Audio Interview, Bill Valenti, December 16, 2012

BILL VALENTI: Now I came out in 1980.

EVELYN BAILEY: Were you born in Rochester?

BILL VALENTI: I'm a Rochester native.

I had moved back here after I finished school.

I was married at that time.

I'd been married for ten years.

And started to deal with that conflict.

And one of the first things that I

did prior to that was, with a group of college buddies,

walked through Dick's 43 Club on Stone Street as a joke,

because I was nineteen or twenty we thought it would

be amusing to go in there.

Now I found it more than just amusing, though.

I found it kind of creepy, to watch

men dancing with each other.

From my recollection of Dick's 43 was that it was a--

and I had heard about that.

And Stone Street, do you know where

the side door of the back of Lincoln Tower is?

EVELYN BAILEY: Yeah.

BILL VALENTI: And as a high school student,

I used to work at the National Clothing Company.

And the employee entrance was on Stone Street,

which was right next door to Dick's.

So I kind of never really venturing too much farther

than the back door of the National,

but still knowing about it, wondering

what went on in there.

So at about the age of nineteen, had a walkthrough.

And then just sort of closed it in and did my life until 1980.

So one of my first recollections in those days

was that there were a number of gay bars in town

and I thought that I should do some due diligence

and that I would go to each of those gay bars

and see what it was like.

And of course I was totally--

EVELYN BAILEY: Closeted.

BILL VALENTI: --under cover, yes.

EVELYN BAILEY: What bars were there?

BILL VALENTI: Well there was June's, which is now, what?

I don't know what it is now.

On Liberty Pole Way.

There was Tara's, the piano bar.

That was where old men went.

So I didn't have too much interest in that

although that was on the tour.

The Avenue Pub, and--

so by the time I got to Friars, where

Tony Green was tending bar, that was the beginning of it.

EVELYN BAILEY: Did he call you Mary? (Laughs)

BILL VALENTI: No.

Eventually he started calling me Doc,

but he was very bold and very fresh.

And it was just what I needed to sort of--

you know, why are you looking at the floor?

And so he picked up on what was going on right away.

EVELYN BAILEY: Sure.

BILL VALENTI: So we had a conversation

and well, if I wasn't ready to come out of the closet then,

I never would have, because he sort of blew the door off just

by being friendly and cordial and welcoming.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Now by this time you

were working at the University, Strong?

BILL VALENTI: Yes.

I had been there since '77.

I was a resident there.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Right.

But I mean, how did that play with you psychologically?

I mean, you felt fearful for your job

if you got caught in one of these places, or--

BILL VALENTI: Totally closeted until there,

for the longest time.

Just another one of docs getting a divorce.

Never did anything to reveal anything, because in those days

the university was not welcoming.

It was most unwelcoming to gay people.

EVELYN BAILEY: Can you put a year to that?

What year?

BILL VALENTI: Well, so my wife and I

separated in eighty-ish, 1980.

And I would have been on the faculty for three years

by then, because I finished my residency in '77.

And was doing my thing in infectious diseases.

And so that in 1980, when I became

aware of needing to make this change

and decided that I didn't need to leave town or leave my job,

but that I just wouldn't stay under cover.

Nobody asked.

EVELYN BAILEY: Yes.

BILL VALENTI: But there was no openness to (unintelligible).

And there wasn't any welcoming, either.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Was there still a Gay Liberation Front

at the U of R at the time?

EVELYN BAILEY: No, not in 1980, no.

Where'd you go to high school?

BILL VALENTI: Across the street.

EVELYN BAILEY: How was that?

We were you aware of your--

BILL VALENTI: Oh, yes.

I was always interested and always curious.

Never really did anything.

Just kind of went about my business, being a good student.

And I was, so I--

EVELYN BAILEY: Yeah.

And do you recall hearing any rumbles from other kids

at that time, about--

BILL VALENTI: No, it was, in those days, it was--

if you were you were called a faggot.

And it was uncomplimentary, which

tended to drive people even farther into the closet.

I mean I, from a very early age, had a very, a great curiosity

about boys and men.

But never put the two together enough to do anything about it.

And in fact, my first experience not even in Rochester,

but I had--

used to work for CDC in those days as a consultant,

in their infection control program, so

was spending a lot of time in Atlanta, three or four

times a year.

So I had the opportunity to--

well, since you've met Tony Green,

I mean, the next step was to just do it.

