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Opening title slate. The Eleventh Hour, Show #116, Aids and Minorities. Rec: 1/26/89. Host Robert Lipsyte can be seen

The Eleventh Hour show graphics and show opener.

Middle aged African American woman, Mildred Pearson, sitting on sofa in her home, talking about her son who recently died from AIDS.

Still color photo(s) of African American male laying in bed (sick with AIDS) and his mother, Mildred Pearson at his bedside.

Var posters on the wall of the "Brooklyn Aids Task Force" - reads: "Do you know where your condom is?": AIDS does not discriminate

Shot of the small office of the Brooklyn Aids Task Force. Cubicles with papers hanging from walls, African Americans at desks

cut to the streets of Brooklyn circa 1980's, pens walking, woman pushing baby carriage, groups of people walking together. Lipsyte narrates how AIDS is now hitting women, IV drug users or partners of drug users.

African American woman (Mildred Pearson) talking on phone in office

(INTERVIEW INSERTED)
Robert Lipsyte:
Joining me is Mildred Pearson whom you've just seen, and Dr. Iris Davis who personally treats 700 AIDS patients at the Bushwick clinic of Woodhall Hospital in Brooklyn, one of the primary aid centers in New York. Mrs. Pearson, I hope you will feel free to join the conversation or not as you wish. Dr. Davis, Mildred Pearson has 14 children and 20 grandchildren living in these neighborhoods. Do they have cause for concern about health care?

Dr. Davis:
Oh, there's no question that there's been remarkable amounts of information that describe the paucity of health care for black Americans irregardless of class and the lack of medical access. And there was recently in fact, a recurrence and a repetition of all this in a major medical journal called the Journal of the American Medical Association describing how blacks not only perceive from themselves that they not only have limited access, but they perceive the care is different, not as well that they're discharged too early from hospitals, and that their doctors do not have the same relationship within that they have with other patients. Is that true? I'm just for example, giving you obviously one group that is already documented. That is true very much in New York City where we can see, by virtue of the extremely large number of uninsured, people that exist within the city, that there's just they don't have access to health care. There is an ambulatory system, which is like what an old family doctor was, for many people are like a small private practice that exists in certain parts of the city that is used to maximum There are a number of city clinics that are that are at maximum and have been there. And what I think you think about healthcare in general health care for working class, low income people, without question poor people, has always been an issue that our country has historically not done well with.

Robert Lipsyte:
Well, now now with AIDS, this health care this inadequate health care is strange, even more, one would think.

Dr. Davis:
I would, if you take the complexity of health care, and the issues that surround it in this country, you can think of HIV, which is how I term it, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus epidemic, as just the fourth Horsemen of the Apocalypse. that it what it is really, really doing is it's allowing us to see that yes, we had a chronic problem with homelessness, watch it move now. We had a chronic problem with lack of doctors and nurses, and other types of health professionals in areas where we needed it. Watch it move now. We had a problem with other types of common diseases, tuberculosis, syphilis, that were not already we were not already impacted in those populations of people. It is moving tremendously. Now. You know, when you look at TB, and syphilis.

Robert Lipsyte
No no, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I was wondering what you're specifically seeing at the Bushwick clinic. That's what you're dealing with.

Dr. Davis
I mean, we've seen people with TB clinics, we're picking we're picking that people who have been picked up from sexually transmitted disease clinics. The number of people who do not recognize that, that they have HIV as the underlying factor, why they may have had these diseases is just astounding. It's it's mind boggling to realize how many people are infected in this city already. And that's where the statistics will never really help you. AIDS. It's like saying diabetics or people who are in a coma. It doesn't it doesn't account for those people with abnormal blood sugars. It doesn't account for those people who require small amounts of insulin. It doesn't require it doesn't. It doesn't cover a large spectrum of areas.

Robert Lipsyte
And people are coming to your clinic into inner city clinics later than people in say Westchester or Long Island go to family doctors or to their health care facilities. You see it later?

Dr. Davis:
Well, it depends. If you're talking about gaming, that's a community of people who are well aware of their risk.

Robert Lipsyte 09:33
No,I'm thinking we're thinking more now in terms of Black and Hispanics of the minority population of certainly the, the clientele of the Bushwick clinic for example

Dr. Davis
Well, the clientele the Bushwick clinic, which by the way, is multi ethnic and primarily minority. Those are individuals who, for whatever reason, have gone for testing. And they, but we tend to get more patients as you say correctly, that are later because they've either denied their risk behavior or what they have done is, is said, there's nothing anybody can do for me, I can't afford to go to those places where they get. First of all, I work with a team of people, I work with an incredible team of people who are incredibly supportive. I'd get killed if I say that she personally, but that team is overwhelmed. That team has been overwhelmed

Robert Lipsyte :
Because this perception that you talked about earlier of minority people feeling that they're 1: getting inadequate health care, and 2: having less personal contact with individual physician is obviously something that you would be fighting against.

