A History of AIDS Services in Utah by Ben Williams,
1 6 Q Q S A LT L A K E Q J u n e 1 6 , 2 0 0 6
ben@qsaltlake.com
Twenty-five years ago this month, the first report of AIDS was announced by the CDC. It took two years to get to Utah, and shortly after, the local gay community took action. We have interviewed those who were in the trenches two decades ago about what it was like then, and how it is different today.
On June 5, 1981, after five gay men were diagnosed with a rare cancer that was previously unknown in people with healthy immune systems, the Centers for Disease Control publicly announced a disease that was first called gay cancer or Gay Related Immune Deficiency, or GRID. This was the first official warning of what would become the AIDS pandemic. A month later, on July 3, The New York Times printed a small article, entitled “Rare Cancer seen in 41 Homosexuals,” regarding the disease affecting normally healthy young gay men. The piece was the first article on AIDS in any newspaper. Fortunately, Dr. Kristen Ries, an infectious disease specialist, moved to Salt Lake City that very same week. Later, in 1982, Dr. Ries believed she saw a man who may have been her first AIDS patient. There was no test available then to confirm it, but she later learned the man had tested HIV positive. For much of the 1980s, Dr. Ries was single-handedly dealing with all the AIDS cases in Utah. The first full-blown case of AIDS in Utah, as documented by the Bureau of Communicable Disease, was in July 1983. On July 21, the Bureau acknowledged that AIDS was in Utah, but only to assure residents that as deadly as AIDS was, “it’s nothing for the general public to worry about.” The first known HIV-related death in Utah occurred on September 19, 1983. According to his friends, Michael Painter, a 34-year-old gay man, was the first Utahn attributed to have died as a result of AIDS. By the end of 1983, the state health department confirmed there had been two AIDS cases in Utah, with one fatality. At the beginning, few people knew anyone personally who had AIDS or had died from it. It was only a matter of time, however. Four years into the epidemic, there were no AIDS health clinics, no safe-sex guidelines, nor anything like it from the state heath department to inform gay people, or anyone else, how to protect themselves. It was the gay community alone — not the state Health Department — that, in 1984, began to disseminate AIDS information in Utah. In February 1985, state epidemiologist Craig Nichols made the first public statement about AIDS by a Utah state official. He reported that an unidentified woman had died of AIDS. On March 25, 1985, Dr. Kristen Ries presented the state’s first safe-sex workshop at the University of Utah as part of the Lesbian and Gay Student Union’s second Lesbian and Gay Conference. Dr. Ries made the first public mention of the use of condoms to help prevent the spread of the disease at this conference. While the state continued to do nothing but compile statistics, the gay community rallied against the plague, which was spreading at an alarming rate through the community. In 1984, Scott Stites, copresident of the Royal Court of the Golden Spike Empire, made AIDS relief a project of the court’s fundraising system. Under his administration, the Royal Court vigorously began to raise money for people with AIDS, formed a food bank, and printed and distributed safe-sex guidelines. All while the state of Utah continued to do nothing. Four people, independent and unaware of each other’s activities, began the process of creating AIDS organization in late 1985. Sheldon Spears, Duane Dawson, Rev. Donald Bramble, and Dr. Patty Reagan were all instrumental in forming grass root
organizations to educate the gay community about AIDS. Sheldon Spears became an AIDS activist immediately after his diagnosis and began campaigning for an AIDS “outreach” project that would provide information on the disease and counseling for its “victims.” Duane Dawson, a registered nurse, was attracted to Spear’s vision. Together, they formed the first AIDS service organization. It eventually became AIDS Project Utah. Spears said, “We just have to help ourselves. We just can’t wait for the help to come to us.” In September 1985, Father Don Bramble, a priest/chaplain for Dignity, Salt Lake’s gay Catholic organization, formed a support group for AIDS patients. Father Bramble stated that the purpose of his group was not to ease people with AIDS out of life, but “to enhance the present process of living.” Dr. Patty Reagan, associate professor at the University of Utah, created an AIDS information line that originated out of the Wasatch Women’s Center. Dr. Reagan called her organization the Salt Lake AIDS Foundation (SLAF) because, as she said, “it sounded important.” The Salt Lake AIDS Foundation differed from AIDS Project Utah in that it did not offer AIDS support facilities or peer counseling. Dr. Reagan spoke to as many gay and non-gay community organizations as she could to educate Utahns on the nature of the AIDS virus. While AIDS Project Utah and the Salt Lake AIDS Foundation were making inroads into the gay and healthcare communities, a dying gay man burst onto the national scene after he told his story of rejection by the LDS Church to the Ogden Standard Examiner in January 1986. Clair Harward was a 26-year-old Ogden resident who had been diagnosed with AIDS in August 1984. The dying Harward became an AIDS activist inadvertently, and also made Utah history by being the first person to have pictures of the purple kaposi’s sarcoma lesions published in a mainstream newspaper. In 1986, Ben Barr, assistant director of AIDS Project Utah succeeded director Rick Cochran. Cochran was the first director of any AIDS organization in America who actually had AIDS. He, however, caused an uproar when he expressed that APU had sponsored “the first AIDS Awareness Week,” offending attending members of the Royal Court, which had held a very successful AIDS Awareness Week in 1985. A rift developed as APU began to distance itself from the very community that helped create it, and the gay community felt slighted by Cochran and APU. Cochran apologized, but the damage was done and he resigned. Cochran died some 8 months later, in 1987. It was Ben Barr who would later merge the two struggling AIDS organizations into today’s Utah AIDS Foundation and mend the riff between the AIDS health community and the gay community. Barr finally left the organization he had shaped to pursue a degree in social work in Berkeley, California. Acerbic David Sharpton, after being diagnosed with HIV in Dallas, Texas, blew into Salt Lake City on a mission to educate Utah Mormons about the AIDS epidemic. He was loud, brash, sometimes a bully, but always relentless about putting a public face on AIDS in Utah. He co-founded the People with AIDS Coalition of Utah in 1988 and succumbed to the disease in 1994. KUED did a documentary on the life of David Sharpton for a PBS special. Q