EVELYN BAILEY: Yeah.

KEVIN INDOVINO: That was my next question.

Now that you're kind of emerging yourself

into this community, what next?

BILL VALENTI: Well the big thing for me was making friends.

And I thought that, god, I'll never know any.

I'll never meet anybody.

So I met this man at--

what was the place?

Mickey Russo's place, and before that it was, not the Bug Jar,

but what was the place?

EVELYN BAILEY: No, Rosie's.

BILL VALENTI: Rosie's.

EVELYN BAILEY: You met a man at Rosie's?

BILL VALENTI: Mm-hm.

KEVIN INDOVINO: That's where I first met my man.

EVELYN BAILEY: (Laughs) OK.

Wow.

BILL VALENTI: And that was my first boyfriend.

So it was very conflicted, of course, since I was still

married, though.

It started moving with getting that part taken care of.

And-- But it was painful, anguishing, (unintelligible).

KEVIN INDOVINO: How did you get through the anguish?

BILL VALENTI: Well I never thought of killing myself.

That was never an option.

What I did, though, was I found a therapist who actually turned

out to be gay. (Unintelligible - therapist's name)

was one of the old guard shrinks from the generation before me,

but was an extraordinary guide in terms of pulling it out

of me to (unintelligible).

So I went into therapy immediately.

Didn't really spend time, because, I mean,

I knew at that point that this isn't

going to go anyplace unless you have somebody to figure this

out with you because--

I mean, I could go to gay bars.

And of course, in those days everybody was at the bar.

So there were lots of opportunities

for sex and for meeting people.

EVELYN BAILEY: Well that was the only social scene available--

BILL VALENTI: That was it.

EVELYN BAILEY: --really.

BILL VALENTI: That was it.

So it certainly took advantage of that.

The other thing I did was, I moved

into an apartment at Vick Morris House, at 963 East Avenue,

across from Eastman House.

EVELYN BAILEY: Oh, yeah.

BILL VALENTI: So that was nice.

So I got myself a good location.

You know, location is everything.

But still I felt terribly isolated,

because this guy that I had met at Rosie's really

didn't know a lot of people.

He had been out for years and years and years,

but he was a bit reclusive.

A nice guy and all of that, and he kind of helped me along.

But you know, there was so many men and so little time.

So I just had to get on with it.

So that.

So the location, the therapist, the--

finally, let's see, met Doug Howard.

You know Doug Howard?

EVELYN BAILEY: No.

BILL VALENTI: He was a student in those days.

He was a grad student in those days.

He was my patient in University Health Service, and he was gay.

And I met him one night at Friars.

And he invited me to a party at his house.

And that was, I had finally arrived because everybody

in town was there.

And he introduced me to a lot of people

and started making some friends, and then it

started to get going.

But you know, you just need that, some kind of push.

EVELYN BAILEY: Introduction.

BILL VALENTI: Something to at least, in those days.

Now I don't know if it's easier today or not.

I have no idea.

Certainly people are more open.

I mean there's some sort of pivot point

that could find them.

And such a good group of people.

They were all people my age.

They were all people who were professional people,

good looking, all of that.

And it was through that group of people

that I met John Washburn.

Which was just a short time later.

So between Tony Green and John Washburn,

there was no turning back.

No turning back.

EVELYN BAILEY: Was this early '80s?

BILL VALENTI: Well, yes because you

know, all of this happened in pretty rapid fire.

Let's see.

Well, wait, because I bought this house,

moved in December '83.

But it took a year because there was a fire

and it had to be renovated of course.

So by '82, '83, I had met Washburn--

probably '82.

And we were still living at Dick Moore's.

And we had many liaisons there, John and I.

Now at that same time, though, the AIDS problem

had started to emerge.

So I kind of started--

I came out before.

Then the AIDS issue hit.

And I was still making my entry.

And so it got a little bumpy, because it

seemed to me right from the get go

that this was some kind of sexually

transmitted something or other.

Very much like hepatitis B.

EVELYN BAILEY: Do you recall the very first time

you heard about HIV?

BILL VALENTI: Yes.

June 5th, 1981.

The June 5th, 1981 date is significant

because that was the date--

remember I was in infectious diseases.

EVELYN BAILEY: Right.

BILL VALENTI: And read the--

had this contact within CDC.