Dr. Davis:
Well, I think that we are able to overcome that. But we're very fortunate by the structure of our clinic, which is the ambulatory sites within the city system. We have, like, for example, two physicians, a nurse practitioner, a nurse clinician, because we have that kind when people come in. I'm their cousin, their sister, that other cousin who went on to do other things with their lives, you know, we very much relate we also speak Spanish and Creole in the clinic. And yet we're obviously we're able to integrate across a number of cultures.

Robert Lipsyte:
So when when Mrs. Pearson brought Bruce home to die and made the appeal that more family should do that. It also seemed that that was an indictment of a health care system that wasn't helping people.

Dr. Davis:
Thiere's nowhere for people to die in the city. Nowhere. There's no well, there's Bailey house, 22 beds. Want to know how many people are infected with HIV? (Lipsyte interjects: "How many). And you'll see that they don't really know. The court studies on women alone show that for example, in Brooklyn, every 20 women out of every 1000 are inffected.

Robert Lipsyte:
I'm afraid we're going to have to stop here. Thank you very much, Dr. Davis. Mrs. Pearson will be staying with us. The AIDS epidemic has created neighborhood heroines like Mildred Pearson, and dedicated professionals like Dr. Iris Davis and political activists will meet one right after this look at his group.

Male protestor laying flat out on the ground.

Protestors lying on the ground holding cardboard "gravestones" read: RIP, Killed by the F.D.A., etc. crowd of people plus police in riot gear. (Lipsyte narrates)

Close up - cardboard gravestone reads "KILLED BY THE SYSTEM" in big white letters. AIDS activism activists.

large group of AIDS protestors holding signs

INTERVIEW INSERTED:
Robert Lipsyte:
The group is called ACT UP, the AIDS coalition to unleash power. Most of its members are white gay men, and their tactics include staging Die Ins like this one at City Hall. Their demands include more money for AIDS research and access to drugs. About a year ago Act Up formed a task force to address the needs of Hispanic and black people with AIDS. But the task force has relatively few members and has yet to be as active as its parent organization. Joining me is Ortez Alderson, an actor and artist and one of the few men of color in Act Up. Mr. Alderson, Mildred Pearson is such a kind of lonely fighter out there. Is it harder for minority people to enter activism?

Ortez Alderson:
Yeah, for quite a few reasons. One of the reasons is that a lot of minority people who are in AIDS organizations, for instance, when I joined Act Up, I also at the same time joined them and a minority task force of AIDS in Harlem. And I was also a buddy to PWA's in Harlem. So I was doing both of them. At the same time, I came to the aid struggle also as an actor doing a play in England, concerning a man whose lover had died of AIDS and I played his lover. And it was through that that I became much more concerned after doing that play for two years about what was really going on with AIDS. After I became a buddy and to people with AIDS, I began to become concerned about some of the political ramifications such as minority organizations not getting enough funding. Drug protocol is being run by the FDA and etc, where women and people of minority are excluded from these drug protocols. And therefore getting no treatment at all since drug protocols are the only way you could get treatment. It was a result of those concerns, and that act up itself was holding demonstrations and etc. And I felt that we had to give as much voice to the struggle of people with AIDS and their friends and people who want to get something done about AIDS from the city government from the federal government that I chose to joinAct Up. At the time and Act Up right now. Since I joined backed up three months after it began, we now have an Act Up what I call the Majority Action Committee, which is a committee that all the minority people in Act Up are involved in. Now what that committee does is we are very active in terms of putting out posters putting out safe sex information and communities like Harlem, Bedford Stuy, the Bronx, etc. We also participates in forums within the black community and etc. on both letting people know about transmission routes, etc. as well as making people try to apply pressure to black politicians yes, and Hispanic politicians and the Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Hispanic Caucus into looking on what is going on in the AIDS crisis within our community.

Robert Lipsyte:
Mr. Alderson there is the sense that activist groups tend to be white and middle class and that institutions kind of respond to that.

