 Hi, welcome to the All Things LGBTQ Interview Show where we interview LGBTQ guests who are making important contributions to our communities. All Things LGBTQ is taped at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which we recognize as being unceded Indigenous land. Thanks for joining us and enjoy the show. I have the great honor this afternoon of talking with Maxine Wolfe, who is lesbian pioneer, activist, former university professor, I believe you're distinguished, and you've been involved with the movement in a million capacities for a long time. So I'm very honored to have you here. Let's start. My honor, actually. Thank you for inviting me. And I hope this will be the first of many interviews because we have a lot to cover. I'd like to start with your bio, if I may, a little bit. You grew up in working class Jewish immigrant, in a working class Jewish immigrant household. You went to Brooklyn College. And you started college at 16 and graduated at 19. Right. According to this dubious source I have, Wikipedia, it was in college that your political interest was sparked. And you worked at the Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality Brooklyn Corps when you were in college. Was that correct? Well, that's part of that Wikipedia that was a little weird. I was actually interested in politics when I was younger because the classmate of mine in high school took me to see Pete Seeger when he was blacklisted. And they sang this land just made for you and me. And I said, that's right. And that was it. Seriously, the power of music. And when I was in Brooklyn College, I tried to join for I went to some meetings and they were doing work up here in Brooklyn, a lot of stuff about poverty and other stuff. But it was also at the point where the movement itself was changing to be all black, where the split was happening and people wanted to run their own organizations. And so I stopped doing that. I just did all kinds of odd other things. But I would say my first small action, you know, street action was trying to unseat the Mississippi delegation to the Democratic Convention in 1964. And I went out on speakporners trying to get people to sign a petition. And that, you know, almost everything you do when you do something like that adds to your political perspective. And I went up to a postal worker who was getting out of his truck. And I said, would you sign this petition to stop the, you know, to change the Mississippi delegation so that it reflects people in Mississippi. And, and he said, I don't sign anything. And I said, what? And he said, McCarthy's not dead. Oh, my gosh. Okay. So, so you learned everything. So anyway, I consider that sort of my induction into being on the street, you know, as opposed to being in meetings and just doing some pickets, you know, I did some stuff about the Krogerrand and South Africa, you know, a lot of small things, but well, one of your cheeks is that a lot of political movements rely on leadership to speak for the membership. And they don't really get to talk with the actual people who are involved in the group whom they're supposed to be representing. Right, right. Absolutely. Yeah. Sorry for the dog rushing. Yeah, go ahead. Well, to continue with your bio went on to after working college, you went on to obtain your master's and PhD in psychology, your professor emerita in psychology from the Graduate Center, CUNY. Congratulations. Thank you. I remember my first question because I've taught for three years myself. And I used to say to myself, my scholarship is my activism and Lilian Faderman, I'm echoing her, it's not, but so my first question to you was going to be, how did you find time with a demanding teaching load to do all this activism? I don't know. I just did it. And I had two kids besides, you know, I don't know, I think that for me, my job, my teaching was a job. I was good. I was good at academic work, and it paid my salary and it gave me time off like in the summers and stuff. And I could even arrange my hours of teaching because well, for eight years when I was a graduate student, I taught part-time, but then I was teaching full-time. And I just, I could arrange which courses I would teach because I was in a graduate school, you know, very elitist kind of position. And that's what I did. And we used to joke because in ACT UP, we put out this women's women in age book. And when we were working on it, we needed to dedicate it to somebody. And one of the things we dedicated to was the CUNY Graduate School because they let, you know, we did Xeroxing there. We had meetings there, you know. So in some ways, we made it work. And I did read a speech that you gave about academia and activism. And you said, you know, as an academic, I was much more privileged in terms of time than people working nine to five. So that's a very useful perspective. Yeah, absolutely. You did a lot of things. And then, maybe I'm wrong, but your first publicized action or activity involved the reproductive rights movement. Right. In an organization supporting reproductive rights. Yes. I read another, I read part of an interview with you that said reproductive rights is a lesbian issue because it's about control of women's bodies. Right. In any event, tell us a little, your involvement with the reproductive rights movement resulted in the formation of a lesbian action committee. And that committee created some waves with the group that you were organizing with. Can you talk about that? Sure. So I joined, I did a lot of different things. And then I ended up joining