So their weekly report was published

in hard copy in those days.

And the morbidity and mortality weekly report

of June 5th, 1981, reported these first five cases

of pneumocystis pneumonia and this Kaposi's sarcoma

and a couple cases from New York, LA and New York.

The curious thing about that is, the guy

who reported those cases, Mike Gottlieb,

was now a young immunologist in LA at UCLA.

And he had been my resident at Strong two years before.

So I knew him.

We all knew him.

We knew Gottlieb.

So it was a double hit in terms of, this

is kind of a curious thing, and these cases were submitted

by Mike Gottlieb who'd been a resident,

was a medical student and a resident at U of R.

So we all knew him and immediately

had this connection.

So I took that.

In those days we had files upon files and files of articles

and we kept all that stuff and I didn't know where to put it.

So I filed it, I made a new file called "Infectious Diseases,

Other" and put it in the file.

And of course, the AIDS file is now--

EVELYN BAILEY: Yeah.

BILL VALENTI: --millions of pieces of information.

So it was that day.

And I actually remember reading it and reading it twice.

I thought I'd take another look because it was curious.

And I had been interested in obscure infectious diseases

anyway, and it was something.

Saw a lot of that stuff in the hospital.

But this was different because I had only

see one case of pneumocystis before in a kidney transplant

patient.

And had never seen Kaposi's sarcoma until--

the Jesse Vulo story.

And when he came in, that was sort of the beginning.

That was-- actually the first case

was a guy from-- was a Haitian.

I mean, this is text book stuff, but all these bizarre--

KEVIN INDOVINO: I'm sorry, what was Justin's last name again?

BILL VALENTI: Vulo.

EVELYN BAILEY: Jesse Vulo.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Vulo, right.

BILL VALENTI: He owned Friars.

EVELYN BAILEY: He owned Friars.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Right, right.

OK.

BILL VALENTI: But the Haitian guy,

so we're sitting around the table with my colleagues

and somebody said this sounds like these cases

that Gottlieb reported.

And then it started to get busy.

So that was June 1981 when the report came out.

But by the end of the year for the beginning of '82, we were

seeing--

EVELYN BAILEY: More.

BILL VALENTI: --people in the hospital

coming into the emergency room, room 380D

or on the in-patient service.

And-- it was picking up.

And it was around that time that we reactivated

the infectious diseases clinic, because up until that time

it was a once a day, half day a week thing.

There was maybe two or three patients and that was it.

EVELYN BAILEY: Now how did that impact you?

Did it send you back into--

BILL VALENTI: Hiding?

No.

Oh, no.

Not at all.

I immediately wanted to swing into action.

Now, you need to talk to Sue Cowell about this middle piece

because before I got involved, around, it must have been well,

'81, '82, when she was still in the health service,

in the University Health Service,

she and a guy named Tom Rush--

Tom Rush was a fellow in the infectious diseases

unit, and a junior guy.

And he and Sue collaborated on a survey.

I was talking to her about it the other night, but we--

you know, it was noisy and didn't have a chance to--

EVELYN BAILEY: Yeah.

BILL VALENTI: So it was a risk based survey of gay men

they were doing in University Health Service.

And then they were doing T-cell counts along with it to try--

because the T-cell thing, issue had come along fairly early

in all of this.

And it was looking like that people with this thing

had low T-cells.

GRID.

Gay-related immune deficiency, but that

didn't last for everyone.

I don't remember when the word AIDS--

EVELYN BAILEY: Actually got attached.

BILL VALENTI: --was minted.

No, I don't.

But it must have been around that time, '82, '83.

So now, Tom Rush left.

So he must have left in--

he may have left-- he would have left at the end of June

in either '82 or '83.

But by then the infectious diseases at the clinic

was getting busy.

So I had some time and some interest,

so I thought I should get to work and I did.

And that's how it started.

So it was probably the end of '81 where--

and then around '82ish things started to get busier and cook.

And I had some time.

I was doing the infection control

program in the hospital, and managed

to extract myself from the lab, so I needed

to get out of there anyway.

And so I parked myself in clinic.

EVELYN BAILEY: And were you still

on East Avenue at this point?

BILL VALENTI: Until December '83.

EVELYN BAILEY: And then you bought the house.

BILL VALENTI: Yeah.

I bought the house before that, remodelled it, and moved in

in December of '83.

