On December 1, in a City Hall press conference conveniently scheduled to precede by one week his formal reelection-campaign declaration, Chicago’s acting mayor Eugene Sawyer introduced a glossy new AIDS education campaign. Joining Sawyer to handle specific questions on the city’s response to AIDS was Lonnie Edwards, MD, MPA, commissioner of the city’s Department of Health. Edwards displayed a series of slickly produced posters to be used as billboards and newspaper ads. The primary targets of the ads were black and Latino heterosexuals–intravenous drug users of both sexes and female sexual partners of IV-drug-using men. Edwards assured reporters that creating the ads and placing them around the city would be accomplished at “practically no cost”–and then dodged specifics about how much the effort would cost.
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The lack of planning and the emphasis on pseudostyle over serious substance displayed in these developments make them a fitting year-end comment on the issue of AIDS and how it has been handled by Chicago’s Health Department under Lonnie Edwards. In his nearly five-year tenure as Chicago’s top public health official, Edwards has come to personify the concept of crisis mismanagement. Under his stewardship, the city has failed to develop a comprehensive plan for prevention, education, and patient care in response to the AIDS epidemic. Funding has generally been grudging and erratic; scarce federal moneys have frequently gone undistributed while AIDS agencies went begging; good personnel have been driven away from the department by inefficiency and politicization. And in the area of committed, courageous, communicative leadership–an area in which U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and Indiana state health commissioner Woodrow Myers, to name two men, have set a laudably high standard–Edwards has failed miserably.
Then a health crisis of a different nature intervened: Harold Washington died of a heart attack. A little more than a month later, the administration of acting mayor Eugene Sawyer announced that Edwards would be staying on after all.
Political concerns also affected the city’s handling of AIDS in another way. Repeatedly, say credible former insiders, the issue of how to address AIDS was hampered by concern about the presumed negative ramifications of the Washington administration’s acting aggressively on what was seen as a “gay” health issue. Compounding this political oversensitivity was a sometimes startling lack of real sensitivity to the situation. AIDS activists still remember the city’s first “AIDS Awareness Month” in April 1984, in which the city placed posters on CTA buses. The posters were dominated by a large, bold headline reading “AlDS”–under which was contact information printed in type so small that anyone who wanted to read it would have to walk over to the poster and look right at it, something a person worried about being tagged as gay would be most unlikely to do.
Lonnie Edwards has survived. But any candidate running for mayor now would be a fool not to make our health commissioner the campaign issue he deserves to be. –Albert Williams
Huff contended that in the late 1970s, a group of U.S. scientists led by a Jewish defector from the Soviet bloc “created [AIDS] genetically and then tested it on gay white male homosexuals” after failing to prove that viruses caused cancer. He said “gay white male homosexuals” were chosen in a homophobic response to burgeoning gay political power.
Doug Huff died from a stroke on September 23, two weeks after receiving a four-year prison sentence for tax evasion. We can only assume he hasn’t been admitted to that great public health organization in the sky.