a group called Carasa, the Coalition for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization of these. And, you know, it was, it was very, and it still is pretty unusual to, to combine those things, but you have to combine those things. If you understand that reproductive rights is about controlling the body and that there were many poor women, women of color who were sterilized in exchange for an abortion. And even in Puerto Rico, which has a huge number of women were sterilized, you know, not knowingly, but not knowing, because it was a way of controlling the population. So the difference between population control and abortion rights is something that people need to keep in mind. So I joined Carasa and I did a lot of different things in the organization. I worked on a lot of different issues like daycare and things like that. And then a group of us who were lesbians who were in the organization decided that we would start a lesbian action committee. So we could do, you know, include lesbian sexuality under reproductive rights. And it, it was, it went on for a long time. But the conclusion is that there were many, the organization had organized, was part of the reproductive rights national network, which I helped start, which was like 80 different groups across the country. And when we produced information about lesbians, you know, like stickers and things, it was the least picked up thing that anybody did. Okay. And in, in the organization that we were in, Carasa, people saw it as, you know, typically what happened sometimes with that situation, claiming that we were trying to make everyone into lesbians. And, and then when that didn't sort of work, people basically questioned the kind of organizing we wanted to do. And I maintain that lesbians do very different, at least then, kinds of organizing with women, because we're not, you know, it's not about necessarily your children or going to places where women would be with children. It's, it's about organizing unorganized women. Okay, not about organized women. And a lot of the groups that are more on the left and to this day, okay, that, that this group turned out to be more of a socialist feminist group. And they were on the left. And they, their mode of organizing was to get people in different organizations to endorse whatever they were doing. And so there would be one person in an office because they didn't have membership. There would be one person in an office, and they would get our met, you know, sign on to whatever we were doing. But they didn't have people to show up, you know, because they didn't have a membership. And our thing was it was time to organize unorganized women. And the best places to go would be places like hair salons, you know, laundromats, places where women are that they do not need to leave, you know, that they're sitting there and they're reading a book or something, if they're waiting for their laundry to get done. And it's a perfect time to talk to people. It's a perfect place to put literature out. And that caused quite a lot of problems. We also wanted to go to places that women don't usually, that organizations on the left don't usually go. So like when, when people would do organizing, they'd go to Greenwich Village, well, who needs to go to Greenwich Village, we wanted to go to Flatbush, okay, which is an organization, you know, in a place in Brooklyn that nobody ever goes to. And people started picking at us, you know, like nobody, nobody's going to want you there. But then when we went to King's Highway, which is another neighborhood in Brooklyn, women said to us, you know, with abortion stuff, women said to us, no one ever comes here except the Jehovah's Witnesses. But, you know, it's a way that people prevent themselves from doing, from going to places where they have an image in their head. When we went to Flatbush, which at that time had become a big Caribbean neighborhood, women came up to the table just like everywhere else to sign, you know, petitions for about maintaining abortion rights. And one woman I remember said, her daughter started saying, what are we doing here? Where she said, shush, this is about your mother, you know, okay. And so it didn't matter where we went. Because if you look at the statistics, you know that women of every background, women of every religion, women of every ethnicity, support abortion rights, you know. And so you can't like limit where you go. Anyway, it ended up with becoming very, very difficult for us to stay in the group because people were actually, you know, under the guise of politics, pushing the lesbians out. So we started a group called Women for Women. And we ended up doing most of our work at the national level with the reproductive rights national network, which I had helped start. And you know, some years before, and we ended up being on the, you know, national steering committee, a lot of us. But that was sort of that. But I still, you know, I did do work on abortion rights for about 15 years. And of course, I still supported and I, I actually support, you know, free abortion on demand, if you really want to know where I stand. I just don't think that anybody should be able to tell you what to do with your body. Exactly. I'm sorry, go ahead. Go ahead. Now you go. Let's talk about Women and Act Up. Okay. Two of the myths, the long myths about Act Up, one that Larry Kramer founded it. So tell us about your involvement in Women and Act Up. Yeah. Well, Larry ended up being a good friend of mine. Unfortunately, he passed away this year. But