AIDS Lecture, January 23, 1987
Address Presented to the Mayor's AIDS Task Force
United States Conference of Mayors
Washington, DC
January 23, 1987
This lecture to a public audience was given 4 days after the previous lecture delivered to Liberty College in Lynchburg, Virginia.
This lecture presented before Mayors of cities large and small in the United States was bringing AIDS down to local problems where indeed they had to be faced first. Remember that as this lecture our experience with AIDS was only six years old and it was only four days since I had last spoken on AIDS at Liberty College in Virginia, therefore, in this cover document, I will add to the introductory remarks given for Liberty College address only those things which are new and/or different.
In this lecture for the first time -- because of the audience I was addressing -- I gave statistics, of cities and of states. I mentioned Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, and Boston, and then Colorado, Ohio, and Arkansas. I made it clear for the first time, in reference to the report requested by President Reagan, that at no time did anyone suggest a change here and a little something there, and that the report that was released on October 22nd was exactly the same report that I personally wrote between February and September of the last year. I added that the report had done two things: First, it had impressed the country generally that AIDS was indeed everyone's problem. (We had said that before, but nobody really wanted to believe it.) Second, the report makes it clear that we have to stop the disease not by waiting around for the development of a vaccine, but by teaching our young people the facts about AIDS and -- hopefully -- thereby ending the chain of
transmission once and for all.
Although, I had implied it previously, this was also the first lecture where I suggested that we stop talking about sex education, but use the term "AIDS education"; it was less of a buzz-word and it was more in line with what we were really trying to accomplish.
I closed as I did at Liberty, noting that this was a grim message, but it had to be that if we were to continue to hope that everyone who hears it or reads it will also believe it.
Abstinence
AIDS carriers
AIDS in heterosexuals
AIDS in homosexuals
AIDS virus
Balanced sexual relationships
Characteristics of AIDS
Condoms
Developmental age vs. chronological age
Intravenous drug abuse
Moral responsibility of parents to children
Mutually faithful monogamy
Predictions about the increase of heterosexual & homosexual AIDS
Prostitutes of both genders
Sex education vs. AIDS education
Sex in light of sensitive & affirmative human relations
Statistics of AIDS by cities
Statistics of AIDS by states
The integrity of the Surgeon General's Report as written
Association of State and Territorial Health Officials
Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention
National Coalition of Black and Lesbian Gays
National Education Association
National PTA
Surgeon General's Report on AIDS
The Washington Business Group on Health