And it was around that time that I--

well, no, I had met Howard long before that because John and I

had completed our affair.

But we remained friends, good friends.

In fact, he eventually became a patient.

But that's what it was like in those days, too.

It was-- the part about being gay and coming out

was not much of an issue anymore,

except to staying closeted at work.

And it didn't work very well.

And if they didn't figure it out, that's OK.

We were all doing what we needed to do.

The patients are your friends.

Your friends are your patients.

So it's just hard to figure out--

EVELYN BAILEY: Where the lines were.

BILL VALENTI: There were no lines.

You just didn't have sex with your patients.

But many of the people that you knew that way became patients.

Along with a fair number of public types.

It seemed like in the beginning there was this never ending

knock on the door.

"Got a minute?

I didn't expect to see you here."

You know, people were telling their stories, sort

of confessing, because by 1985 there was an HIV test.

And we were testing people.

The Red Cross had a blood screen test that they did,

and it was anonymous so that we were just--

in fact, we tested ourselves early on.

And we did it by number, and sent numbers, specimens in.

And it would take a couple days to a week,

but we'd get results back.

So we had screened Washburn.

That was before the test was commercially available,

because he was in the hospital.

So he was one of the first people

that I knew who tested positive and by then he

was sick, by '85.

But along with him, it seemed like there

was this, all of a sudden--

EVELYN BAILEY: It just exploded.

BILL VALENTI: Yeah, because Jackie and I,

we were sort of trying to pace our--Jackie (unintelligible)--

pace ourselves.

You know, she was, for the time she was good.

She had this grassroots approach.

She was a little bit somber.

She had that somber side to her.

She took a lot on her shoulders very early.

KEVIN INDOVINO: How did she get into all of this?

Was she in the health care business?

EVELYN BAILEY: No.

BILL VALENTI: No.

KEVIN INDOVINO: No.

BILL VALENTI: The short story is,

and the story that I remember--

and I think Sue can, we talked about this the other night--

is that Sue will tell you the date that they formed AIDS

Rochester on their front porch.

EVELYN BAILEY: Right.

BILL VALENTI: On Harper street, wasn't it?

EVELYN BAILEY: Yes.

BILL VALENTI: So there was this grassroots organization

(unintelligible).

Now Sue recalls other people who came through.

Jackie was the only one that I knew.

EVELYN BAILEY: There were six or seven people

who were on that front porch.

And there were two or three possibilities

in terms of executive director.

But the Gay Alliance took on the hotline.

We took on the hotline, and that was the first kind of outreach

to the community.

The first--

BILL VALENTI: Yeah.

EVELYN BAILEY: --first place people

could go or call to get information.

And Jackie had been president of the Alliance, and so--

BILL VALENTI: Right.

KEVIN INDOVINO: OK.

BILL VALENTI: Now at the time, we have to bring

in the Rochester Area Task Force on AIDS, the R-A-T-F-A, RATFA,

because that was--

we formed that.

Jackie and I were the first co-chairs

of that when the health department wanted

to initiate this thing.

But that before the test came in 1985.

So Jackie had been involved at that level.

And then the AIDS Rochester thing was formed

and she wanted that job.

At the time, her day job was working

in the adult bookstore on Monroe Avenue

across from the current Starbucks.

And AIDS Rochester's first office was upstairs.

The bookstore was downstairs.

The AIDS Rochester office was upstairs,

so Jackie never had to leave the building to go--

EVELYN BAILEY: To work.

BILL VALENTI: To go to work, to go to either one of her jobs,

because in the very early days it was a part time thing.

And that became full time later on, when they moved to--

there was someplace before they were on University Avenue.

EVELYN BAILEY: They were at Tara's.

The office moved to Tara's.

And then it moved around the corner on Liberty Pole Way,

or--

BILL VALENTI: Right, right.

EVELYN BAILEY: --by Barga Printing.

BILL VALENTI: Yes, and then to 20 University.

EVELYN BAILEY: And then to 20 University.

It was on Liberty Pole Way maybe three--

two or three years at least.

BILL VALENTI: So we were collaborating.

We started working together very early.

A couple of things happened.

One was, we tried to--

there's a report in The Empty Closet of a letter

that I wrote to Jackie.

It must have been in '85, and it was published in the EC.

And I found it the other day.

I may even have the link.

Somebody sent it to me.

