By Karen Ocamb

(Editor's Note: On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) published the first report of a mysterious new epidemic effecting five gay men in Los Angeles. On April 13, 1982, Congressmember Henry Waxman (D-L.A.), chair of the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, held the first congressional hearing on the new disease at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center. By then 248 gay men had been diagnosed with the apparently fatal Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID, which later became known as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or AIDS), according to the late Randy Shilts in And the Band Played On.

Tim Westmoreland, Waxman's openly gay subcommittee counsel, wrote Waxman's opening remarks. "There is no doubt in my mind," Waxman said, "that if the same disease had appeared among Americans of Norwegian descent, or among tennis players, rather than gay males, the responses of both the government and the medical community would have been different." The following are direct quotes taken from an April 11 phone interview with Rep. Waxman.)

"According to the Centers for Disease Control, (the new disease) was multiplying geometrically which meant that what we were facing was spreading quite rapidly within the gay male community and we didn't know what it was," Waxman told IN. "Dr. Gottlieb of UCLA was giving care to the first patients and thought that we ought to come to Los Angeles -- it's my district -- and hear from people here to try to understand what was happening.

"We did it at the Gay & Lesbian Service Center because many of the people coming down with symptoms would come (there) ... and I wanted to dramatize the fact that this was a disease affecting gay men and it was a major public health threat. We didn't realize the magnitude at that point but we realized it could be very, very huge.

"I was very concerned at the time -- and continue to be concerned -- that the attention paid to Kaposi's sarcoma and now HIV/AIDS -- has always been less than attention paid to other diseases, primarily because it affected gay men ... President Reagan would never even say the word 'AIDS.' It wasn't until Elizabeth Taylor personally talked to him that he even acknowledged the disease. Part of his failure and his reluctance to make it a high priority, I think, had to do with his chief Domestic Policy Advisor Gary Bauer. (He) was clearly with the religious extremist right wing and their attitude was this seemed to be a disease that was somewhat deserved. (In 1983, Reagan's communications director Patrick Buchanan called AIDS "nature's revenge on gay men.")

"We had a very difficult time with the extremist right wing, trying to enact legislation. They didn't want to educate people about the disease because they feared that people would engage in gay sex if they heard about it ... and I remember a lot of fear by the gay community that this disease would be used to go after gay men, to isolate them. Throughout those years, the top Republican on my subcommittee, Bill Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), advocated taking people who had AIDS and isolating them on some island somewhere -- quarantining them. (In his 1989 book, Dannemeyer dubbed gays and lesbians "the ultimate enemy.")

"The people in the Department of Health and Human Services were very much on top of this as a health issue ... (They) would testify and give the administration's line and then it was pre-arranged that if I asked questions about 'in their best medical judgment, did they have enough (funding) for this or that?' -- they would invariably (say) that the administration's (budget) recommendation wasn't sufficient. I thought they were courageous.

"One of the most courageous was C. Everett Koop. He had been the choice of the religious right to be surgeon general because he had lectured against abortions. But he was a man of enormous integrity. He told the medical truth about AIDS.

"The health professionals, even in the administration, were very clear that this was not an easily transmitted disease -- from sweat and tears and casual contact. There was a fear that there was going to be a public reaction that even being near a gay man might expose them to AIDS...

"Another interesting thing was the very active and aggressive involvement of gay men. The Food and Drug Administration worked on the model that you don't make drugs available until they've been established as safe and effective -- and that could take many years ... The whole idea for 'compassionate use' came from ACT UP lawyers convincing the FDA that they had the legal authority to release drugs still in clinical trials, especially when the disease was as fatal as this.

"We finally passed the Ryan White Care Act -- named after the young boy who had AIDS. I knew so many people who died of AIDS who were gay men, the primary group affected by AIDS. And yet when we worked out the bill -- between Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah and myself -- Sen. Hatch insisted we call it the Ryan White Act. I guess I was just too anxious to pass it rather than make a fight over that. Certainly Ryan White deserved a tribute for his courageous fight. But so many gay men had to fight as well.

"We had pretty much worked out the bill a year or two earlier than when it passed but Sen. Jesse Helms held it up. I remember saying to him that he did a great disservice, that people were dying and needed this legislation right away. He was offended at my comments. But I was offended by his action.

"Ryan White is up for reauthorization and it's going to be difficult because there's less money going into the program while we're giving tax breaks to billionaires. And that means there's going to be a greater fight for funds ... But it's a very different problem than what we had in the beginning when Jesse Helms wanted to make sure we didn't talk about gay men or drug users."