“Jeez, AIDS was complicated,” former director of the Boston AIDS consortium and executive director of the New England Innocence Project Denise McWilliams said during her lecture “Fears, Fallacies and Failures” yesterday in the Rockefeller Center. The talk was the College’s 15th annual Stonewall Lecture, a series which aims to educate students on gay, lesbian, transgender and queer issues.
McWilliams has spent her professional career as a lawyer representing disenfranchised members of the community, including AIDS patients, sex workers, people with developmental disabilities, non-native English speakers and people from the LGBT community, according to the New England Innocence Project website. The New England Innocence project was founded in 2000 to exonerate wrongly-accused individuals through DNA and other scientific evidence. She represented several AIDS patients during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and has served on several boards for AIDS education and advocacy.
She started her lecture by summarizing the Jan. 1983 meeting the Center for Disease Control called in Washington, D.C., when the government first named the disease that had been killing thousands. She said at this point, there had been 1,118 deaths from HIV nationally, including the deaths of six hemophiliacs and an infant from HIV-contaminated blood transfusions, an uncounted amount of IV drug users and gay men. The government concluded that the cause of AIDS was infectious.
“Now, we would just say, ‘well, duh,’ but at that point it was more confusing,” McWilliams said. “People really didn’t know the cause of this mysterious disease. The symptoms were just so bizarre from what we had seen previously, finding a cause was such a difficult thing to do.”
She said that the fact that the federal government actually named the disease was significant and spoke to the severity of the epidemic, as federal bureaucracy generally takes a long time to acknowledge and name such problems.
McWilliams said that one of her all-time favorite responses to the AIDS epidemic came from Dr. Donald Francis who said, “How many deaths do you need? Give us the threshold of death that you need in order to believe that this is happening, and we’ll meet at that time and we can start doing something,” during a CDC conference.
The CDC first suggested that the American Red Cross and private blood suppliers bar homosexual men from donating, as members of that community were more likely to be HIV positive, she said. The second suggestion from the CDC was to start surrogate testing on donor blood to find out more about the disease, adding that ultimately the American Red Cross and private blood suppliers did not comply with these suggestions.
“The evidence was too thin so their reactions made sense,” McWilliams said. “They didn’t want to exclude a group of donors who would significantly decrease their supply.”
She added that members of the gay community also rejected these suggestions — as they would require self-identification — and then deferred from giving blood.
McWilliams said that Stanford Univeristy began surrogate testing before CDC approval.
“Stanford gets some credit leading the charge on that, the rest of the country didn’t get the benefits of the testing until 1985, when the HIV test was developed,” McWilliams said. At that point, she said that HIV had killed 13,000 people, and over half of living hemophiliacs in the United States were HIV positive.
McWilliams also cited 1985 as the first year in which a safe-sex initiative started to prevent the spread of HIV and accredits the gay community for pioneering this effort.
Nancy Reagan said to “Just say no,” McWilliams said, adding that “the gay community created colorful, effective pamphlets and public service announcements that really spoke to people.”
She noted that initiatives were made to encourage safer-drug use, including the distribution of clean needles and bleach cleaning kits to addicts in drug-ridden areas.
She said that there was a cultural obsession with finding patient zero, who was later identified as Gaetan Dugas, a French-Canadian flight attendant who was found to have directly and indirectly infected upwards of 40 people who were diagnosed with the first cases in the United States. With more time, it was found that Dugas was not actually the first person infected with AIDS, but rather just a very early patient.
“It honestly doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things,” she said, “There are infected people who’ve had sex with one person, or 10, or who didn’t contract the disease from sex at all.”
McWilliams finished her speech by warning audience members not to mistake historical solutions as solutions for a current problem.
“Take what history gives you, but don’t confuse historical circumstances with what is happening right in front of you,” McWilliams said, referring to scientists’ approaches to curing HIV in the same way they did in 1940s while trying to find a cure for syphilis.
McWilliams said that tackling a lecture on the AIDS epidemic was difficult, as the problem is not specific to any single aspect of life.
“AIDS was the really unfortunate conflation of class, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, addictive behaviors, 12-step programs, the rise of the moral majority and the religious right and their support of the government that just happened to be in place when HIV came into fruition,” she said.
Women and gender studies professor Michael Bronski started the Stonewall series when he came to the College in 2000. He was the first lecturer in the series, in his talk “Queering Harry Potter” he points out that the magical minority of wizards in the series were portrayed as normal, while the majority, “muggles,” are seen as inferior.
“The College had been thinking of starting an annual series before I came to educate students on queer issues,” he said. “They knew that I had worked a lot in gay studies, so they asked me to pioneer the program.”
Justine Goggin ’18, who heard McWilliams both in the lecture and in Bronski’s class, said that she found the basis of McWilliams’s insights interesting.
“They’re completely based on facts,” she said. “But [they] are also completely morally driven.”
