HIV documentary

The comment re “bug chasing” by POZ editor Walter Armstrong is nauseating in its lack of insight (“When ‘The Gift’ Is HIV,” by Robert W. Welkos, Jan. 11).: “I just think the ‘gift giving’ and ‘bug chasing,’ as sensational as they are and as interesting as they are, aren’t really a public health or a social problem. It’s just a tiny group of people.” It might as well be 1982.

Has everyone forgotten the one-man epidemic referred to as “Patient Zero” to whom hundreds of early HIV cases could be traced?

I believe we are looking at the petri dish for a super strain of HIV, more virulent and deadly than the one that is barely managed now. Who will be to blame when that happens?

I am a gay male who has observed every year of this public health crisis that was allowed to run rampant because no one wanted to hurt any feelings. That someone could make such an ignorant statement as the editor of a national magazine is dumbfounding. It has gone beyond one’s “individual right” to do what you want when it becomes a public health menace and the public has to pay for one’s treatment and support, disability and Social Security payments.

I look forward to seeing the film and hope it becomes a great success for Hogarth. At least she has had the guts to tell the truth.

Dave Gregory

Van Nuys

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Hogarth says she deliberately left crystal meth and alcohol use out of her film “because I don’t really believe that is the issue.” Drug and alcohol use are clearly major factors in irresponsible sexual behavior, yet she chose not to include them in her polemic, thereby giving the radical right ammunition to attack the very community she claims to be helping. It is irresponsible to think that this “work” will not be used to bash gay males and exploit a negative minority within a larger community that is so much more than sexual. As a gay man I am offended by her insulting comments, and as a person living with HIV I am enraged by her cavalier attitude. Hogarth seems to want her cake and eat it too at the expense of the gay community.

Skip Houston

Laguna Beach

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I’ve been involved with AIDS since 1983 when I first became a volunteer in June of that year and then hired as the first director of volunteers that December for AIDS Project Los Angeles -- a post I held until 1989.

Although I’ll turn 60 this April, I think I can relate to what is happening with those much younger than me.

Back in the mid-’80s, as a member to this day of the UCLA Men’s Study concerning HIV, I can still distinctly recall the trepidation I experienced when the HIV test became available and I finally inquired about my status. Much to my relief, I was negative. But that information, as welcomed as it was, precipitated a disconnect for me with the clients I was serving. How could I relate to these HIV- positive individuals when I was negative? It took me a while to reconcile this situation.

What the article did not address was the possibility that the stress of “waiting for the HIV shoe to drop” is more than one can bear. In other words, get it over with, let me be “poz” and move on.

Unfortunately, these younger individuals do not have the frame of reference I was exposed to, as in people constantly dying, oftentimes in a most horrible way.

I realize that young people think they are invincible, as I did. But in this day and age, they aren’t. Regrettably, I do not have the answer to make them realize that they are playing, for all intents and purposes, a version of Russian roulette.

Dan Morin

West Hollywood