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"There is no evidence that DNCB decreases opportunistic infections, or increases T cells, or delays the onset of AIDS," says Miles, who heads the Clinical AIDS Research and Education Clinic at the University of California at Los Angeles. "To mislead people into believing that is a gross misrepresentation."
Miles says the existing data on DNCB is unreliable because the studies report only selected results from selected patients. Says Miles: "I'm singularly unimpressed."
ACT UP S.F. frequently cites Dr. Raphael Stricker, one of the very few medical "authorities" to publicly endorse DNCB. But Stricker's professional track record speaks for itself: He was fired from the University of California at San Francisco in 1990 for falsifying results of an AIDS study in an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Supporters of DNCB cite testimonials of AIDS patients as evidence that the drug boosts immune function. Some people have reported feeling "better" after applying the substance to their skin. Others have reported severe rashes, burns, and blistering.
The Boys From Florida, however, were convinced of DNCB's effectiveness and decided that the rest of ACT UP S.F. needed convincing, too. The DNCB group began holding its own community forums to promote the use of the photoactive drug, which ACT UP S.F. now distributes for "suggested donations" of $5 to $20, depending on the quantity supplied.
DNCB has hardly been a moneymaking venture. ACT UP S.F. gives away more of the chemical than it sells and profits from sales are negligible: Pasquarelli still works at Kinko's, and Bellefountaine weighs marijuana at a buyers club twice a week.
Former ACT UP S.F. members say Pasquarelli and Bellefountaine increasingly seemed more interested in DNCB than the group's political goals. Discussions became shouting matches. Disagreements deteriorated to insults and obscenities.
"They would scream at people, they would curse at them," says former ACT UP S.F. member Laura Thomas. "They would present themselves as somehow being persecuted. It made it a really unpleasant room to sit in for a couple of hours."
Bellefountaine maintains that the members of ACT UP S.F. were simply "not supportive of new ideas or new people. They seemed suspicious."
Longtime members began to leave the group. Rebecca Hensler decided she'd had enough in the summer of 1994. "We had gotten so far from the days when we could all disagree and still put our lives and bodies on the line for each other," says Hensler, brushing tears from her eyes, "it was making me completely miserable. I had to leave."
By the end of that summer, none of the original members of ACT UP San Francisco remained.
"All the sane, rational, committed people left the group," says Thomas. "They were basically chased out, or they decided that they could do the work they wanted to on AIDS without being screamed at about DNCB by Pasquarelli and Bellefountaine."
The Dissenters
These days, ACT UP S.F. meets each Monday night at the Epicenter Zone, a punk collective and music store on Valencia Street. This evening in March, 14 people sit on sagging sofas arranged in a rectangle at the rear of the store. The meeting begins without Dave Pasquarelli, who is home sick with a cold.
Michael Bellefountaine pulls out a yellow ACT UP Planning Calendar. A face -- AIDS Foundation Director Pat Christen's -- is on the calendar, with a few slight alterations. Christen has been drawn to look like a cat. The calendar is a larger version of the stickers, captioned "Dump Fat Cat Pat," that ACT UP S.F. plastered throughout the Castro neighborhood a few months ago. Ronnie, the kitty-litter activist, and Kay, a woman with fluffy gray and mauve hair, facilitate the meeting.
Bellefountaine hands out proposed budgets for an animal rights protest to be held later this month, on World Animal Rights Day, in Atlanta. He is excited to announce that singer Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, who met ACT UP S.F. members last year at an animal rights protest in Washington, has just donated $5,000 to the group. Bellefountaine says the money will go toward the Atlanta trip. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) will pay his airfare, as they did last year for the D.C. trip.
The unusual connection between ACT UP S.F. and PETA originated two years ago, when ACT UP S.F. decided it would add animal research to the list of evils perpetrated by AIDS researchers and the pharmaceutical industry. The group has since joined forces with PETA to protest, among other things, the hyperpublicized transplant of baboon bone marrow into an Oakland man with AIDS -- a procedure that, incidentally, ACT UP Golden Gate supports.
Kay says she has done some research on the Atlanta police: "I heard the cops are wusses compared to San Francisco, so if you want to get arrested, you're going to have to work really hard!" she laughs. This prompts Medea, a woman with long, jet black and royal blue braids, to talk animatedly, and in full, bloody, intestinal detail, about the evils of animal vivisection.
Although there is a written agenda, the discussion meanders. Todd, the treasurer, encourages his colleagues to follow his example and engage in "bigot busting" -- that is, a spitting campaign directed against Mormons.
A few members take turns rubber-stamping Pat Christen's feline countenance on stacks of postage-paid remittance cards -- registration cards for an AIDS dance-a-thon sponsored by Mobilization Against AIDS. ACT UP S.F. is protesting the dance because income from the event, Todd says, will be used to pay the salaries of fat cats like Christen, who are, he claims, profiting from the AIDS epidemic.
ACT UP S.F. is discussing plans for obtaining news coverage of abysmal living conditions at a single resident occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin that houses indigent AIDS patients when the meeting is interrupted. A round-shouldered employee from the city's Department of Public Works sheepishly asks who is in charge; he needs to issue a citation and a bill for removing ACT UP S.F. stickers that have been plastered on city No Parking signs.
