacent table. As they peruse the dessert selection, Strub--in a quiet, earnest voice broken by long rests--talks about the most recent chapter in his own HIV/AIDS drama.

“In the new issue I write about coming out of the KS closet,” says Strub, 35, of AIDS-related Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. “I wrote that I’ve decided not to do anything about it for the time being. . . . They are sprouting all over me now. I have a little one on my neck now,” he says, pulling back his collar to reveal a barely visible lavender mark, smaller than a pinky nail. “I just noticed it this morning. But I have a few pretty big ones here,” he says, turning to the side and touching his white shirt at his lower back, “and on my leg and shoulder. And that’s all been in the last couple of months.” He shrugs.

The couple--both graying at the temples, someone’s mother and father--have forgotten their menus, their fancy coffees. They listen, compassionate eyes locked on the lively magnetic eyes, the handsome boyish face, the slight teller of this large and unwieldy tale.

“I suppose if I got one in the middle of my forehead, I’d be a little more conscious about doing it,” he continues. Then comes a shade of a smile. “But at least for the time being I don’t want to go through radiation. It’s about not becoming a full-time patient. It’s about having my life.”

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At the core, this is what POZ is about: Not death, but life. Not simply subsisting, but reveling. And, without falling into Pollyanna-ish traps, about changing perceptions, language and the morass of misinformation about living with and around AIDS.

Surrounded and consequently trapped by it, Strub’s largest concern is the mainstream media’s narrow view of AIDS as suffering victims left hopeless. Those images, the language of sickness, deplete what little is left--the will to live.

In one bid to counter that, choreographer Bill T. Jones, whose slightly-out-of-focus image shimmered up from the cover of the second issue, quite elegantly echoed the publication’s mission: “So I say to people if you feel you can’t have human contact (or) pleasure because of this thing, you’re doing that to yourself. Don’t blame it on AIDS. Any barrier you feel, be aware. . . . Take responsibility for your mental and physical health.”

Electing to dismantle barriers--dividing mainstream from special interest, gay from straight (for starters)--his mission is grand. But Strub, attired in a suit and tie of graduating shades of greens and tans, is not nearly as flashy as his magazine, which could be summed up as an unorthodox melange: health-care trade meets Vanity Fair.

Half the copies are distributed, even mailed, free of charge to people with HIV or AIDS. “When we started,” Strub says, “we just decided that we were never going to charge somebody for information (that) could be lifesaving.”

POZ, however, is published by his marketing concern, Strubco. Supporters and critics alike have observed that while Strub is serving an audience too often neglected, he is also tapping a market heretofore bypassed.

“He took a genre that is especially important to people with AIDS, glossed it up and made it something more marketable,” says William K. Dobbs, a New York-based AIDS and gay activist. Dobbs points to smaller publications, such as Philadelphia-based Critical Path AIDS Project, which have proved indispensable for people maneuvering through medical red tape and doublespeak, yet have received very little financial support or media attention.

“I know there are people who are upset about (POZ),” says Cory Roberts-Auli, a Los Angeles artist with AIDS, who admits that his first look was a guarded one. “I’m sort of a street activist. I was shocked to see it. I thought, ‘Oh my God, what is this?’ Then I read it and my first thought was, ‘What if you lived in Wichita, Kan., what a godsend this must be.’ ”

For activists, he says, the fight has been to make AIDS much more visible. “And looking at POZ, I think that’s been realized.”

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POZ effectively melds the latest information about AIDS and HIV treatment, testing and general health care, with smart literary columns, features and investigative articles by nationally known journalists.

“We want people who read magazines,” says Editor in Chief Richard Perez-Feria, whose resume includes Esquire, 7-Days and Miami Monthly. “We want people who read Entertainment Weekly, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, because (POZ) is written by the people who contribute to those magazines.

“We don’t just want to reach the infected, but all those affected by AIDS,” he says. “The agenda is to inform and provoke. That is important. AIDS isn’t just about disease-sorrow-death. It doesn’t have to be so heavy. It can be inspiring.”

“POZ filled an incredibly important market niche,” says Ronald Mark Kraft, editor in chief of the L.A.-based Genre magazine. “A lot of gay magazines have been trying to cover AIDS, but it had been pretty piecemeal since AIDS is not the only issue affecting the gay community.”

Although Strub says he didn’t have many requirements for the first issue, he knew he wanted the cover subject to be presented as “an attractive sexual being.” And that, Strub says, “was very, very, very challenging to people.”

The premiere issue, with cover boy Ty Ross (the gay and HIV-positive grandson of conservative icon Barry Goldwater), touched off a flurry of talk--on POZ’s letters page and elsewhere. It wasn’t Ross who turned up the heat, but journalist Kevin Sessums’ revelation.

“When I was getting updates on the story, I was teasing (Kevin) a little bit--because Ty is attractive and Kevin is attractive,” says Strub, who detected a spark. “I said: ‘Well, if you sleep with him you’ve gotta include it in the story.’ . . . He did, and there it was.”

Since then, the magazine has concentrated on assembling a wide spectrum of voices: gay and straight, white and black, Latino and Native American, male and female. Thrusting this health issue out of what has proven to be yet another closet, Strub hopes to radically tilt perceptions.

Strub, who tested positive for HIV in 1985, sets up the scenario: “If I were a woman and I had a malignant tumor on my breast and had been in remission for five years, I would be called a breast cancer survivor. But, I’ve been HIV positive for probably 16, 17 years and I’m still called terminally ill . Well . . . “ says Strub, stirring his carrot soup, “how long do I have to survive to be called a survivor rather than called terminal ?”

This is not an empty debate over semantics, he assures. “The body is a remarkably cooperative organ and if our brain is telling our body it has an expectation of terminality, the body is going to cooperate to a certain extent. That’s the message that’s hammered into people, and we’re trying to combat that with POZ.”