yeah, so I was looking for something to do because in about 1980, to every group that I was a part of fell apart. And it was the Reagan era. And so I did, you know, individual kinds of actions. I also had gone to early meetings of what was then GLAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which is, you know, still around. And I didn't like it because it was very top down. And but I knew that we had to do some work around age, which was interesting because there were women in the community that didn't understand why we were doing that. And there was a newspaper in New York called Woman News. And some woman wrote in a letter saying, why are we doing this for gay men? You know, we should not be doing this for gay men. And so Joan Nestle and I, I had gone to the archives then in 1984. And Joan Nestle and I wrote a letter back saying, how many Nicaraguans do you know? Okay, because clearly it was like internalized homophobic stuff. Because you don't need to know somebody personally to work on an issue. It's you do it because it's something that's important to you, not because it's for somebody else. That's a that's I call that philanthropy, if it's important for somebody else and not for you. But, you know, if it's important, you know, you should work on it because it's important to you and it was. So I also joined a group called Lesbian and CUNY, Lesbian and Gay People from the Graduate School from actually from all of CUNY to keep my hand in. And that June, I went to the Gay Pride March with the CUNY group and act up was in front of me. And they had this amazing concentration camp float. And I saw a couple of women and I went up to one of the women and I said, are there women in your group? And she said, Oh, yeah. So I went to the meeting at the community center two weeks later and and saw four visible women. But that grew. And I mean, what kept me there was that it was you could do what you want. You stood up and if you had a good idea, you could do it. It was so different from so many of the groups that I had been in on the left. Even the women's groups where everybody, you know, had to agree on everything. And this was not that way. There was no general principle other than that we were trying to end the AIDS crisis. And if somebody came up and wanted to do something, you would discuss it. And if it passed the vote, you did it. And so I stayed and gradually, you know, more women came. And I have never been able to be in a group where I don't know people. I find it very difficult to just do something abstractly and, you know, come into a meeting and never talk to anybody. So I invited a whole group of the women to come to my house, which was our first diet dinner. I still have a diet dinner every year. And with some of the most amazing activists you can possibly imagine. And and they and young young women as well. So it's not just those of us who have been doing this a long time, because we keep meeting people. And, and we talked about that night, we talked about why we were in the group, like why as women, why as lesbians, we were in this group act up. And it was really interesting because people had different reasons. One woman's brother had AIDS. Other people didn't know anybody with AIDS. Okay, it was, you know, I basically wanted to do the work and act up because I felt like the homophobia that was attached to HIV and AIDS was enough to kill me. I mean, one day when I was walking across the street in Park Slope, a woman yelled out, I hope you all die of AIDS. You know, in the world, at large, people did not and often do not make the distinction between lesbians, gay men, trans people, or anybody else. As long as they think that you're in that category, that general category, they want you dead. So, so anyway, so we started a women's committee. And actually the first action that we did solidified it because we so we had the dive dinner, we actually went away for a couple of weekends, we, you know, did things together to build a relationship to one another. And how many of you were there in that first grouping about seven or eight? And then it grew. So we were going to have a meeting to talk about getting women into clinical trials at the NIH because to this day, it's really hard to get women into those trials, even though their bodies are very different than men's and they deal with medication very differently. And so we were going to have a meeting about what could we do about that. And Rebecca Cole, who was one of the women, was on the way to the meeting and she passed a newspaper stand. And there was a magazine and on the cover was Cosmo had a headline about that that heterosexual women do not have to worry about AIDS. Okay. And she was fuming. And she brought it up and it turned out that it was a male psychiatrist who had not done anything about HIV. But he had patients that he thought were anxious because of it. And he had an office on East End Avenue, which if you don't know, New York is a very upper class area. And he wrote this whole thing that was totally racist about why there was AIDS in Africa and just his major point was that women's vaginas ward off any infections, okay, because they're so strong and resilient and whatever. And so what we did was we immediately said let's do an action. And we did what people don't know this about ACT UP, but ACT UP had this as a premise. You first you call up the people that you're angry at and you ask to meet with them and you give them a chance to change their mind by talking with you. And then if they don't change their mind, you