page 4 - Out in the Mountains

A EDS its EL

by Gwen Shervington

As of the summer of I984, 340 women
in the U.S. between the ages of 20-40 had
AIDS. Of this total, 50% were black, 24%
white, 23% hispanic and 3% other. Over
half of these women were l.V. drug usercs
and over one-third were “other” which
includes women who had received blood
transfusion and women who had sexual
relations with men in the high risk groups.
People who are in high risk groups for
AIDS are I.V. drug users, sexual partners of
people at high risk, and blood transfusion
recipients.

Lesbians who aren't I.V. drug users‘

appear to be at the lowest risk of
contracting AIDS, but this has not prevented
us from being victims of the homophobic
backlash associated with the disease.
Lesbians are included in the legislation
designed to limit the sexual freedom of gay
men because we too are considered perverts.
The loss of sexual freedom is a lesbian issue.

Today about 7% of the U.S. cases and
50% of the non-U.S. cases are women. While
women at AIDS conferences do get together
to talk about women and AIDS, minimal
organizing is done around the needs of our
sisters exposed to the disease. Why? One
reason is burnout from other work. Another
reason is that people generally don't respond
to the urgency of AIDS until someone they
know gets it. Women with AIDS are
scattered across the country and not
necessarily associated with the lesbian
community. Therefore not many radically
active lesbians know women with AIDS.

For
confidential

AIDS

Information

    
   
    
 

 
 
  
  

  

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Call

1-800
882—AIDS

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Nonetheless, women with AIDS is a lesbian
issue, and as long as women sleep Will‘
womcn, AXDS will remain a lesbian and
bisexual women's issue.

The right wing lumps women (ERA)
and lesbians/gays in the same bundle. There
is a dangerous prejudice against all groups
that go against the traditional family model.
The Reagan Administration is systematically
eliminating laws which prohibit prohibit
discrimination and destroying the right to

Frorn all

A View of "From All Walks of Line" in
Boston on June I

Richard Cornwall

They looked up startled from their
Sunday papers. It wasn't that they did
not expect foot and bike and dog
traffic in profusion on the asphalt path
on the levee in the Charles River. As
they lay on the green flanks of the
levee developing their seductively
curved tan-lines, they liked looking and
being looked at. Yet the spectacle of
4,000 massed walkers parading behind a
mildly activist banner carried by two
chunky hunks was startling, perhaps
exposing, and that is what this walk
was all about.

We assembled near the anemic
statue between the two exists from the
parking garage on the Boston Common.
There is something ritualistic about
speeches at rallies like this. Mayor
Raymond Flynn,and Governor Michael

Dukakis recognized this by being
pleasantly brief in their support.
Dukakis also had the incentive to

shorten the exposure of the omnipresent
TV cameras to the well disciplined
chorus of chanters of "Foster equality"
which accompanied this talk. Rep.
Gerry Studs gave a good, solid talk,
but the hits were John Pascarelli, who
has AIDS, and Paula Martin, the
mother of Jimmy Mclntyre who died of
AIDS a month earlier. They evoked
our core feelings about the risks to our
loving we all face because of AIDS.
"From All Walks of Life" was well
organized. From the crossing guards at
every intersection (I haven't felt that
wonderful double sense of protection
and power crossing a busy street since
going to elementary school) to the fruit
stops with water in hundreds of Dixie
cups arrayed on tables, with heaping
boxes of orange slices, with bands (as
in Souza) playing and, on the
Cambridge side of the River, with a
dark, brown-haired boy in bountiful
black running shorts with a wonderful
grin. Most impressive was the
organizational work whichihad to have
been done to create the coalition of
diverse people from all walks. At least
fifty percent were women and large
numbers of nongay and nonlesbian
people were there (it did not even spoil
the cruising). Walking with my
straight sister and her woman friend

Walks

issue

privacy sexually, including abortion. The
refusal of this Administration to disseminate
non-judgmental information on safe sex and
safe l.V. needle use is of concern to us all.

AIDS touches on the issues that
lesbians have been concerned with ior years:
education about our bodies and the right to
make choices for which we are not
penalized. It's time for us to put AIDS on
our agendas. AIDS is a lesbian issue.

of life

from Sterling Institute and comparing
notes on who was cute was the most
simple kind of community building.
This walk was the most tangible
evidence I have yet seen of Cindy
Patton's assertion (in her excellent book
Sex and Germs, the Politics of AIDS
by Southend Press in Boston) that
"AIDS organizing promises to exert a
major influence on the lesbian and gay
community for years. ...A ‘post-AIDS‘
sensibility will emerge with a special
emotional quality and political
commitment much as a ‘post-Stonewall’
r-thnc resonates in lesbian and gay
organizing after 1969." We, as a
community, are successfully overcoming
homophobia and crotophobia ("if gay
men had ,conducted themselves
differently, AIDS would never have
happened"). Gay men now have more
in common with women in dealing with
the medical establishment. We both
have clearly articulated goals in
working with the doctors and scientists
who run our institutions for disease
control and, as Michel Foucault (French
student of, among other topics,
ideology, prisons, and sexuality) has
remarked, in our age it is primarily
scientists who shape our society’s
ideology. From abortion rights to
AIDS to sex education and to
spirituality, lesbians and gay men are

playing the leading role in redefining
our socicty’s perspective on the
vocabulary about love and sexuality.

The AIDS walk in Boston netted over
$350,000 for groups ranging from
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross AIDS Baby
Hospice and the New England
Hemophilia Association as well as
several AIDS helping groups. But more
importantly, it also probably brought
some of those startled sunbathcrs on
the levee one step closer to using
organization and education than Lysol
to fight germs.

M

44

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