But we tried to identify local cases, versus somebody

who may have had experience elsewhere,

in New York, LA, the a big city, the big, high risk

places, because the perception at the time

was that well, Rochester's just sort

of a low risk kind of thing.

It's not here, it's not our problem.

So it was a crude attempt, but we did it nonetheless.

And tried to keep track of people.

We made a definition, a standard definition of someone

who would be considered a locally acquired case.

And it was fairly strict, but in other words,

somebody who hadn't travelled in the past year,

but had been right here in Rochester.

And sure enough, one walked in the door.

And we just started talking to people

and ask them their sexual history and discussion.

He had pneumocystis.

He had everything.

He had AIDS.

And he had lived right here.

He had been right here, so.

And we had collected a number of those cases by 1985, 1986.

And the idea was to try and dispel the myth of,

this is not just a New York City problem.

This is a Rochester problem and we really

need to be looking at this through a different lens.

So that was the purpose of that exercise.

We also did the task force RATFA together.

And then by about '85ish, the ID clinic at Strong

was now busy almost every day.

I was there almost every day.

And we had a staff of people--

small, but a nurse and those people, staff.

And Jackie would come to clinic and she

would sit, we would ask her to talk

to people, to do some counseling,

because there wasn't anybody else.

I mean it was--

collect this handful of people and that was her job.

So she came to clinic.

Now we got busted because we hadn't credentialed her

as a hospital staff, and you need

to go through a more formal process.

So we did that and it worked.

And that's when the era of now signing

consent forms for patients to talk

to her and that kind of thing.

So it became a little more structured.

But it was still busy.

And we were just doing it, waiting for AZT.

EVELYN BAILEY: But the community response--

BILL VALENTI: Yes, the community response.

EVELYN BAILEY: --was almost, in terms of financial response,

nothing.

BILL VALENTI: Right.

EVELYN BAILEY: And so all you had were really

volunteers, people who came forward or who were involved,

who wanted to help.

BILL VALENTI: Right because there

was the pre- and post-era.

The before era was "not my problem,

nothing goes on here, we don't have to worry."

The after problem was "oh, OK, it's a different story."

I think what changed that was helping people

with AIDS, because around 1985 a group of us got together.

A lot of the people that I had met at Doug Howard's

several years prior, who were part of my social network--

although we didn't call them social networks in those days.

EVELYN BAILEY: Right.

BILL VALENTI: And--

EVELYN BAILEY: And Tony Green.

BILL VALENTI: Tony, Green, Ron Enders, Dan Meyers,

Neil Parasello, Jerry Algozer, Dick Easton, those people,

formed this fundraising group called Helping People

with AIDS, HPA, and created the Dining for Dollars fundraiser.

And that was the turning point, because if you

remember the Village Gate, that night

at Village Gate in eighty--

EVELYN BAILEY: '86.

BILL VALENTI: OK, '86, where we weren't

sure anybody would show up, the lines were down the block.

People-- all of a sudden now, there

was a way of mobilizing people in the community

to not only get interested but to write checks.

And if you knew how that thing snowballed to those parties

in midtown on the mall.

I mean, they were huge, became very, very important,

significant events that brought people together

around one cause that started with a couple

volunteers and an idea and that little thing at Village Gate.

That went for a number of years.

EVELYN BAILEY: That went for ten or twelve years.

Now the first one at Village Gate,

were there parties in people's homes prior to the coming

together at Village Gate, or was it just--

BILL VALENTI: Yes.

It was--

EVELYN BAILEY: So it was always--

BILL VALENTI: The dinner party idea.

EVELYN BAILEY: --set up.

BILL VALENTI: Yes.

And that's the way it was that night.

But that was a pretty remarkable--

EVELYN BAILEY: It was extraordinary.

BILL VALENTI: I mean, because it surprised everybody

in terms of the response.

EVELYN BAILEY: Yeah.

BILL VALENTI: Because by '86, I mean,

it was the issue of, is Rochester a high risk area

or not was--

EVELYN BAILEY: Mute.

BILL VALENTI: --way behind this.

Way behind this.

KEVIN INDOVINO: By that time we actually

had a significant amount of people who have actually

died already, right?

BILL VALENTI: I don't remember what the head

count was at that point.

It exists some place, by year, of how many people had died.

But yes, we knew people who were sick and had died because--

I knew Jesse Vulo had died by that time.

It's been a long time.

And a lot of other people.