have the moral high ground to do an action. Right. But if you could have changed their minds without doing an action, why bother to do an action. So we called up this doctor and he was so arrogant that he said, sure, you know, come and interview me. So we got to get, we got Denise Ribble, who was a nurse at the Community Health Project and had been seeing, had been running groups of women with HIV, okay, to come and then a group of us. And we interviewed him and Jean Carla Musto, who's a wonderful filmmaker, brought her camera and he was so arrogant that he said, fine. And so we filmed the entire thing. And basically filmed him saying things like, you know, that women in Africa get HIV because their men take them in a rough way. And, you know, and so we would count to him at each point and say like, and rape in the United States, like, what is that about? You know what I mean? So we basically, you know, answered everything that he said and showed how ignorant he was. You know, when he said the thing about the vagina, we started naming all of the kinds of infections that women get. Okay. And, and then we left. And we basically decided that we would do an action at Cosmo because we did ask to speak to the people at Cosmo, but they didn't want it to speak to us. So we planned an action at the building. Cosmo had two buildings at the first Cosmo building, which was on 57th Street. And it was a freezing day. It was about six degrees in New York. It was in January. And we did this, we did a picket, basically, and we were going to try to get into the building. I actually had called to say that I wanted to bring a group of students up there who were studying the physical environment of magazines and magazine production. And we were going to go and then the day before somebody leaked a story about the action to one of the local newspapers, the Daily News, and they put it on their gossip page. And so they called me up to say that they weren't allowing any people up and I could make another date or something. So we went anyway and we did basically a picket and we kept trying to get into the building and we couldn't, they had goons out front is the only word I can think of to use and who kept pushing us back. And finally, we had picketed long enough, we went and by the way, the men and act up totally supported this action and they were at it with us. And then we decided we would walk over to the other Hearst building and which was a couple of blocks away, which is where they had put the barricades because they didn't realize we were going to come to this building. So we get to that building walking very slowly. I always say when you cross the street, do it with the light and go slowly. Okay. And then, you know, you end up doing a minor action. And we got there and they made us be in this barricade and we were picketing and then we said, let's just go back to the other place. And we didn't say that out loud. So I went to open up the barricade and a police person said to me, oh, you can't do that, you need to be in there. And I just said, oh, the demonstration is over. And he said, oh, and he opened it up and then we started chanting. And we went back to the other building. And by that time, the police were getting a little, you know, praised. And so they arrested one of the women, Jerry Wells, who was doing it with us. And she had been protecting me because the police really came after me because I kept challenging them. And so they picked her out as a way to end the demonstration. And they took her into the police wagon that was there. And Maria Magenti got so upset because she couldn't get arrested, Jerry, because her brother was in the hospital and she had to go to the hospital. He had AIDS. And so she, Maria, just without thinking climbed onto the trunk, the front of the, not the trunk, the hood of the police wagon and started pounding on it and on the window and yelling, let that woman go, let that woman go. And so then everybody in the action started, you know, screaming, let that woman go. And this lieutenant, who we call them white shirts, who was in charge of the demonstration for the police, opened up the door to the police wagon and went in and said, get that woman out of here because we're going to have a riot. And so they wrote her like a desk ticket and, you know, put her out and she came out and did like a victory sign. And everybody applauded and stuff and action ended. So yeah, it ended, but it ended the way we wanted it to end. And then it was an amazing action. Oh, and I should say it was the first time that ACT UP, to my knowledge, did not organize with the police. The other actions prior to the women's action, they had negotiated with the police and negotiated arrest. This was not, and then one of those men kept yelling at me, the police lieutenant wants to speak with you. I said, we do not want to speak to the police lieutenant. Anyway, so that was an amazing action for a lot of reasons. And then we did follow up by doing some boycott of the magazine and we were on several television programs. And we got a lot of the word out, even if it didn't mean that they would change the magazine. But a few months later, they did. And they had a different kind of article, but they didn't do it right away. But you never know how long it's going to take for something to show up. That's why it's important to keep doing your activism, even if you don't get an immediate result. Because you never know what's going on in the background. But anyway, yeah, go ahead. What a fabulous story. And I've never