Positively HIV - conservative radio personality's AIDS narrative - Column

National Review, April 17, 1995 by David Brudnoy

Mr. Brudnoy is a Boston radio talk host, TV commentator, film critic, and Boston University adjunct professor of communications.

THE WHIMSICAL film critic in me toyed with the idea of calling this piece ``Mon Jour chez Oprah,'' in tribute to Eric Rohmer's Ma Nuit chez Maud (1970), but then I decided, a la Richard Nixon, that that would be wrong. What I have to say here is not funny, though my half-year-long ramble through the gruesomeness of AIDS has had its amusing moments. To begin at the end -- at least at the end of developments as I write this -- I can now say I have spent a day inhabiting the giddy air of the Oprah show, this as a decidedly second banana to Olympic diver Greg Louganis.

As a broadcast and print journalist for the last quarter-century, I am no longer surprised by anything, including the comedy of possessiveness that accompanied the charming Mr. Louganis's appearance on the show. First he was booked, as was I; then ABC's 20/20 convinced Random House, publisher of his new book, that even though that installment of Oprah wouldn't air until three days after 20/20's interview with him, he mustn't appear on Oprah. I was then asked to be Numero Uno on the show, though by the time I flew out to Chicago with my producer, Kevin Myron, the touchy media moguls had relented and allowed Greg to appear. Well, by now you've heard the high points of the sometimes horrifying life -- raped at knifepoint, attempted suicide, relentless depression -- of the world's greatest diver.

Andy Warhol was wrong: sometimes you do get more than 15 minutes of fame, even if you're not Greg Louganis. I figure that by now I've had at least 20 minutes of fame, and it continues.

Media outlets across the country have expressed an interest in my story. But when NR's literary editor asked me to write about AIDS, it came as rather an enormous surprise. Not because I'm unfamiliar with this magazine or with the relevant debates. I have been part of the NR family since 1968. And among my nearly ten thousand written and broadcast commentaries, essays, and film, stage, and book reviews, about one hundred have touched on homosexuality and a like number on AIDS, though never until now on my own involvement in either. In NR's issue of July 19, 1974, Ernest van den Haag and I took differing positions on ``gay'' rights, and I find that what I had to say then reflects what I believe now.

The surprise was because this journal has been less than latitudinarian on the subject of those infected with HIV. Most conservatives take a dim view of homosexual activity. But I will not try to justify myself here; arguments about the moral status of practicing homosexuals tend to be as inconclusive as arguments about the nature of God. If you have a decade or so to debate the matter, please do. Unfortunately I don't have enough time left for that.

I was diagnosed with HIV in the spring of 1988. When I recovered from my shock -- I had assumed that since I didn't (and don't) do intravenous drugs or anal sex, I could not be infected -- I decided to deal with the matter privately. I told my local doctor and a very few friends in Boston, where I live, and elsewhere. My local doctor did blood tests on me twice each month, and we sent the results to a physician in Washington, D.C., who is also the doctor of a couple of other well-known conservative AIDS patients. Two or three times each year I went to Washington and had the expensive tests that relate to AIDS -- HIV antigen, HIV antibody, T4 cell count, and the like. In this way, and by getting my drugs pseudonymously and not collecting reimbursement for them from my insurance, I maintained perfect secrecy.

Not because I feel shame. I feel regret and sadness, and you and I know that the overwhelming likelihood is that this will all end very badly indeed. I wanted not to burden my friends and family with the knowledge, and I wanted not to be subjected to the usual media reductionism: ``AIDS-infected talk host David . . .'' and so forth.

Like innumerable others I suffered a few infections in the first six years: a little weight loss, diarrhea, thrush. But then, in Kyoto in November 1993, the side effect of one of my drugs, ddI, appeared: peripheral neuropathy, meaning an increasing pain in my feet, which by ten months later had resulted in near-paralysis. By September of last year I couldn't walk up stairs and the pain was fierce.

At that point, this rationalist realist, this no-nonsense fellow, began a six-week exercise in classical denial. I got what I thought was a bad flu -- swollen legs, dizzy spells, falling in the bushes behind the radio station, clutching the walls as I walked through the hallways, fatigue, nausea, high fever. Some flu!

I carried on at my TV, radio, writing, and teaching jobs. Sort of. Several nights I was too ill to work, and on Monday, October 24, my producer yanked me off the air because I was incoherent. But the next day I went to my Boston University class on media criticism and delivered what I tenaciously believed was a brilliant lecture, my students sitting transfixed. Months later I ran into one of those students, who, in response to my question about how he and the others had taken the lecture, told me that they sat transfixed because they had no idea what I was talking about and wondered only if I would live through the day.