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The March 1 edition of Thompson Healthcare Company's newsletter AIDS Alert provides some clues. Inspector general auditors are examining the Global AIDS Program, which provides federal money to attack AIDS overseas, according to the newsletter. Federal sleuths are looking at how the CDC accounts for spending on HIV program activities. They're conducting an audit of how the CDC monitors federal grants to programs such as the Stop AIDS Project. And, once the audit of the Global AIDS Program is done, investigators will conduct an audit into whether the CDC obeys federal laws in deciding which AIDS groups to fund, the AIDS Alert article says.
The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S., a group that promotes sex education, has been subjected to similar scrutiny. Twenty-four members of Congress recently sent a letter to Secretary Thompson asking for an investigation into SIECUS, along with Advocates for Youth and Planned Parenthood. These groups had jointly sponsored a Web site protesting the diversion of AIDS funding to Christian fundamentalist-backed "abstinence education." A federal inquiry soon followed. As in the other cases, it turned up no wrongdoing.
"We're huge proponents of the idea that tax dollars should be spent appropriately. Anyone who says we're trying to undermine the appropriate use of tax dollars is throwing up a red herring," says SIECUS's Smith. "When you have more auditors in a program than actual people doing the program, that tells me there's something else at work."
It's fitting that the cycle of vindication followed by stepped-up federal inquiry now haunting AIDS prevention programs began in San Francisco. Conservative Christians tend to fetishize obscure sexual practices, and they often turn to our city for help. I experienced this phenomenon four years ago when I wrote about a sexually obscene performance art piece; the story appeared on dozens of right-wing Web sites, and years later it still seems to get reposted to a new one every month. And so it was that in last year's saturation coverage of the Stop AIDS Project, stories quoting multiple conservative voices tended to include the term "rimming."
In addition to providing fodder for fundamentalist sexual obsessions, San Francisco suffers another tradition, equally distasteful, which has played an important role in the ongoing federal AIDS program witch-hunt. Like 17th-century Salem, San Francisco tends to aggrandize lonely, mean gadflies. The Stop AIDS Project has suffered the tireless attention of self-proclaimed AIDS activist Michael Petrelis, whose greatest fame came from being jailed last year on charges that he and a cohort stalked and made criminal threats against employees of the S.F. Chronicle and the Department of Public Health.
In news reports, Web log references, gay newspaper citations, and copies of mass e-mails from Republican congressional staffers given me by Krochmal, the Stop AIDS publicist, Petrelis is described as having spawned the endless audits by writing to members of Congress complaining that taxpayer dollars were being spent on what he described as sexually explicit anti-AIDS workshops.
Petrelis' precise motives for doing this are hard to pin down; he styles himself as a good-government, public-openness advocate, saying federally funded AIDS programs receive insufficient oversight. He also says AIDS education programs stigmatize homosexuals. He's joined forces with AIDS denier David Pasquarelli in a campaign to reopen San Francisco bathhouses, saying he dislikes having to travel to other cities for anonymous sex. In compendium, Petrelis' odd list of causes reads like the sort of activist résumé typical of San Francisco arrivals who have discovered that the city's inclusive, help-the-little-guy political culture can be easily hijacked by self-promoters.
Evans, the Stop AIDS Project program director, says Petrelis has worked in concert with AIDS-audit-obsessed congressional aide Roland Foster to keep the pressure on HIV education groups. Both Petrelis and Foster have been quoted by the Washington Times as saying programs such as Stop AIDS are ineffective and waste taxpayer money. An August e-mail from Petrelis to former Stop AIDS Project Director Steve Gibson mentions a Stop AIDS schedule and asks: "Can you tell me if any HIV prevention funds from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are being used to put on these forums? If CDC funds are being used for these events, can you inform me as to how much CDC money is being spent on the meetings?"
Foster, a staffer on the House Government Reform committee, did not return my call requesting comment. Petrelis refused in an e-mail message to be interviewed. He wrote that he would respond to written questions by e-mail; I generally don't agree to this type of e-mail Q&A because it results in non sequitur responses with no opportunity for follow-up, making it a waste of time.
Though I didn't get to speak with him, I did get the sense that Petrelis has been pleased with Republican success in pressuring AIDS prevention programs. Last month the Los Angeles Times reported that the federal government will curtail spending on safe-sex programs designed to prevent HIV among uninfected people in favor of a campaign to stop the spread of the virus by those who already have it. AIDS activists say this reduced funding of safe-sex education programs, including the Stop AIDS Project, is the result of pressure from both the Bush administration and conservative members of Congress who have objected to explicit HIV prevention materials.
It's perhaps an apt conclusion to the Republican pressure Petrelis apparently helped launch.
In a posting to his Web log last week titled "I am the happy homosexual," he praised the L.A. Times story:
"My happiness stems from the tone of the story and from a quote [the Times reporter] got from the executive director of the National Association of People With AIDS, Terje Anderson, about the CDC shift: 'There ain't going to be any more safe-sex workshops. There ain't going to be any more public attitude campaigns around this.'"