heard about that. No, it's interesting. People pick out actions that they think were important, because they don't. I mean, there are many actions that we did were important. But I thought the importance of this one was that it was, you know, we did not negotiate with the police, because it was the women who organized the entire thing, because the men came with us. So it was definitely a supported action, which many people don't ever think of act up that way. And we always had men who supported the work that we were doing. Men and I, we formed affinity groups, if people don't know what that means. It's a small group of people that when you do big actions, and there's a lot of people there, it's a group that you do work with, so that you know each other well, and you can support each other. And often in act up, those small groups did a specific thing that was not just the generic action. But you know, my affinity group had 24 people in it, and most of them, and several of them have died. And we did work all the time on women's issues on changing the CDC definition of AIDS to include women. That was, you know, my affinity group really started that. And it was loads of men who, you know, were not going to benefit in the way that you think of benefiting, but who were totally involved in it. So it's something that people should remember about act up, you know, that there were many men who supported all kinds of actions. Everybody always thinks about drugs into bodies, but that's not at all the only thing we did in act up. And it wasn't just the women's committee, although the women's committee is the only committee that wrote a book that was published on women in AIDS, and that was an actual published book. We also put together before that that the book was based on we used to do teachings at act up, and we did a teaching on women in AIDS. And you'd be amazed how important that was in the men's group, where men had never seen a vagina. Okay, seriously. And didn't know like how women function or why it would matter what drugs they took. You know, and we took that on to do and produced a thick book on women in AIDS that went all over the world. Because we sent it to people in other countries. And in future actions, those people came and supported a lot of the actions that we did when we went to international conferences. So we created an international, you know, a network of AIDS activists by doing that kind of stuff. This is incredible. Clearly, this is the beginning of a much longer conversation. I've seen before we let you go, are there any words for the audience that you'd like to share? But we do want to hear you back and talk more. Okay. I do just want to say that one of the things that I was involved in was the Lesbian Avengers who started the Dyke marches. And we should talk about that some other time. And I am a coordinator at the Lesbian Hershey Archives, which I urge everybody to look at our website. There's amazing stuff on there. Tapes, videotapes, audio tapes, photographs. If we ever get you to come to the archives, that's great, but you can see a lot online. And what I want to tell people is get out in the street and do things. You know, there's no, I mean, there are all different ways to do activism. But I am a firm believer in direct action activism. And being out there visible. And I always used to say that it's okay if you get if people are afraid of you, because that's when politicians do something. But and just one other thing, which is something I always say, and it's important to remember, which is you have to have a vision. And, you know, my vision is of a world, just world. And it's because that's my vision, that I do the things that I do because I want to be part of creating that. And if I'm not here to do it, the people that come after me will. So Maxine Wolfe, thank you for joining us. So thanks so much. Hello again. After we recorded this interview, I discovered that there is a bimio recording the action that Maxine spoke about in the interview. And I think it would be great to have a visual addition to her remarks. So I'd like to thank Director Gene Calamusto for giving us permission to show doctors, liars, and women AIDS activists say no to Cosmo. Enjoy. In January 1988, Cosmopolitan magazine published an article by Dr. Robert E. Gould called, Reassuring News About AIDS, A Doctor Tells Why You May Not Be At Risk. According to Dr. Gould, there is almost no danger of contracting AIDS through ordinary unprotected heterosexual intercourse. I'm very upset about your article and I've already written Cosmopolitan because it infuriated me when I read it. I was in a monogamous relationship with one man for two years. I have problems that I will not go into because I cannot have anal intercourse. I am not an IV drug user. I go to the gym. I'm a faithful gym goer. I got it through ordinary heterosexual sex. What you're saying there is so misleading. That's nothing short of attempted murder. You can transmit it heterosexual through penis vagina intercourse. The numbers would be vastly greater than what we see. We literally mobilized within four days starting with a review, a very quick review of the article in a three-hour meeting which was held at my house with lots of food and drink which was wonderful. An introduction on a Monday night to the general body of ACT UP saying we want to do this and getting a lot of support from all the men in the group which was very exciting. The whole movement has very much addressed a lot of men's issues and that's been great but I think that there