The Wockner Wire

Veteran gay journalist Rex Wockner flaunts his opinions in "The Wockner Wire." Check in every Friday for a dose of politics and entertainment according to Rex.

Reverse discrimination It's become so predictable it's humorous.

The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force has just hired its sixth lesbian-feminist executive director in a row.

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Elizabeth Toledo replaces Kerry Lobel who replaced Melinda Paras who replaced Peri Jude Radecic who replaced Torie Osborn who replaced Urvashi Vaid.

Toledo comes from the National Organization for Women where she was a vice president, which is so perfect that a playwright couldn't have done it better.

Apart from Toledo, I know all these women, like them, and had good working relationships with them. But what are the odds that six times in a row the best applicant was a female?

Further, what are the odds that the best applicant is someone who, like Toledo, has been out of the closet for less than one year? Someone who only divorced her husband last year?

I believe the NGLTF board is willing to hire only lesbian-feminists for the organization's top job, and all the better if they're lesbian-feminists "of color" like Toledo.

No matter how wonderful these particular lesbian-feminists may be, that's unfair.

Our Dissident Friends A couple of renegade ACT UP groups have stepped up their activism in recent months, promoting their belief that HIV is not the cause of AIDS and that all current anti-HIV drugs are poison.

And, in recent weeks, they've gotten a boost from South African President Thabo Mbeki, who, after cruising the Web, has come to the conclusion that the dissidents have a point. He even wrote a letter to Bill Clinton about it.

ACT UP/San Francisco recently went so far as to violently disrupt a public meeting on AIDS treatment issues. ACT UP/Hollywood, meanwhile, is brawling with the L.A. gay center which refuses to rent them meeting space.

There are three issues here:

1. Scientists agree that HIV causes AIDS. I'm not smart enough to promise you they've "proved" it, but I am smart enough to have noticed that when my HIV-positive friends who were on their death beds back around 1996 started taking anti-viral cocktails, their immune systems rebounded dramatically and their AIDS-related infections disappeared. They are living normal lives now (except for a couple of people who failed to respond to the drugs). If suppressing HIV causes the immune system to recover, that's strong evidence that HIV is causing the immune deficiency.

2. However, there's no question that the anti-HIV drugs are nasty. Much has been written about the side effects: strokes, heart attacks, liver damage, kidney damage, diabetes, crippling diarrhea, dangerously high cholesterol and triglycerides, and disfiguring body-fat redistribution. If it were me, I'd wait till the last minute -- till I had 50 CD4 cells -- to do the drugs. The "side effects" are anything but minor and I'd let my immune system struggle along valiantly as long as it could before subjecting myself to the pharmaceutical onslaught. If renegade ACT UP chapters convince healthy HIV-positives who have hundreds of CD4 cells to resist hopping on the drug bandwagon too early, that's a good thing, in my opinion.

3. Then there's poor President Mbeki. The World Wide Web is stuffed with information, lots of it wonderful and accurate and lots of it riddled with errors. Always proceed with caution when doing "research" online. But what I think is really going on with Mbeki is this: One in nine South Africans is HIV-positive, the nation cannot even begin to hope to buy these exorbitantly priced drugs for its citizens, and the president is completely freaked out and is grasping for something else, anything else, to hold onto. It's sad and pathetic and someone should slap him hard soon.

Convincing the citizens of South Africa that HIV is harmless is not going to save their lives. The only thing that's going to do that is a $10,000 to $15,000 per person per year three-drug anti-HIV cocktail when their CD4 cells fall below 50. If the average South African makes 10 times less money than the average American, then these drugs need to be 10 times cheaper in South Africa. Actually, they need to be 50 times cheaper because they're unconscionably overpriced here in America to start with.

If you're bored and looking for a way to make a difference in the world, start beating the shit out of these immoral, profiteering pharmaceutical companies who dare to charge $30 a day for pills that you have to take for the rest of your life. A decent salary in Tijuana, 15 miles from my house, is about $19 a day, and most of the world is more or less in the same boat as Tijuana.