Ortez Alderson:
I think that has to do so with with an idea of what an activist is. There is no bigger activist and this lady right here (Mildred Pearson), who whose own son died and who after all of that stood up and told people we are going to talk about eight, that is Activism. I am here as an Activist, because I have watched my friends die, I have held their hands too. So I'm saying there is all kinds of Activism, because the person decides to get arrested or not get arrested. But if necessary, we definitely will get arrested. I came here today from court over a case with Dr. Joseph that we all know about is cutting the funds for AIDS patients in New York City, I could go to jail for that. I came here to do this show from that court. So I'm saying you have to do whatever is necessary. When we are dealing in a struggle where people are living and dying, where we're dealing with the struggle where minority organizations are not getting the money that they have, I'll give you a perfect example of what I'm talking about without pointing out any minority organizations. The point of the fact is, is most minority organizations are given 75,000 are given this as if they're going to save all of Harlem with that, and they have two people on staff. This is the sort of thing that we have to fight. This is the sort of thing that people like myself, who are involved in groups like Act Up or say, No, we are not going to let this become the struggle. And we are not going to allow the only thing that is being said, or only information that's being put out there to be a benefit only to other communities, but not to the minority communities. I went to the FDA before we had the demonstration. And I said to Dr. Young, I said Dr. Young, why is it the only 200 black people are being treated in this country? Why are 200 women excuse me, 400 black men, and 235 out of 6,000 slots in your drug protocols in this country, you are not treating us. You are not giving us experimental drugs. 100 of these people are in one drug protocol in San Francisco, and they are asymptomatic, have no symptoms, and you are feeding them AZT.

Robert Lipsyte:
Mr. Alderson, just why are these institutions not responsive?

Ortez Alderson:
They're not responsive, sir. Because the whole society is run in a very way that has nothing to do with our communities. The IRBs or the committee IRB, the IRB is called institutional review boards, they are being run by places like New York University and etc. For instance, we're having a big thing now, right here right now with the idea that they're now starting drug protocols for CD4, but they want to do them at the University Hospitals where they have no black or Hispanic enrollment. Now, we all know that if these that if our community does not get some of the CD4 then whatever cure or whatever they're going to find may benefit other people, but not may not deal with the realities and the health care of our community. The reason why people in our community are suffering from this is because there is a lack of Health Care Services period, when a person of color goes who has AIDS, it is much more likely that they're only going to live six months, because it took them so long to go to the doctor, they can now cannot get into a drug protocol because they do not have a private doctor. So what we have to do is have AIDS organizations, and everybody become politically aware of these issues. So then when we say to Frank Young and it did work, we said, Look, a lot of minority people do not have private doctors, so they don't, they're not going to know about these programs. Furthermore, the only press that they are putting in is Institutional Review Board literature, which is only passed out in universities, white universities.

Robert Lipsyte:
Excuse me, Mrs. Pearson, you wanted to add to that?

Mildred Pearson:
Well, this is why we have to go into the communities and educate our people. And I feel like when I stand on the platform, and I give my story, that it's more of an awareness, he does his one way, and I do mine another and I feel like the message is being reached.

Robert Lipsyte:
You think that people are responding? And here?

Mildred Pearson:
Yes, because through phone calls I get and people want to know more. And I have been in a couple of churches and given you know, my story and they you know they're amazed. And as I'm telling also reaching out, come help me Come help me. But I'm not gonna give up.

Robert Lipsyte:
He's obviously there's

Ortez Alderson:
And I also want to say real fast that that it's a false division that people are trying to say that I am a political activist, and a person taking care of a person with AIDS because she's a nurse or etc is not a political activist, Sir, she is taking care of life, she is supporting life. If I am going to go and testify about us not having enough money to treat people with AIDS, that is saving life that does not make me and you know, again, a activist and make someone else not an activist. And I want to say that the people that are taking care of people with AIDS are activists Sir, and as you can tell from the way I feel about it, and I feel very strongly because I feel it's a false division, which people like Dr. Joseph tried to use to divide our community to divide the communities that are concerned about AIDS. He wants to divide people who care about drug abusers versus people who are not gay and etc.

Mildred Pearson:
We don't have to say one community. This is hitting Society, you don't have to be rich, or poor or anything. Awareness, open your eyes and see the children, our grown children are suffering, we need more help. And this is what we're reaching out for, help

Robert Lipsyte:
so that other mothers don't have to bury their sons.

Mildred Pearson:
That's it. There's no cure right now. But with love, understanding, caring and sharing we work miracles.

Ortez Alderson:
and fighting to make sure that we get what's necessary to take care of people and keep people alive. And to be able to deal openly and honestly, with all of our communities, about the many varied sexualities that are going on. without apology. We do not I do not apologize for being a black gay male. And I suggest that all people in our communities, no matter what their sexual preference are, come out and educate our community into how not to come in contact with this virus. Actually, We need that openess to have that happen.

Robert Lipsyte:
Thank you very, very much for joining us. We'll be right back with Mrs. Pearson. And with one of the city's leading black churchmen.

The Eleventh Hour show graphics.

Interview ends.
Credits run over clips from previous parts of the show.

Reel Ends.