needs to be some leadership now in the media and addressing the fact that women are at risk. We're not invisible in all this. Over the course of the next three days, one of the things that was happening is I was writing the flyer thing, up all night writing the flyer. Other women were spending the morning scouting the building of Cosmopolitan on West 57th Street. Meanwhile Jean was in her mind brewing the idea of getting together with Dr. Gould and taping an interview with him where we could actually confront him and say what do you think you're doing? I began thinking of ways to make it apparent to the viewer that what the issues were and to do that I felt like we really needed to confront Gould. We needed to go and sit down with a little monster and find out exactly one by one each issue he had presented that was putting women in peril. Can I just ask what your expertise in documentation and the AIDS as far as AIDS is concerned? I became concerned because as a psychiatrist all of my patients were talking about AIDS and their fear of it and what risk are they at and should they be changing their sexual habits and so on. In order to be able to advise them if it's a deadly disease and was easily transmissible it required a certain kind of approach. If there were distortions and misrepresentations then it would be good to be able to clarify that so that's why I got interested in this. Considering the kind of statements that you make in this article about your own assessment of statistics that you've read and the work that you've done why did you choose Cosmopolitan as the place to do this? When you knew there would not be the possibility of substantiating some of your claims with the kind of footnoting and bibliography that is crucial to any kind of serious work on this issue? It was purely fortuitous. Myra Appleton with the articles editor is a good friend of mine. She knows my thinking when we talk about things at dinner one thing or another and she said you know I think this would be a good piece for our readers and I thought about Cosmo and although I've never written for Cosmo if what I'm saying is correct it would be very useful for a lot of scared people whose lives are being compromised if I am correct. You say can recurrent sexual activity with a person who does carry the AIDS virus cause you to develop AIDS? Not if you subscribe to the theory supported by considerable fact which I have just put forward that you don't get AIDS from sexual activity with a man who has the disease or carries the virus unless you engage in anal sex or there is an open lesion in the vagina when you are having vaginal intercourse. That's wrong. How many women you think in the United States have a healthy vagina? That is one that has no cuts, no abrasions, no internal lesions. No mild yeast infection? No mild yeast infection, no vaginitis. I think that I'm being conservative when I add lesions because I think in these small lesions when many women have them that again that is not a mode of transmission because if it were we would have thousands of more cases. Your data here that you put in a January 1988 Cosmopolitan Magazine and based all your theory on is one year out of date a full one year and in that one year there have been somewhere around a thousand new reported cases of women heterosexually transmitted that has left out an awful large portion of the numbers so I would like to know why it's it's one year behind and most of the things you're telling me is based on these numbers. I don't know that it's a year out of date. I know there are more people allegedly getting it but it doesn't prove that it has happened that way if I can even give some more of my data on this and from some personal examples from from patients I do know that there are women who have had anal sex who have not acknowledged it or admitted it. I've known women who practiced nothing but oral sex and they're HIV positive. I've also known women who practice nothing but heterosexual sex and even that over short term and are HIV positive. They're not drug users. They're not the sexual partners of drug users. They're not prostitutes. They're not prostitutes and they're not liars. Can I just quote from your article? Then to many men in Africa take their women in a brutal way so that some heterosexual activity regarded as normal by them would be closer to rape by our standards. I got from I cannot tell you how many nurses from how many different countries in Africa who describe this kind of sexual activity. I do happen to think that the statement about men in Africa taking their women in a brutal way implies that men in the United States do not do that and speaks to- In a lesser number. Excuse me. We don't know that since one third of women will be raped in their lifetime and we don't know what happens to the other two thirds. We don't want to continue with the fear that's that's not in in a place that's founded but we certainly want to give people a chance to make informed decisions based on what we do know not based on what we don't know and what we think might be out there it's what we do know and we do know that there are cases of women who have become infected with this virus that claim they're not IV drug users claim they're not prostitutes and claim they haven't had anal sex and based on that alone we must say to women then there's got to be some sort of possibility and until we know further I want you to know all the real data that's there. It's a different point of view. I really am convinced from all the people I've talked to and