Early on, Strub noted that survival appeared directly linked to information.

“People who had the time and energy and access to go into the meetings and read the newsletters invariably were living longer.” Without that, “people are getting very, very poor treatment or in some cases, the wrong treatment.”

The best information came, he recalls, “mostly from the activists who were out there. Going to ACT UP every Monday night for a couple of years is sort of like a double Ph.D in AIDS.” In the late ‘80s Strub created his own nexus. Going to ACT UP/New York’s weekly meetings, Strub collected any new data that had made its way over the transom, then spent the next morning faxing it to friends across the country.

Those efforts engendered a newsletter that aimed to boil the information down, “so it wasn’t homework for people to read it.”

About 18 months ago, Strub became serious about expanding the venture into a magazine. Start-up funds came from a life insurance policy he sold. He took all the equity he had in his company and marketing agencies and borrowed from his credit cards.

Printing 100,000 copies every other month, Strub hopes the venture will ultimately be funded through subscriptions, sales and advertising. Although newsstand sales and subscriptions are high, Strub says advertising has fallen far short of their projections.

“People look at you like you are crazy when you say it’s a magazine about life with AIDS. Many advertisers don’t want to--as one said to me--’violate’ their brand name by associating it with an illness. A vitamin company told me, ‘We market our vitamins to well people, not to sick people.’ ”

But Strub, the entrepreneur, turns over this card: “Looking at it as strictly a market, they’re missing the boat. When someone finds out they’re positive, they tend to accelerate their consuming pattern to whatever level they are able,” he says. “Whether their dream vacation is a ‘round-the-world cruise or taking the Greyhound bus to Dollywood. They do it to whatever level they are able.”

Strub carefully tends his own dream. The challenge: to give a broad readership the sort of up-to-date news that has so far only been available to “the most dedicated, informed or educated activist--sort of what we call the AIDS-affected community,” in articles such as “AIDS Law--When Known HIV Exposure Occurs” and “The ABCs of HIV.”

POZ seeks to tell the tale of the epidemic through the stories of individuals. “The heroes have not been the government, the drug companies or any one activist organization,” Strub says. “Heroes have been individuals and that’s what people relate to.”

At the front, the Gazette section assembles a grab bag of short news items, medical/legal updates, picks and pans, while the POZ Partner imparts practical information about treatments, diet, products, terminology. It is here Strub chose to publish his own blood work, interpreted by a team of doctors. “I certainly don’t think it was anything particularly courageous. . . . It’s just part of the advocacy nature of everything we do. It’s education and everything else.”

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For Strub, activism is part and parcel of the fight. Co-author of two books about corporate culture; 1990 candidate for U.S. Congress (he received 45% of the primary vote); producer of the off-Broadway hit “The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me,” he doesn’t think the package too incongruous.

“I view publishing the magazine, producing the play, running for office as all different manifestations of the same activity. It’s all about social change.”

Even while growing up in Iowa City, Strub found controversy--attending anti-war protests, fund-raising for Mozambique, working with women’s rights groups.

“I knew I was a feminist long before I knew I was gay,” he admits. “I didn’t come out even to myself until I was 17 or 18 years old.” Strub now lives in Manhattan with his spouse, Xavier Morales.

“AIDS has been much more difficult and more of an impediment in my relationship to my family than being gay,” he says. “It’s painful for my parents for the obvious reasons--because they love me . . . and it’s painful to me because they have lots of kids and lots of priorities and they live in Iowa and sometimes their perspective is different.”

Strub hopes POZ can help people balance those perspectives as health and social issues become more profound. Planning issues in Spanish and for high school students, he knows both will be costly ventures. “And I don’t have much more insurance.”

Until then, he will inspire debate the best ways he knows how: in editorials, in lectures, in intimate conversation among friends. For silence is at bottom the weight slowing the push forward.

“It’s amazing how few people talk to each other: the activists, the inside political people, the researchers, the scientists. . . . As AIDS has become more institutionalized that’s perhaps inevitable. I think every sort of movement goes through a maturing process, but it’s not one of the attractive side effects.”

Indeed, the complicated business of AIDS and the many roles of Sean Strub--activist, journalist, entrepreneur--leave some on the front lines with questions. Most recently, about Strubco’s serving as consultant for Johnson & Johnson on a home HIV test kit. In the Advocate last month, Chris Bull reported that POZ had encouraged its readers to send postcards to federal officials “urging support for the kit,” while “Strub . . . acknowledges that Johnson & Johnson provides almost 5% of the combined revenue of all his business interests.”

Strub says his work with Johnson & Johnson was never a secret, and had been reported in POZ last summer. And he believes the issue goes far deeper.

“There’s some pretty good evidence that (home testing) may double the number of people who know they are positive within 18 to 24 months,” Strub says. “It’s very disturbing to see the opposition--and some of it is genuine and heartfelt, but most of it is about power and politics.”

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And still, somewhere in the middle of all this, is the search for a cure. Somehow, to Strub, that discussion feels cramped, imperfect.

“If I could just get people past, ‘Boy, if I could just get the secret: two blue ones on Wednesday and a yellow one on Thursday’ . . . and (instead) understand that the most effective treatment is a path, it’s not a pill.

“I say I don’t believe that there will be a cure for AIDS and some people say: ‘Ah, he’s lost hope,’ ” says Strub, inclining his head, gently shaking it. “Well, I think talking about a cure for AIDS is like talking about a cure for disease . It’s so broad. It’s so big. It is so multifaceted and . . . it’s driven by so many different things: by racism, by poverty, driven incredibly by malnutrition. . . .

“And sure,” says Strub, connecting the dots as if completing an effortless equation, “solve all those things and you will have a cure for AIDS.”