And some surprises.

EVELYN BAILEY: Right.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Yeah, I think the first person I recollect

passing away was John.

EVELYN BAILEY: Washburn?

KEVIN INDOVINO: Yeah, because that made the news.

BILL VALENTI: 1989.

That was June.

KEVIN INDOVINO: But there were several people

that died long before that.

EVELYN BAILEY: Yes.

BILL VALENTI: Yes.

EVELYN BAILEY: Because in '87, Claire and I got together.

And practically every week, every other week,

we were going to funerals, or visiting

people in the hospital, or bringing them food,

or bringing them other things that they needed because there

was no financial aid.

There was no support set up by then.

BILL VALENTI: Oh, no.

I mean, there were the existing activities like the Meals

on Wheels and the Visiting Nurse.

PEACE.

There were no AIDS organizations other

than AIDS Rochester that was going.

But there really wasn't any kind of government funding

of any kind because even when AZT was introduced in '87,

we were bootlegging that and stashing it away in the closet

to give to somebody else after a patient had died or couldn't

take it.

But we always asked for the drug back, for the drug,

because it was expensive and it was in short supply.

And we had access to it and a couple

other drugs that we used in combination.

But there wasn't any federal funding

until Ryan White came along.

The Ryan White Act came along, and that

was after we opened CHM, so that was in 1990.

But up until then we were pretty much on our own.

Now there was Medicaid for patients.

And you could go almost immediately,

if you had a diagnosis of AIDS, go almost immediately on SSI

or SSD.

So it was almost automatic.

And that, it was a pretty quick response but in terms of,

there weren't any drugs.

And there was no money.

EVELYN BAILEY: No.

When did you and Steve Scheibel begin the research?

BILL VALENTI: Our collaboration?

Oh, he was a fellow in infectious diseases.

And must have arrived by--

I can get the date, but by certainly '85.

I can tell you the exact date.

I just have to go back and look it up.

But where we concocted a collaboration,

we were at the infectious diseases

annual meeting in Minneapolis.

And it was twenty below zero, and we walking back to a hotel

after dinner and just started to talk.

And in fact, I think it was at point where we came out

to each other about the gay part,

because I'm not sure we ever really--

we never really had a serious conversation until that point.

But once we cleared the air on that

and declared our interest in HIV,

we started to come to clinic and started

working on some of the studies that he brought over

to Community Health Network in '88, '89.

So that was the beginning of that.

But he was always interested in patients

and innovative treatments, and thought right away

from the beginning even when there weren't

any, when AZT was the only game in town,

that we would need to use combinations of drugs

to prevent the virus from becoming resistant.

So he knew about that right away.

He was just as smart as they come.

EVELYN BAILEY: Wow.

BILL VALENTI: It's a pretty amazing brain.

I always was in awe of his brain, and I still am.

I mean, he's just so smart.

He just gets it.

KEVIN INDOVINO: So when the concept of CHN came about,

tell me why?

What were you hoping to accomplish?

BILL VALENTI: A couple things.

One is, we were working from '85 now through '88

in the ID clinic at Strong.

And part of the problem was that there

were very few trials of drugs to tell us what

the best way to do this was.

And we were seeing--

Steve and I, by that point, had been

doing the bulk of the work in clinic

while the rest of my faculty colleagues

were doing things in the lab and those kinds

of academic university things, and were isolated

from what was going on on the ground, which

was people are sick, people are dying,

and what are we going to do?

I mean, you just can't continue to let people die

without even making an effort.

So one of the things we did was we,

in addition to AZT, which we used early

and our colleagues disagreed with that at a number of round

table discussions about that.

EVELYN BAILEY: I remember.

BILL VALENTI: We started to import drugs.

One was dextran sulfate from Japan.

There were some really good reports in Japan

that there was a sort of a binding agent that

would sort of bind to HIV that would slow down

its replication.

And then we also had the drug acyclovir,

which was used for herpes virus infections.

Or the drug interferon, which was an injectable drug,

an immune stimulator.

And we would use three of the four agents

in many of our patients.

And every month, now, there was a package delivered.

About five or six of us who worked in the clinic,

because you cold only get a month's supply per person,

we used the Helping People with AIDS money

to buy dextran from Japan, and each one of us

wold get a box of dextran sulfate once a month

in the mail.

And we would combine that with AZT and either interferon

or acyclovir.