all the work that I have gone over that I am not on the wrong track. When I walked out of there I thought I there's never been a better decision made this man has absolutely no concern for the you know the really horrific potential risk he's putting women in. It confirmed that he didn't know anything it confirmed that he was doing it for his own ends whatever they are probably his own ego and I think it also made the group coalesce more because we all felt the power of sitting there and being able to each one play off the other one and each of us knew like a different tactic to take. One of the things that was really nice about cosmopolitan and in act up and in the AIDS crisis as a whole it's really hard to pinpoint the blame and to say that you know someone isn't doing their job or they're doing it wrong because there's no one who's really willing to take any responsibility or to be in charge of the AIDS crisis and the great thing about cosmopolitan was you know here's a magazine with an office in New York with real life people inside who had done something completely wrong and you know they were just sitting there as a target for us and it was very clear you know what the problem was and what the solution to it was. The thing to know is that we weren't even a women's committee until the organizing of this demonstration originally in the very beginning we were a bunch of lesbians who had these decked dinners and we would sit around trying to figure out why we were involved with AIDS activism at all. The women's committee started with a group of five or six women and when the Cosmo organizing started all of a sudden all these great women both gained strength were there doing everything that needed to be done. Do we have a bullhorn? It's going to come. Who's picking up the stuff for now? I'm picking the stuff up. Here's that Hearst Corporation owns Cosmopolitan magazine and Cosmo just ran probably one of the worst AIDS articles on women which basically says that if you're heterosexual woman even if you're sleeping with a guy who's infected you're safe you're not at risk. So you know we'd go up we'd say that we want to go inside we get pushed away by the goons from Cosmo often then we would like go right back and say you know we'd like to get in to make an appointment and then the police would come over and they'd say you're blocking the door. He said we were blocking the door we told him no the goons were blocking the door and if they would get out of the way we would get into the building. Every time that the police would try to confront us that we were doing something illegal we would tell them we weren't weren't and we would take their badge numbers down and they were getting really really antsy and I started taking his badge number again he got so furious and started yelling at me this is the fourth time today you have taken my number and I know we just have to know like each thing that you do you have to document but then he really got pissed and he started really pushing on us very very hard. I was torn in a way because as being in in the organizing process I wanted to be part of the demonstration but when you have a camera in your hand you've got to also think about documenting so part of you has to be cool and frankly at that point I lost my cool so we're seeing you see a lot of my feet in in the rough footage because my hands were up in the air and I was chanting along with everybody else see when we were in control things went well when we lost control was afterwards when the media got control of the event and we lost our representation up until then we'd been representing ourselves I was in I was in on the organizing I was documenting it so we had control of our image the next day at WOR was exactly the opposite I just like to point out that 1,000 people with AIDS right now or 1,000 women with AIDS right now does not reflect how many women are infected these it takes at least five years it seems for people to start showing signs that there could be somewhere not at least five years but during the course of the it could be up to five years it could be up to five years and it's in in up to five years about 30 percent of some of those cases would show up during those five years some of them but less than 30 percent and that's very much documented I would like to know why this person who is not at all an expert has never dealt with people with AIDS is allowed to be up here telling us and telling women particularly the women that read cosmopolitan between the ages of 15 and 23 that they don't have to tell their lovers to use a condom it's hard enough to get them to use one anyway there's a woman at risk through heterosexual intercourse uh Richard she's specifically at risk from having panels like this virtually all panel I asked you a question chris talking about women and I asked you a question all right thank you any questions over here may stand up please ma'am yes if dr casas says that it's about her it was being spread heterosexual and how does he account that in las vegas where they have legalized all right can we have security guards in here please these women thank you women today why did I can see I can see that I can see that your side believes in the exchange of ideas I can that is very well demonstrated this is an idea the idea is that women should represent them own selves in talking about AIDS both these men to the wonderful vibrant alive women in this room and the wonderful vibrant alive women in your audience that to go on like this is really dangerous to people's lives are