FIGHTING BACK IN SHREVEPORT, AIDS ACTIVISTS DO MORE WITH LESS
Weiser, Jay
FIGHTING BACK In Shreveport, AIDS activists do more with less BY JAY WEISER The teen-aged boys and girls at the Johnnie Gray Youth Center laugh and joke among themselves, seemingly oblivious to...
...With Normand, she devised a fifteen-hour course to certify AIDS educators...
...But the threat of AIDS may be more insidious off the coasts than anywhere else...
...Though Ransbottom thrives on the pressure, volunteers carrying similar loads have burned out...
...So Patricia Simmons, a forty-nine-year-old black social worker, abruptly interrupts her talk at this Shreveport, Louisiana, correctional facility for troubled youth...
...Nationally, the group has used civil disobedience and demonstrations to push its agenda, though its tactics are milder in Shreveoort...
...He lives with his parents in the upper-class South Highland neighborhood...
...Family connections have made Selber an effective lobbyist...
...Abrasive challenges can have a price, but the alternatives are limited...
...He is a member of the small, liberal, Reform Jewish wing of Shreveport's local oligarchy, which is dominated by conservative oil money...
...But we got thirty-eight people for the first class, including a high-school student with a dying friend, a medical doctor who wanted to communicate to patients, and housewives who wanted to educate themselves and teach their friends...
...Selber persuaded Debbie Reynolds to appear at the city's first major AIDS fundraiser, and helped start an annual AIDS educational exhibit at the city's leading society event, Holiday in Dixie...
...66 per cent of teen-agers surveyed said they had experimented with drugs...
...As the epidemic turns, Shreveport's underfunded AIDS activists fight it and each other, and the drama replays itself, again and again, in cities all across the country...
...Everyone has his or her own cultural approach, but at least let's give the same information," says Ransbottom, who has managed to get Shreveport's often quarrelsome and egocentric AIDS activists to participate...
...ACT UP did a good thing in inspiring a little action," says don't want any hellfire and damnation and mark of the devil' nurse Rick Normand, who administers AIDS programs at the local Veterans Hospital...
...We don't want any hellfire and damnation and mark of the devil...
...Shreveport's leading hospital, Louisiana State University Medical Center, was doing virtually nothing to make AIDS clinic facilities available to the infected, or to seek participation in experimental-drug trials—though it was headed by Dr...
...Williams promised to move ahead on the clinic and drug trials, but says, "It's taken me a long time to cool down...
...Perhaps because AIDS is perceived to be an epidemic of the East and West coasts of the United States, many in America's heartland have lulled themselves into complacency...
...Selber has denounced GLAD for the collapse of its programs delivering services to people with AIDS...
...GLAD beefed up its services, but Selber fought on...
...Many churches are similar, but Ransbottom says, "You can always go back to Leviticus—'When a man lieth with a woman.' Ministers can't forbid Biblical references...
...Ransbottom's achievements would be hard to duplicate...
...Other people don't like to have that kind of confrontational situation, and they quit working...
...Maybe five or six...
...We weren't expecting a big response," says Ransbottom...
...Organizations want her to serve as a minority representative on their boards—on her own time...
...The targets today, though, are specific AIDS policies...
...On the Northwest Louisiana AIDS Task Force board, Simmons says, "the only thing I do is give the minority report...
...Simmons, who runs the publicly funded AIDS Minority Community Outreach Program in Shreveport, is one of them...
...Selber has organized a fundraiser for the satellite, written grant proposals, and traveled to New Orleans to meet with the researchers...
...We're very pleased that he followed through," says Selber...
...The organization finally threw him out...
...Then Jay Weiser, a free-lance writer based in Brooklyn, New York, is a former law clerk to Shreve-port's Judge Henry A. Politz of the U.S...
...He's sensitized some [AIDS activists] to a degree that when he comes up with something logical, they tune him out...
...I can understand why they were uncomfortable with him on the board," says David Connelly, a fellow AIDS activist...
...Fewer still would have the skills...
...He was campaigning around the state to get their funding cut...
...Like her staff, she works part-time, and she must hold another job to make ends meet...
...Minorities are used to doing more with less," she says...
...Selber, mostly on his own, has been working for more than a year on the home-delivery system to bring experimental drugs to rural AIDS victims...
...metropolitan areas, Shreveport has the third-highest rate of teen-age pregnancies...
...The training is no-holds-barred, including frank discussions of homosexuality...
...Her son, who from the beginning has helped her churn out materials on the family computer, has gone through the course...
...When Simmons and another black activist gave a forum on AIDS and the black community, members of the Northwest Louisiana AIDS Task Force, the city's umbrella organization for health and social-service professionals working on AIDS, didn't deign to attend...
...At first, she cut wages rather than services: "It felt very noble at the time, but it was beginning to pinch," she says...
...The ministers view it as a moral rather than a health issue," she says...
...There was some talk of expanding her responsibilities, but her supervisor said, "I don't see why we want to make more work for Pat when we pay her pennies...
...Though a nationally prominent black Shreveport minister is an enthusiastic AIDS fighter, many black churches are as reluctant as white ones to discuss homosexuality and drugs...
...Once, Simmons sent out a mailing to 260 black churches offering to speak, and received only three responses...
...Working with AIDS is like a soap opera," she says...
...A few committed activists are trying to pierce this wall of smugness, persevering despite funding constraints, internecine bickering, and public aversion to their life-saving message...
...People with urgent needs are perceived as radical," says Mary Rans-bottom, a volunteer who runs an innovative AIDS education program for the Shreveport Red Cross...
