Mayor Eugene Sawyer announced a campaign Thursday to prevent the spread of AIDS by encouraging people to use condoms, while two floors below in the City Council chambers, Ald. Robert Shaw (9th) asked a succession of witnesses whether a proposed human rights ordinance ”would create a third sex” in Chicago.
Sawyer, timing the announcement of the condom campaign to ”World AIDS Day,” said he was not encouraging promiscuity.
The centerpiece of the campaign will be black and white posters on CTA buses, platforms and billboards in neighborhoods.
Two posters picture a black woman or a Hispanic woman with a message in Spanish and English that using condoms can prevent AIDS. Others show a packet of a condom and the message: ”Care Package,” or ”Don`t think of it as birth control. Think of it as death control.”
One poster designed to reach drug users shows a hypodermic needle with the message, ”Sharing Kills.”
Lonnie Edwards, city health commissioner, predicted that from 1,000 to 1,200 new cases of AIDS would be reported in Chicago during 1989, many of them in the black and Hispanic communities. To date, 48 percent of the 1,709 people with AIDS in Chicago have been minorities.
So far, 68 women and 19 children in Chicago have been diagnosed with AIDS, but public health experts say those numbers are probably low.
The campaign`s emphasis on women and intravenous drug users prompted Albert Williams, a gay activist, to ask Edwards why he had not included any gay-related posters, since 80 percent of white and black AIDS victims and 50 percent of Hispanic and Asian AIDS victims in Chicago have been gay.
”We are not denying the fact that a large number of AIDS cases are in homosexual men, but a sizable number are drug users, and that would be the way it would be introduced into the heterosexual community,” Edwards said.
There were 67 new AIDS cases reported in Chicago in November, including 37 whites, 24 blacks and 6 Hispanics and 5 women. A fourth site for free, anonymous testing for infection with human immunodeficiency virus will open at 2418 W. Division St. in West Town at the end of the month.
Meanwhile, testimony from opponents and supporters of the reintroduced human rights ordinance often collapsed into shouting matches with aldermen. The ordinance would prohibit discrimination in housing and employment based on a number of factors, including race, sex, religion and sexual orientation.
Shaw, who voted against the ordinance, asked each witness how many sexes there were in Chicago and if passing the human rights ordinance would not be tantamount to ”creating a third sex.”
”We have laws that protect men and women,” Shaw asked Jane Whicher, ACLU legal counsel, testifying in favor of the ordinance. ”Isn`t that enough? Isn`t a lesbian still a woman? Wouldn`t this create some kind of third sex?” An obviously exasperated Whicher replied: ”I see no basis in law or logic for that, Alderman Shaw.”
