Posted by X (**) on February 01, 2002 at 02:45:01:
Here's a letter to the editor of LGNY, a gay weekly - from Ronnie Burk, in response to a hate- filled editorial written by Paul Schindler.
Standing Up for Petrelis, Pasquarelli
January 6, 2002
To the Editor:
Paul Schindler in his op-ed letter ("Liberties, Civil and Uncivil," January 3) fails to mention that one of the main points of contention between Michael Petrelis and the CDC is that Petrelis can prove with CDC numbers that official reports of a "syphilis alert" are highly exaggerated. The real epidemic is occurring in the sexually active heterosexual sector.
Do we live in a society where to question authority means to risk being sent to jail? Do we not have the right to demand from local and federal public health officials honest reporting? These are key questions. If authorities respond with jail time for those who simply ask questions then we are all in trouble.
For years both Petrelis and Pasquarelli have criticized the CEO salaries of AIDS Industry executives. Wasted on bloated salaries, ludicrous ad campaigns, and meaningless "workshops," millions of dollars are spent annually on AIDS in San Francisco yet there are no rent subsidies for the infirm. During a housing crisis in 1999 while disabled PWAs were being evicted in San Francisco there were no services available from local AIDS agencies. Executives directors walk away with a take home pay of $270,000 a year, a salary that exceeds that of the President of the United States. Is it a crime to stand in the lobby of such an agency and chant, "Where is the money going?" Apparently so, both Pasquarelli and Petrelis were dragged through court last year for doing just that at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.
You may not like their style but you can be sure Petrelis' and Pasquarelli's intentions are in the interests of the gay community. If authorities would simply answer the questions being asked by both Petrelis and Pasquarelli concerning the discrepancies between paltry services and AIDS Industry salaries, CDC numbers reporting, the efficacy and safety of the AIDS drugs, and the very notion that HIV causes AIDS, then this little tempest in a tea pot might resolve itself. To respond to two HIV-positive gay men with a long history of activism in the community by demonizing them as thugs from some badly scripted production of The Sopranos and jailing them with a bail set at a million dollars is not only excessive but a disservice to the gay community at large.
Ronnie Burk
Brooklyn
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Letter from the Editor, LGNY
Liberties, Civil and Uncivil
By PAUL SCHINDLER
In a typically well-reasoned
"All That
Glitters" column in this issue, contributor Sara Pursley examines the
issue of the unusually high bail — $500,000 each — established in the case
of Michael Petrelis and David Pasquarelli, two San Francisco activists held
on numerous felony charges in connection with harassment and threats they
are alleged to have made against local and federal public health officials
and journalists.
Pursley argues that the size of the bail and the insignificant flight risk
the two men pose prove that the aim of prosecutors is to punish the
defendants rather than simply guarantee their subsequent appearance in
court.
Pursley is correct to raise these concerns. The queer community is
ill-served by turning a deaf ear to the fine points of our Constitution.
That said, I have to admit that I have watched with more than a little
dismay as a number of long-time gay and AIDS activists in New York signed
onto
a letter in support of Petrelis and Pasquarelli, initiated by Bill Dobbs,
that seems calculated to minimize the harm these two men have caused in
recent months.
Let's be clear about the matter: Michael Petrelis and David Pasquarelli have
no interest in a broader-based and more enlightened discussion of the
challenges facing gay men from HIV. Not only do they peddle crackpot ideas
about AIDS, [Editor's note: Michael Petrelis believes in HIV and takes HIV medications] they are also hell-bent on shutting up anyone in their path who
dares contradict them.
Surely as a community we can simultaneously care about civil liberties and
concern ourselves with the quality and civility of our own discourse.
The Dobbs letter states they the criminal charges arose out of the
activists' opposition to "proposed AIDS quarantine laws." That assertion is
the central canard, the grand lie of Pasquarelli and Petrelis' vituperative
activities in recent months. In what can only be interpreted as a deliberate
misreading of an interview that Jeffrey Klausner, a public health official
in San Francisco, gave to Washington Monthly magazine, the pair began
an overheated campaign in November to warn gay men that concentration camps
were just around the corner. Pasquarelli and Petrelis raised this
spectacular charge weeks into a campaign in which they were already
pummeling the S.F. public health department for issuing the latest in a
series of warnings about surging syphilis numbers in that town.
Throughout the autumn, numerous people, including Klausner and Sabin
Russell, a medical reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, received
threatening phone calls at home. Klausner went to court and got a
restraining order protecting himself, his wife, and their children's nanny.
Tom Coates, who heads up the University of California San Francisco's AIDS
research efforts, received this message from Pasquarelli, "Get this, and get
this good, you Nazi pig. If you open your mouth one more time to the media
and stigmatize homosexuals as diseased and deadly, we're going to shut it
for good." The San Francisco Examiner reports that court documents in
the Petrelis/Pasquarelli case indicate a link between the campaign by
Pasquarelli and Petrelis and a November bomb threat made to the Chronicle.
What are the larger goals of Pasquarelli and Petrelis? That is anything but
clear.
Pasquarelli is a member of ACT UP San Francisco, the fringe group that
claims that HIV does not cause AIDS. Petrelis has not specifically signed
onto AUSF's denialist agenda, though he has adopted the group's trademark
mantra, AIDS Is Over!, as his own. Both of them are dead set against any public discussion of sexual health risks facing gay men, characterizing such
information as "stigmatizing." Yet even as he claims to be a gay champion
working to combat "stigmatizing," Petrelis has found common cause with far
right members of Congress in his opposition to funding AIDS prevention work,
and his sound bites have found their way approvingly into the literature of
ultraconservative groups such as the Traditional Values Coalition.
Pasquarelli and Petrelis have clearly crossed a line from aggressive
activism into thuggish intimidation that is ugliest when directed at other
gay men, who are routinely termed "self-hating" and even "murderers." Beyond
their tactics, the basic politics they stand for are wrong-headed at their
most benign and increasingly just plain destructive to the health interests
of the community.
So, we can defend them as we might any one who we fear could be the target
of overzealous prosecution. But, for God sakes, let's not lionize them, or
imagine them heroes.