Chicago Stories: "The Outrage of Danny Sotomayor" (WTTW, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, June 11) I watched a couple of Queer-themed shows on KPBS that brought back memories – grim memories in the case of the first one, The Outrage of Danny Sotomayor. Danny Sotomayor was an openly Gay artist from Chicago whose father was Puerto Rican and whose mother was Mexican. Sotomayor tested “HIV positive” in 1987, was diagnosed with full-blown AIDS in 1988, and he became one of the original organizers of the Chicago chapter of ACT UP and a major fixture in protests aimed at getting both the federal government and the local administration in Chicago to take AIDS more seriously and appropriate more money against it. He also became a nationally syndicated cartoonist doing mostly political cartoons attacking the government’s lack of concern for AIDS in general and Gay and Bisexual men with AIDS in particular. Sotomayor’s most famous cartoon – and the one that appeared on his AIDS quilt panel once he finally died in February 1992 – showed President George H. W. Bush and his wife Barbara in bed together. He was reading a newspaper with a banner headline announcing that by then 100,000 Americans had died of AIDS; Barbara asks him if there’s anything important in the news that day, and he says, “Nope.” One of Sotomayor’s campaigns was against the Chicago Transit Authority, which had authorized a safer-sex ad campaign to run as placards inside buses. Unfortunately, their first ad showed a condom and said, “Don’t think of it as birth control. Think of it as death control.” Sotomayor and the other members of ACT UP Chicago took strong exception to this slogan, “believing the ads to be blaming individuals with HIV,” as the Web site for the program on Chicago’s public television station, WTTW, explained. “He wanted ads that were informative about safe sex at a time when education about HIV/AIDS was nonexistent.” Danny’s friend Victor Salvo “said the ads featured only heterosexual people ‘because you weren’t allowed to spend any money on anything that validated homosexual existence.’ ACT UP Chicago took action.”

The action they took was to design a set of placards exactly the same size as the bus ads and use them in guerrilla-style actions to replace the offensive ads with theirs. When Richard M. Daley, son of Chicago’s legendary “Boss” Mayor Richard J. Daley, was elected Mayor in his own right in 1989 (an office he held until 2001, surpassing his father’s term from 1955 to 1976), ACT UP Chicago repeatedly targeted him for not spending enough of the city’s money on AIDS. While more Establishment Queer organizations in Chicago were trying to build relationships with Daley and his administration, ACT UP disrupted Queer community events featuring Daley. When Daley challenged the ACT UP activists to find loose money in the city budget that could be redirected to AIDS spending, ACT UP’s people did just that. Working from a leaked copy of the city budget, and with the support of sympathetic Alderperson Helen Shiller (the Board of Aldermen is Chicago’s equivalent of a city council) who actually introduced the legislation, ACT UP got Mayor Daley and the Board of Aldermen to triple Chicago’s AIDS funding. It was Danny Sotomayor’s last great victory, but he didn’t live to see it. The program also profiled Danny Sotomayor’s relationship with Scott McPherson, a Chicago-based Gay playwright whose best-known work, Marvin’s Room, has nothing to do with AIDS but deals with a dysfunctional family brought back together when two of its members come down with a fatal disease (leukemia). At a time when the leaders of the Gay male community were calling on individual Gay men to pick their romantic and sexual partners on the basis of HIV status – the word was that positive men should only date other positive men and negative men should only date other negative men – Sotomayor and McPherson, who was also HIV positive, began to see each other aware that their relationship would probably not last long.