you a medical doctor three years I can see you're a propagandist are you a medical doctor are you a medical doctor three years I can see you're a propagandist are you a medical doctor are you a medical doctor three years I can see you're a propagandist are you a medical doctor okay I can see the people in our audience believe in the exchange of ideas excuse me Deborah I'm going to have to escort you back here it doesn't have to be a woman on the panel we're not going to allow you to produce the show one of the problems that we have hysteria in this country is that people like this do not want the exchange of information you don't know what the idea is to go back and forth we're going to take a commercial break right now we'll be right back at least W.O.R. we were able to tear the place apart um nightline was a totally different fiasco because we were completely invisible can you believe they put this entire show on and never even mentioned the protest we'll talk to the author to one of his critics and to cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown tonight this is ABC News Nightline we are simply saying be careful use condoms no you're not saying that you're not saying that I wrote the article very carefully it it says if you want to be absolutely totally beyond any shadow of a doubt but you don't really have to do that that's I mean the article does not say use condoms just respond if you were Dr. Krim to the point that Dr. Gould was making that if you're going to raise research money the way to do it is is to leave the impression correctly or otherwise that the entire universe is is capable of being infected yes I found that statement deeply offensive to somebody like me because my intent is not to fool the public to raise money it's really what I do and what I say is then with great concern for the new the young generation I don't I want them to stop dying I think that none of us knew that Dr. Gould then would also be on the Phil Donahue show and that the Phil Donahue producers would make sure that four of us who were identifiable at the talk show that where we were thrown out would be put on a list and forbidden from being in that studio audience to refute Dr. Gould when Winklestein and Patty and did their study of women who did get AIDS asked them how many of you had anal intercourse 60 percent admitted it and that doesn't include the others who don't want to admit it though we kind of broke the story that women could be killed from this kind of information we were then made invisible and the only thing that was left was a debate about epidemiological truth and whether or not so-and-so is a doctor and whether or not there is proof that there is heterosexual transmission irrespective of the fact that women have AIDS my name is Jennifer Bensinger I'm an NYU student part of the student AIDS coalition there and I read the Casa Palma article and it appalled me I thought it was a bunch of lies and if the printing of it could cost lives so I called the department of health and the age project coordinator there and the research people wrote a letter to Casa Palma they tried to call Casa Palma and didn't get very much response so they wrote letters and now we're here to stop people from killing each other by printing lives I think this will let us broaden the issues and I think I hope that it'll also allow us to support other women who are working on AIDS issues and that they'll know that we're there as a resource and they can call on us when they have things that they think maybe a direct action needs to be taken about everybody who is affected by AIDS has to be out here fighting about it if we section off into gay men and women and minorities and black men and black if everyone is separated we're all going to fail the only way for us to really change the way AIDS is handled in this country is for all of us to work together so you know their lives are my life I'm glad that the AIDS community joined in with this but we've got we need to have a whole other world join in with this and that's the you know 15-year-old girls that are becoming sexually active that don't think they're at risk and that's just not true as a group we brought something to act up by the women organizing together even though we started out almost really as a gripe group about act up it was just completely a positive experience and you know I think it really there was a lot of trust and a lot of feeling that we're really on to something and that we were you know that we're really going to go someplace and do a lot of good work my fantasy is that things don't stop here and that more women in the group will feel comfortable taking the camera and bringing it to places where things are happening and documenting their own lives because as women have been saying for years now what's personal is political and our personal lives are a microcosm in a way of what's going on in the entire political scene so it's very important to me that this happened and I want the camera to be there when when when uh any of these actions are happening and I want these women to be in the editing room to sort of restructure and represent their own history and that's really important to me so I think it's particularly significant that women are as involved as they are who that they know the issues and that they're willing as we were to take anybody on who says that we are stupid that we are animals that we don't deserve information and that we should be killed because all of us said no thank you for joining us and until next time remember resist