And we treated people with new drugs.

Well, the colleagues in infectious diseases

thought we were out of our minds.

And really there were a number of heated discussions

that went on in those days about the wisdom of that.

And while we were waiting for data, people were dying.

So I was on the in patient service at one point,

and had made friends with Carol Withers, who

became a head nurse at CHN, who was the nurse in clinic.

And we were making rounds on an in patient,

and there was this guy in the ICU with pnuemocystis.

And gasping for breath.

He'd been taken off the respirator,

but he was begging us to let him die.

He wanted us to--

when Carol recounted the story, when

I went with her just a couple weeks ago, and she said,

"We can't just let this guy.

He can't just suffocate like this.

And if he goes back on the respirator he's sure to die.

So I think we should treat him with steroids."

In addition to the pneumocystis treatment that we were using.

Because it was some speculation that steroids in large doses

might be helpful.

But there were no clinical trials or any of that.

So, do it.

Let's just do it.

We have nothing to lose.

So we did it.

And over the next three days, the guy came along,

and his oxygen improved.

And he eventually left the hospital

and lived for a while longer.

But had a decent quality life.

So when my colleagues downstairs learned

that I was experimenting in doing witchcraft in the ICU

with patients.

Scheibel and I were caucusing about how to do this.

And by today's standards, I mean that's almost standard of care.

It's accepted.

It's nothing.

It certainly wasn't going to harm you.

It's just that there wasn't any evidence for it.

EVELYN BAILEY: Right.

BILL VALENTI: So we realized that this

has reached a point where this isn't going to work any longer.

That we have some experience.

And have an idea of how we might do this in the community.

And that would be a community based medical approach

to HIV where we cold attempt to bring as much under one roof as

possible because people were not in any kind of condition

to be going back and forth to many different places

for a whole bunch of things.

We're trying to consolidate as much of what they needed

in one place as possible.

And do it.

So in fact, this is December 20th, 1988,

I walked out the door and was done.

I gave my notice six months or so in advance,

saying that the original idea was that we

would do private practice.

But Pearl Rubin from the Daisy Marquis Jones foundation

was the executive director of the foundation at the time.

When I presented the idea to her she

said, "You're really not talking about a private practice.

You'll never be able to get any grants or other funding for it.

You're talking about a not for profit."

That was her advice right on, very, very early.

So I left in '88.

Steve stayed on at least another six months about

because he needed to finish his fellowship.

And while he was finishing his fellowship

he was also signing up people, patients

to come with us when we opened, which

was in July of '89, when we opened in that temporary space

on South Avenue, on 758 South Avenue.

EVELYN BAILEY: Who funded that?

Who funded that?

BILL VALENTI: Nobody.

I did.

I did a lot of out of pocket in those days.

Plus-- and I didn't do it alone--

we had a number of people and foundations

who were willing to fund an idea.

And you know, in today's world, it doesn't fly.

But in AIDS world, in 1989, it was the perfect timing for that

because the situation was so urgent that it was just

a desperate time and people were willing to take

a flyer on something like that.

The big push came when we met with a guy named--

he was a friend of Jackie's, who was on our task force,

from Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Was a guy named Tony Amato, who was very active.

He was like a VP at Blue, for--

A-M-A-T-O, Anthony Amato.

And he was the VP for home care.

So he had a vested interest in overseeing what was going on.

But he set up a meeting for Steve and for me

with Howard Berman, who was the CEO of Blue in those days,

and some of his honchos to present the idea.

And we pitched the idea and they loved it.

They saw what we didn't see, which

was a way of mobilizing medical resources in a more

cost effective way that might eventually keep people out

of the hospital-- an ambulatory program for HIV.

And we had this amorphous kind of thing.

No business experience at all.

But what they did was, they plugged us

into what's now Lifetime Health, but then

was Genesee Valley Group Health, which has these three health

centers--

the Wilson Center, the Folsom Center, and there's one other.

Those like health centers.

EVELYN BAILEY: Highland?

No.

BILL VALENTI: Part of the Blue thing.

But there were three of them.

So we-- they got us hooked up with their architect.

They also helped us with the state application,

for an article 28 operating certificate

to operate an ambulatory clinic, and a number of other resources

to make this thing move quicker.

And while our application was pending review at the state

health department, we became a satellite of Group Health.

And we operated under their license.

That was a Berman idea, right on day one.