Sotomayor died in February 1992 and McPherson followed him that December, but not before designing a panel for Sotomayor on the AIDS quilt. By special dispensation from Cleve Jones, founder of the NAMES Project (the organization that sponsored the quilt), McPherson got to do an unusually large panel for Sotomayor featuring his cartoon of the two Bushes in bed and a love poem McPherson wrote to “Honey Pie,” his pet name for Sotomayor. Sotomayor had come from a troubled background even before he realized he was Gay; when he was 12 his father had literally gone after his mother with a knife, and it took both Danny and his older brother, David Sotomayor (who was interviewed for the program), pulling their dad off their mom to save her life. Danny complained that when he was with other Hispanic people he was seen primarily as a Gay man, while when he was with other Queer people he was seen primarily as a Puerto Rican. Of course I couldn’t watch this program without being reminded of my own relationship with AIDS; since I didn’t come out until December 1982 I missed the experience of having hundreds of my friends literally dying on me for reasons that remained mysterious, and though I did certainly lose people I cared about to AIDS, that gave me a detachment from the issue that led me to question the received medical wisdom that AIDS was a single disease caused by a single virus. I spent years involved with the so-called “AIDS dissent” movement, which challenged the official HIV/AIDS model and relied on a cadre of scientists who argued that AIDS was a multi-factorial condition whose primary cause, at least in the West, was widespread and long-term drug abuse that broke down people’s immune systems over time.

I launched my own Queer publication, Zenger’s Newsmagazine, in 1994 largely to advocate for this view – my second issue featured a cover interview with UC Berkeley professor Peter Duesberg, the principal advocate for the drug/AIDS model in the scientific community – and that made me a lot of enemies in the Queer community who thought my information literally could kill people. I still don’t think HIV follows the standard protocol for a disease-causing virus and I remain appalled at the way basic scientific principles of virology were redefined to make HIV the “cause” of AIDS. My biggest quarrel with AIDS “science” remains that for all other viral diseases, development of an antibody response means that your immune system has recognized the virus and mobilized your body to fight it . Indeed, the whole purpose of vaccination is to give your body something close enough to the virus being vaccinated against so your immune system will learn enough about it to fight off the real thing. But with HIV we’re told that an antibody response (which is what the so-called “HIV test” measures) is an infallible indication that you already have the infection and will die from it unless you go on “antiviral” treatments immediately and remain on them for the rest of your life. Indeed, the response to HIV has become so twisted that people are now routinely urged to go on antiviral meds before they test “HIV positive” – so-called “pre-exposure prophylaxis,” or “PrEP” for short. The TV airwaves are currently clogged with ads for these drugs, which were originally designed to protect HIV negative people in relationships with HIV positive people but now are being marketed to just about everybody. My involvement with AIDS dissent has colored much of my reaction to the history of AIDS in general and ACT UP’s legacy in particular.

I can well understand the frustration of people who literally were under an imminent death sentence that led to the demand of “Drugs Into Bodies!,” a call to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to loosen up the formerly strict regulations governing new drug approvals. But loosening those regulations had also been a long-term goal of the pharmaceutical industry, which seized on the “Drugs Into Bodies!” demand to achieve it. The drug companies and their lobbyists could tell reluctant Congressmembers, “It’s not us who are saying it! It’s the patients themselves who are saying it!” Also, during Sotomayor’s lifetime the only approved therapy for AIDS was azidothymidine (AZT), a brutal drug that had originally been designed as a cancer chemotherapy. AZT worked by killing off all cells in the process of reproducing themselves; the theory was that since cancer cells reproduce thousands of times faster than normal cells, AZT would kill off the cancer cells while enough of the non-cancerous cells would survive to keep the patient going. But when it was used as an AIDS treatment, AZT devastated the body and led to many of the same symptoms as AIDS itself (which led dissident Queer AIDS journalist John Lauritsen to call it “AIDS by prescription”). Doctors made it worse by prescribing it for steady use instead of “pulsing” it (giving patients some time on the drug and some time off) the way cancer chemotherapies are usually used. AZT fell from popularity, partly because long-term studies like the British/French Concorde trial in the early 1990’s revealed people who used it early on actually died quicker than people who waited, and partly because less blatantly toxic antiviral drugs became available. “Today, contracting HIV is no longer a death sentence,” says the narration to this program. “We’ve been remarkably successful at controlling the infection, making it a chronic problem that you can live an entire normal life with. They take their medication, HIV is in the background, it's not doing anything,” which has left the human race freer to react to subsequent pandemics like COVID-19 (caused by a virus, SARS-CoV-2, which actually behaves like a normal pathogenic virus, while HIV does not) and has greatly eased the sense of crisis that gripped the Queer community at the height of AIDS.