Town hall focuses on L.A.'s battle with HIV/AIDS

John Duran was a young lawyer living in West Hollywood in 1984 when he joined what would become one of the nation's longest-running studies of HIV/AIDS.

"They were going to try to figure out what this thing was that was killing gay men," Duran said.

More than a thousand men signed up for the Los Angeles Men's Study, part of the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study, or MACS, that also included 5,000 men in Chicago, Baltimore and Pittsburgh. During the next 25 years, the study generated scores of scientific findings as the group of mostly white, openly gay volunteers tested HIV-positive and sought treatment.

This week, with White House officials visiting Hollywood to discuss the administration's new national AIDS strategy at a town hall meeting, advocates reflected on the study's legacy as they prepared to call for more diversity in AIDS research.

As of last year, the population living with AIDS in Los Angeles County was 40% Latino, 35% white and 21% African American, according to the county's Department of Public Health.

When the L.A. Men's Study was proposed by Dr. Roger Detels, then dean of the UCLA School of Public Health, the population living with AIDS was far less diverse: 75% white, 13% African American and 11% Latino.

Detels started by recruiting gay student volunteers but wanted a bigger group. He posted ads in gay magazines and contacted gay activists and lawyers, among them Rand Schrader at the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center in West Hollywood.

Detels told potential volunteers they would have to take blood tests, and submit to physical exams and surveys twice a year. Although their records would remain confidential, they would have to tell him their names.

Schrader, who had recently become the state's first openly gay municipal judge, was among the first to volunteer. Many others refused.

"This was the midst of the sexual liberation movement, bath houses were flourishing, gays and lesbians were seeing renewed levels of recognition in society and there was concern this would set us back," said Schrader's then-partner, Geo- Cities founder David Bohnett, who did not join the study.

Within about a year, Detels had recruited 1,647 volunteers, mostly middle-class professionals motivated by fear of the mysterious new disease.

'Friends dying'

Actor Dale Reynolds, 65, was living in West Hollywood, read about the study in Frontiers magazine and immediately signed up. "I had so many friends dying around me, I felt I really had to do something," Reynolds said.