Petrelis Files

Bay Area Reporter to PWAs: Drop Dead

Just how pathetic is it that in San Francisco as the city marks 25 years of AIDS, the official event commemorating the first reports of the disease couldn't find any actual living people with AIDS to share their lives and opinion? Very pathetic and the omission of PWAs from the city's event was compounded today by a lame editorial in the Bay Area Reporter about the omission.

Sure, it's great one of our gay weeklies paid attention, but it's very odd the BAR editor couldn't be bothered to acknowledge that PWAs themselves, were upset about the omission and demanded PWAs be included in the mayor's ceremony.

What lame excuse does the editor have for not including a single PWA voice in her editorial? Sure, we know she doesn't like me and would never note my role in all of this, but what reason is there for her to not quote any PWA about the mayor's omission? To paraphrase the BAR's own editorial, it's not as if there aren't PWAs in SF to weigh in on the official event in the BAR.

Perhaps the BAR editor is unaware of the Thrive group's web site, where messages about this matter have been posted in the past week. Maybe she should read what PWAs had to say about it all at this site.

Bravo to Thrivers Rodger Brook, Stu Smith and Hank Wilson who posted messages and emails about this matter.

Even if the BAR editor is totally ignorant about Thrive and its fantastic web site, she might have picked up the phone and tried to find one, maybe even two people with AIDS with an opinion on being excluded from the event today.

In my opinion, the underlying message of both the official commemoration and the BAR editorial that lack PWA voices is simple: PWAs, Drop Dead.

From today's BAR:

What About PWAs?

[snip]
The program plans that we saw also calls for long-term survivors to be honored; but the glaring omission that caught our eye is an actual person living with AIDS on the speakers list. When we called Dufty's office last week to inquire about this, we were told we were not the first to notice the oversight. But now, a week later, the final invitation still lacks a PWA speaker. We're not sure if the lack of a PWA speaker was bureaucratic bumbling, but it definitely sends the wrong message as people around the country prepare to mark the tragic milestone that is AIDS at 25. After all, it's not as if there aren't PWAs in San Francisco who could say a few words about what the last two and a half decades have been like.
[snip]