A Need For Television Challengers

One of my favorite movie scenes is the one in Annie Hall (1977) in which Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are standing on a movie line and behind them is a know-it-all guy pontificating to his girlfriend on the theories of the Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980). 

Allen goes off screen for a second. When he returns, he has McLuhan with him. McLuhan immediately tells the guy he doesn't know what he's talking about.

I sometimes wish there was a Woody Allen character or characters who would go on camera on one of these talking heads TV shows to challenge hosts and guests about the efficacy of COVID vaccines and the lethality of COVID. The information given seems to be one-sided.

A Flu Epidemic In 1820

On October 24, in the year 1820, according to the U.S. Capitol Historical Society's 2020 calendar entry for that day, "J[ohn] Q[uincy] Adams notes that his father [John Adams, the 2nd U.S. president, 1797-1801] is victim of flu epidemic raging in northern cities."

In light of today's COVID-19 pandemic, I would like to get an answer to the following questions: how did they handle the flu? Who was most at risk back then? How severe was it?

We might be able to draw a lesson or two from this history.

Coronavirus Alert

Re: Coronavirus: wash your hands with soap and water or alcohol-based hand sanitizer. For more information, visit nyc.gov/coronavirus.

World AIDS Day, 2018

Today is World AIDS Day, a time to remember friends and family members who succumbed to this disease as well as to reflect on the progress made thus far by medical science in fighting and possibly eradicating it.

Looking back, the AIDS epidemic made the 1980s and 1990s a scary time. Especially because so many people were dropping like flies and a cure seemed a million years away.

But it was also a great time for AIDS activism and artistic expression, particularly among black gay men. So whenever I look through one of my scrapbooks or manuscript folders containing articles that I've written, I'm reminded that, as a journalist, I was privileged to have had the opportunity to witness and document what went on within the gay community during a frightening time.

Concentration Camps For People With AIDS?

The following brief transcript is from a tape recording I made off the radio of an interview that New York talk show host Barry Gray did with Dr. Stephen Caiazza, on WMCA, in June 1989. Dr. Caiazza (pronounced ky-ay-zah) specialized in caring for people with AIDS and died in 1990 of complications from the disease himself at the age of 46.

Barry Gray: "We are coming close to what someone suggested to me a couple of years ago. I thought he was just kidding. He said we're going to wind up where everybody with AIDS is going to be behind barbed wire in a concentration camp."

Dr. Stephen Caiazza: "Fortunately--unfortunately, I think, the numbers are so astonishingly high that will never happen. The jails in the city of New York are already running at a hundred and four percent of capacity. And that's for convicted felons.

"Where are we going to put these concentration camps? In your backyard?"

Barry Gray: "In Gracie Mansion [the New York mayor's official residence]."

We've come a long way from the days when it was suggested that people with AIDS be tattooed to easily identify them or be put in concentration camps.

Today such sentiments would be considered ridiculous, barbaric, and inhuman.

However, we should keep in mind that in Donald Trump's America anything is possible.

Nobelist Wole Soyinka's Prostate Cancer Cure?

The banner headline on the front page of the African Sun Times (December 1-7, 2014) announced: "Soyinka: How I Survived Prostate Cancer." Wanting to know how Nigerian playwright/poet/essayist Wole Soyinka achieved this medical miracle, I immediately went to the story, which reported on remarks he made  at a press conference in his hometown of Abeokuta, Nigeria.

According to the article, Soyinka, a 1986 Nobel laureate in literature, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in December of 2013. (Soyinka a few paragraphs later stated it was in November.) He claimed he was cured in October of 2014. But the article neglected to give specifics about Soyinka's treatment other than to quote the 80-year-old luminary as saying "There are many ways of managing cancer; even diet. I have had to drink a lot of water and as many of you know, water and I are not really friends."

He went on to state that "It [prostate cancer] is not a death sentence and it is curable. I have undergone the treatment."

If Soyinka, a brilliant and articulate man, went to the trouble of giving a press conference about his prostate cancer cure, he must have given the attendees more information about his treatment options than was reported in the article. The African Sun Times, published in East Orange, New Jersey, has unfortunately done its readers a disservice by publishing what can only be called shoddy and incomplete journalism.

AIDS Researcher Wins Eviction Battle

A Greenwich Village co-op board 's year-long court battle to evict a doctor who treats persons with AIDS ended in defeat on October 17 [1984], due to the efforts of a gay rights group and the New York state attorney general's office.

The board, representing the tenants of 49 West 12th Street, told Dr. Joseph A. Sonnabend last year that the tenants wanted him out of the building because of concern for their health and the lowering of property values of their apartments due to AIDS patients entering his office.

Sonnabend, a microbiologist and the occupant of the ground floor office since 1977, consulted his lawyer, William Hibsher of the New York law firm Teitelbaum and Hiller. Hibsher is also a board member of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the organization which took the case to court and succeeded in blocking the eviction with a temporary restraining order. The order was issued on October 14, 1983, by the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan.

Sonnabend had no quarrel with the board's right to evict him. "But the mistake they made," said Sonnabend, "was to say it was over AIDS."

Then it became a case of discrimination, said Hibsher,"against a population that is really more deserving of people's compassion and help. I think that all people know that very often discrimination against people with AIDS is another form of discrimination against gay people."

In New York State, there is no law prohibiting discrimination against people because of sexual orientation; however, Lambda used a provision of the state's human rights law protecting disabled people from discrimination as the basis for their lawsuit.

"Five of Sonnabend's patients," said Hibsher, "joined in the lawsuit for legal reasons. We were concerned that since Dr. Sonnabend is not himself a disabled person, the defendant might take the position that [Sonnabend] could not raise the disability statute in support of his legal position."

With the patients as co-plaintiffs, continued Hibsher, "they could say they are disabled persons, and they are potentially being discriminated against by the building's decision." Two of the five patients have since died of the disease.

In the court settlement, Sonnabend was awarded $10,000 in damages and a new one-year lease. The co-op must also pay $1,000 in legal costs to state Attorney General Robert Abrams's office, which acted as Lambda's co-counsel.

Hibsher sees the settlement as a landmark case that "projects a very strong image on the part of those who protect the rights of these citizens."

He continued: "It's, to our knowledge, the first litigation brought in connection with alleged discrimination against people with AIDS, and it established very importantly legal procedures in the State of New York and nationwide; One, that people with AIDS are considered disabled persons under the disability laws, and most states have a civil rights law which protects persons who are disabled from discrimination. Two, the court issued a preliminary injunction in the course of the litigation and part of its ruling was that it accepted the expert opinion that AIDS is not casually transmitted. Consequently, the court rejected any notion that a person with AIDS could be segregated or kept out of a public accommodation on the grounds of potential contagion. Three, and I think most important, the case stands for the proposition that the civil rights community, Lambda, the attorney general of the State of New York, and other litigants are not going to sit back and let people discriminate" against people who are gravely ill.

Sonnabend, who spends much of his time doing research, said that after the settlement, "some of the tenants offered their congratulations. Many tenants at the time [of the eviction attempt] were quite unhappy with the way the board proceeded."


This article was originally published in the Gay Community News (Boston) on November 10, 1984.

Surgery Without Anesthesia

While browsing through a copy of Daniel J. Boorstein's Hidden History (Vintage Books), I came across this passage: "...the enterprising dentist William T. G. Morton introduced ether as an anesthetic. Surgeons had long performed amputations by wielding their saws on screaming patients." Reading that passage made me glad I live in the more medically and technologically advanced 21st century.