Titan of the Senate by William Doyle

Author:William Doyle [DOYLE, WILLIAM]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2022-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Summer of Glory Part 2 The Ryan White CARE Act

THE STAGE WAS SET for the second triumph coengineered by Orrin Hatch to unfold in the Senate chamber in the summer of 1990, just weeks after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

It was a story that symbolically began on June 5, 1981, the day that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) first described the illness that came to be known as HIV/AIDS.

On the same day, a woman arrived in Salt Lake City, Utah, to start a new medical practice. Over the next decade, that woman, Kristen Ries, an MD and lifelong Republican, became Utah’s “AIDS Doctor” by treating over 90 percent of people with HIV/AIDS in the state during the epidemic’s initial years.

Forty years later, she recalled, “In the first nine years I had a solo medical practice and I had almost all the [HIV/AIDS] patients in Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, and Idaho.” No other doctors would see these patients. Working with her nurse and physician’s assistant Maggie Snyder and a team of Roman Catholic nuns at Salt Lake City’s Holy Cross Hospital, she was often the only doctor in those four states who would even accept appointments with HIV/AIDS patients.267

The 1980s were a time of widespread ignorance, fear, and prejudice among many Americans over both AIDS and homosexuality, and Dr. Ries said she was treated as “a pariah of the medical community” for her work. These attitudes extended into religious communities, and in this respect, the intensely conservative state of Utah was no different from many other locations and religious denominations in the nation. Utah journalist Gillian Friedman noted that at the time, “the cause of the epidemic was still unknown and public fear of needles and blood, of touching anyone who might have the virus and of the gay community in general, was running rampant.”268

“Very early on in the epidemic,” recalled Dr. Ries, “some of the local bishops of the churches encouraged the parents and families of people with HIV—or even gay [people]—to disown their children. Some of them did. But that didn’t last too long. Finally, some of the mothers stood up, and now they have Mama Dragons [a community of Latter-day Saint mothers with LGBTQI+ children]. It’s come really almost 360 degrees around in the last number of years. But back then, many of these patients died almost alone. Some of ’em, they didn’t have friends.”

In the first decade since its emergence in 1981, the HIV/AIDS pandemic killed tens of thousands of gay and straight Americans, primarily through blood transfusions and sexual contact. As Senator Edward Kennedy recalled in a 2007 oral history, “The kind of discrimination against gays during this period, and the vehemence and the vitriol directed towards them, was just extraordinary. The disease was obviously the result of gay sexual behavior, but it was also the result of the use of needles and of the blood supply being contaminated. People who were hemophiliacs were getting AIDS and were suffering this extraordinary discrimination.

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