Free Dave Pasquarelli and Michael Petrelis!

Free Dave Pasquarelli and Michael Petrelis!

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2002 by Mark Gabrish Conlan
Reprinted by permission from the February 2002 issue of Zenger’s Newsmagazine

“The danger we face today is not that government officials will make hasty decisions out of fear or that they will strike the wrong balance between liberty and security,” Yale Law School professor Jack M. Balkin wrote in the November 29, 2001 Los Angeles Times. “It is that they will use a national crisis as an opportunity to make themselves more powerful and less accountable for what they do — not because they are corrupt and venal but because they are so utterly convinced of their uprightness.”

Balkin was writing about President Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft and their far-reaching attack on the Constitution — including the “USA Patriot Act” they ramrodded through Congress, the detention of over 1,000 noncitizen Arab-Americans without any evidence of criminal conduct and the decision to try suspected terrorists in secret military tribunals with no rights of appeal — all in the name of the “war on terrorism.” But he could just have easily been writing about the appallingly self-righteous government officials and AIDS agency executives in San Francisco who have spearheaded the insane prosecution of David Pasquarelli and Michael Petrelis as “terrorist conspirators” for using time-honored protest tactics against the AIDS establishment.

Pasquarelli and Petrelis currently languish in the San Francisco County Jail, held on a total of $1.1 million in bail amidst public accusations that they made bomb threats to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper and committed other acts of “criminal terrorism.” But at the one hearing they’ve actually had in open court (on December 13 before San Francisco Superior Court judge Perker Meeks, Jr.), the only accusation actually supported by any evidence was that they had made angry and scatological late-night phone calls to the homes of San Francisco health officials. There was nothing about bomb threats, stalking or any of the other hysterical allegations for which they have already been tried and found guilty in the San Francisco media, Queer and straight.

What did they really do? Last October 30 Pasquarelli and other members of ACT UP San Francisco joined with Petrelis in sending out a series of e-mail press releases strongly criticizing the San Francisco Department of Public Health for releasing inflated statistics on the numbers of Gay men in the city who were contracting syphilis. They also targeted local reporters for having reported the Health Department numbers as absolute fact, without any attempt to investigate the ACT UP members’ allegations that the figures had been rigged.

What’s going on here? Two things: money and the peculiar loyalty the Left in particular has formed towards the mainstream view of AIDS. Though Pasquarelli and Petrelis disagree on some fundamental questions — Pasquarelli rejects HIV as the cause of AIDS and opposes the standard chemotherapies, while Petrelis believes in HIV and takes the drugs himself — they’ve joined forces to challenge the bloated funding for AIDS, especially in San Francisco. Not only have they made a good case that city officials are deliberately cooking the statistical books to defend S.F.’s disproportionate share of total federal AIDS dollars, their complaints sparked a federal investigation of all HIV prevention programs nationwide that could also cost their city millions.

As for loyalty, as dissident AIDS activist Christine Maggiore put it in the March 2001 Satya magazine, “The same people who are wary of mainstream media stories and government reports accept without question all stories and reports on AIDS. The very activists who protest the agendas of multinational chemical corporations assume their typical practices and toxic products are right-on when it comes to AIDS. … It seems that AIDS is immune to healthy skepticism and has the unique ability to turn fervent liberals [and Leftists] ferociously conventional and make compliant followers out of our most innovative leaders.”

Thus we see San Francisco district attorney Terrence Hallinan — son of one of the most legendary progressive attorneys in our nation’s history — use the very conspiracy laws his father fought so eloquently and passionately against to try to put Pasquarelli and Petrelis away for years. We see aggressive Queer writers like Michaelangelo Signorile (godfather of “outing”) and Gabriel Rotello practically drooling in print over seeing Pasquarelli and Petrelis in jail. And we even see Philadelphia activist Kate Sorensen — who was herself kept from protesting the 2000 Republican convention by a pre-emptive $1 million bail — blasting Pasquarelli and Petrelis in print for “damaging the good work that real AIDS activists have done for years” and refusing to sign a petition protesting their treatment by the authorities. AIDS clinicians and researchers even went to the FBI in an unsuccessful attempt to have Pasquarelli and Petrelis prosecuted federally under the Patriot Act.

Fortunately, the very heavy-handedness of the treatment meted out to Pasquarelli and Petrelis is earning them some support even among Queer and Left activists who disagree with them. Doug Ireland of In These Times wrote a supportive article in the January 22 issue, comparing their treatment with Sorensen’s and hitting the point dead-on: “One can object to both Petrelis’ and Pasquarelli’s politics and actions, but what is being done to them is deeply disturbing. The prohibitively high bail for these activist marginals amounts to preventive detention.”

A New York Queer activist named William Dobbs has started an “Open Letter of Concern” on their behalf, demanding that they be given reasonable bail and prosecuted, if at all, on charges more in line with the evidence than with the hysterical, repressive agenda of San Francisco’s authorities. The signatories include not only long-time AIDS skeptics like author Patricia Nell Warren but even people like Stuart Timmons and Poz editor Sean Strub, who have strongly criticized AIDS dissenters in print. “I, like everyone I know, abhor most of the messages and tactics” of Petrelis and Pasquarelli, Torch Song Trilogy author Harvey Fierstein wrote with his signature. “However … I fear the bullying of protesters.”

Especially in this enervated post-September 11 era in which the government is aggressively trashing Constitutional rights and using the “war on terrorism” as an excuse, all those interested in preserving their own right to dissent need to come together on behalf of David Pasquarelli and Michael Petrelis. For information on the Open Letter, e-mail Dobbs at <duchamp [at] mindspring.com>. To contribute to the Pasquarelli/Petrelis bail fund, contact the Direct Action Civil Liberties Fund, Att’n.: Free Petrelis and Pasquarelli, PMB 101, 100 First Street, Suite 100, San Francisco, CA 94105; e-mail <info [at] daclf.org> or visit <http://www.daclf.org> on the Web.