...Still, she keeps going...
...Selber always presses for immediate action...
...I'm getting fed up with the conservative attitudes in Shreveport," Simmons says...
...The reason you people are dying is because you're falling asleep, gossiping with neighbors, and daydreaming about Saturday night...
...ACT UP member Joseph deSantis issued a challenge to Williams, who convened a long and contentious meeting that the local media covered prominently...
...And that's just as much a fact as that there are some people who are worried about running out of time...
...before that, the Shreveport Red Cross AIDS program worked on a zero budget...
...The mother of six and grandmother often, Simmons had been a social worker in a community-action agency until the Reagan Administration's budget cuts...
...Ransbottom, thirty-six, is a housewife, mother, and organizational whiz...
...After a few sessions with Selber and others, Representative Jim McCrery, a conservative Republican who had denounced then-Surgeon General C. Everett Koop's 1988 national mailing on AIDS, became a public supporter of AIDS causes...
...He's going to undo all the good he's ever done...
...I'm here to save your life," she says...
...One of its main focuses has been aggressive treatment...
...His mother, Flo, founded the Shreveport chapter of Mothers of AIDS Patients...
...In early 1988, the Red Cross had just seven volunteer AIDS educators and was deluged with requests for speakers...
...Chuck Selber is a forty-two-year-old gay man who has AIDS...
...The speakers tailor their talks—children are reached through a PAC-man analogy, professionals through medical terms...
...Schools are tough, observes Ransbottom: "In high schools, we're not allowed to talk about condoms, sexual practices, and homosexuality...
...she spent eight years in restaurant management...
...She was handed a 13 per cent reduction in her budget of $47,000—a modest amount, though large for AIDS services in Shreveport terms...
...A Silence = Death sticker, which has become an international logo for AIDS activism, adorns the refrigerator...
...AIDS, a quick death sentence only four years ago, now can often be controlled for long periods...
...She recently received a $20,000 grant to train, teen-agers to do peer education...
...When she agrees, she often finds she is merely window dressing...
...She hated it, and applied for the minority-outreach job...
...Darryl Williams, the Task Force chair...
...Funding for Simmons's outreach project was cut because of Louisiana's budget crisis...
...The program-Louisiana's first—has trained 387 educators, of whom 80 per cent do presentations to the public...
...Teen-agers are a special concern to Ransbottom, who has a fifteen-year-old son as well as a six-year-old daughter...
...Simmons, who is a friend, says, "Chuck gets so involved personally that he loses his rationality...
...Selber himself eschewed the family business for film and theater work, first in New York City and then back in Shreveport...
...Service cuts followed, and the program now reaches fewer people...
...They see 'minority,' and they don't turn out," she says...
...Of major U.S...
...FIGHTING BACK In Shreveport, AIDS activists do more with less BY JAY WEISER The teen-aged boys and girls at the Johnnie Gray Youth Center laugh and joke among themselves, seemingly oblivious to the woman speaking to them...
...I have no choice but to speak up loud and clear...
...Simmons's agency reached 7,000 people in 1989...
...Selber, with a dozen others, founded a Shreveport chapter of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) last November, which has since grown to thirty-five members...
...Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit...
...Simmons sometimes finds it awkward to be one of the few black AIDS activists in Shreveport...
...If I went out as an openly gay man, there would be an immediate threat to people...
...Senator J. Bennett Johnston, a Democrat, has introduced a Selber-inspired bill to allow deductions for medical expense payments made by taxpayers for nondependents who have such catastrophic illnesses as AIDS...
...Until you cross over to the infected category, you really don't know the issues," he says...
...He has written an advocacy play that he hopes to take on tour through south Louisiana...
...Selber's and ACT UP's confrontational style is drawn from Stonewall-era gay lib-erationists, whose original goal was sexual revolution...
...Despite this, many Shreveport victims lack treatment...
...Connelly says, "She has a lot of credibility as a mother...
...That has often meant harshly attacking people in the city's two oldest AIDS organizations, the mostly-gay Greater Louisiana AIDS Defense (GLAD) and the mostly-straight Task Force...
...If support from white activists and the government is uneven, the black community has its own problems facing up to reality...
...In small communities, people are dying quicker and more painful deaths, denied access to life-prolonging drugs and treatment, ostracized and ignored by a society that doesn't want to admit its vulnerability...
...ACT UP started in New York and has spread to scores of cities across the country...
...Even in Shreveport, one of the last bastions of the Southern lady, not many women would have so much time to volunteer...
...His family owned Shreveport's premier department store chain, which folded during the oil-patch recession of the 1980s...
...If someone is uncomfortable with the issue, we tell them they may be uncomfortable with AIDS education," Ransbottom says...
...The primary ways of transmission are drug abuse and sex, so we thought our teens were at risk," Ransbottom says...
...I wanted to be back in social work, and I wanted to help people with AIDS," she says...
...LSU Medical Center and ACT UP have been working toward a community research satellite that would allow Shreveport patients to participate in drug trials run out of Dallas and New Orleans...
...Williams was true to his word...
...We were beginning to hit burnout," she says, "and we were looking for some way to train people to go into the community...
...Simmons managed to get into a local Baptist youth convention with more than 600 people in attendance, but the convention chairman dismissed everyone under nineteen—her target group...
...It's perverse to marginalize blacks when new cases in Shreveport increasingly consist of black drug users and their sexual partners...
Vol. 54 • August 1990 • No. 8
