News Item: "Mayor David Dinkins appointed Indiana Health Commissioner Woodrow August Myers, Jr. health commissioner of the City of New York, Friday, January 19, amid a storm of controversy..." Outweek, Jan 28, 1990.

The winter had begun painfully for Aaron Bronsky. For almost a decade he had struggled to make breakthroughs happen in government, so that the community he identified with could survive AIDS. Then, in the start of that winter, from 1989 to 1990, he himself was diagnosed with HIV. Obviously, he had been infected years before. By the time there was a test to take, he showed no symptoms, but later he began to suffer some complications. He took the test and got the terrible news. He had striven so hard for the sake of others, only to find he had to fight for his own life, now. True, he often felt depressed and very despairing, and found he needed friends to bolster his morale. But he also intensified his activism.

One night in January, Aaron was in rare form. That was before the Woody Myers appointment was finalized.

Dinkins had floated the name, and activists began researching it. They were afraid that Woody Myers' past politics on AIDS might run counter to their own beliefs, especially on issues like quarantine, names reporting and contact tracing. (Eventually, an HIV positive gay man would even be brought in from Indiana for a New York press conference, during which he'd claim Myers had quarantined him because of his sexual activity.)

Aaron Bronsky lobbied the coalition to do an emergency demo against the Myers crisis, one evening, but the main floor seemed either apathetic or distracted. Aaron felt the floor's response was dysfunctional, so he stood on a chair and lambasted their complacency, accusing them of being like cattle led to slaughter.

Arguments flared. The tide turned in favor of Aaron's call for immediate action, and so the entire room adjourned early to do a spontaneous picket line that hour at the Mayor's mansion on the Upper East Side.

Sean was in that meeting, applauding Aaron. So were Nathan and Reggie. Collectively and individually, activists started hopping on northbound subways, and finally, a large turn out at Gracie Mansion appeared, startling the guards and taking the police by surprise.

The protest made the news, and that was the first volley. The activist community was galvanized. Ad hoc meetings were held. Bigger demos were planned. Phone trees were activated in a desperate zero-hour push to prevent the Myers appointment.

At these hectic meetings, activists lost their tempers with each other, and a few wanted to curb the demos, for they felt the spontaneity seemed hazardous.

There were a couple of big demos at City Hall. The media coverage was brilliant. But Dinkins stuck by Woody Myers. The coalition couldn't have been angrier. The defeat seemed ominous, too, as if the coalition were losing its clout. Complicating the crisis was the fact that some felt the coalition, which was made up mostly of white people, was being latently racist, since Myers, like Dinkins, was black.

Nathan had gone to a Time Square demo in the immediate aftermath of Myers' appointment. Hundreds of protesters were there. It was on a Saturday night. He experienced something that stayed with him. At the end of the event, dozens of heavy-set men in parkas and sneakers stepped out of the activist ranks and crossed the wide street of Broadway, to congregate on the other side.

"Who the fuck are they?" Nathan asked an older demonstrator.

"Cops," the man said.

"Plainclothesmen?" said Nathan.

"I think we call them 'undercover'."

"Shit," said Nathan. "There are so many of them."

The man nodded. "It's been going on for years in our community," he said. "For years." Aaron overheard the exchange. He looked off to the same line of men, and nodded gravely.

***

Many intelligent people in the coalition thought Sean would never make the best point man on anything, and they were basically right. Not even Sean thought he had the cunning and drive to cope with the typical personalities activists had to face, in that kind of a position, like public relations experts, high-powered lobbyists or even CEO's.

Nevertheless, late in winter he was to meet some government reps from Albany to discuss home health care.

Sean brought a younger coalition member up to speed on the issue so that he'd have some support.

The event took place in a small, plain-looking office near Madison Square Garden.

These officials weren't the main figures who had oversight on the home health care front, but they were state officials, nonetheless, and solid contacts.

Sean, who did most of the talking, at first, stressed how the home health care industry seemed to fail at least a percentage of PWAs who needed it.

Low pay, spotty training, and not enough follow-through on complaints seemed to be the source of some of the problems that would arise.

The representatives nodded and said Sean and his cohort seemed familiar with the whole issue.

Then, they took Sean in a whole new direction. They referred to community-based groups that were giving tremendous help to patient populations by taking up slack the State wasn't always able to handle. Wouldn't Sean like to do the same thing with home health care, they wondered?

"Whoah," Sean thought. He felt out done and over his head.

Were they asking him to become a founder of a non-profit? (That's how the alarmist in him felt, anyway.)

Both he and the Albany people said they'd get back to each other. They adjourned.

"I'm not capable of being a health care professional," Sean thought.

His mind lingered on the kinds of people who'd be able to run with a project like that. He felt like a phony. He wanted to help channel (from his own community to the government) complaints about the service, that's all. That was the role he thought he was cut out for. He viewed himself as beneath this new challenge...

He didn't have much time to dwell on the issue, that day, however, for back in his apartment, he received an urgent phone call from the buddy at GMHC who had been looking after his redheaded friend. It was a cool hour, in the late afternoon.

The news was ominous: Sean's friend had refused food over the past forty-eight hours and now was refusing life-support.

Sean hung up the phone, grabbed his jacket and ran into the cold.