AHC: Mick Fleetwood, imagined background as paramedic, successful activist regarding AIDS?





Mick's the tall chap in the middle.

Fleetwood Mac's been making music from 1967 all of the way up to the present day, with changes in membership of course.

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This is a flight of fancy on how successful celebrity activism might be. For example, let's pretend Mick is often talked about in the same sentence as Bono, to which Mick usually politely demurs.

In OTL, Mick is a regular guy and doesn't particularly have the activist bug.
 
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Now, to the best of my knowledge, no, Mick never worked as a paramedic prior to making it big.

But if he had . . . would have given him some amount of street cred.

AIDS was discovered in the United States in 1981, although . . .

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https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/27/health/hiv-patient-zero-genetic-analysis.html?_r=0

[on desktop this map is the second image, but it's hard to bring up on my phone]

This is the New York Times citing a study in Nature that HIV transferred from Zaire to Haiti about 1967, to New York about '71, and to San Francisco about 1976.

Well, maybe, for we don't know how slam-dunk this study was, and we don't know how well it was summarized by these mainstream journalists writing for the New York Times.
 
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So, what the heck do I expect a rock star to do about AIDS ? ! ?

Well, at least in this thought experiment, maybe a lot! For as I remember, no famous person in the United States spoke up about AIDS until Rock Hudson contacted the disease in 1985 and either his friend Doris Day or Elizabeth Taylor or both spoke up on his behalf, that of course we should treat this like any other illness. Maybe famous persons in Africa, Europe, Latin America, or Asia spoke up sooner.

(To complicate matters, Mick has lived in the U.S. since the 1970s and only became a U.S. citizen in 2006. This doesn't make it impossible, just makes it more of a hurdle.)
 
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http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hollywood-facing-aids-crisis-80s-694482

' . . . [Rock] Hudson died in his Beverly Hills home Oct. 2, 1985, leaving $250,000 in his will to help set up the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR), with Elizabeth Taylor as its national chairman. . . '
Elizabeth spoke up for her friend and for other AIDS patients, at some risk to her career and that she'd receive various negative labels. All the same, 1985 was relatively late in the game.

I'd like to look at some of the 1981 and '82 activism in New York City mostly by just regular, nonfamous persons. Some of this was depicted in the 2014 made-for-TV movie The Normal Heart starring Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer, Jim Parsons, and Julia Roberts. I think the actual events were the early days of GMHC, which stands for Gay Men's Health Crisis. Of course, a movie's likely to be accurate in some ways and inaccurate in others.

In 1987, ACT UP was formed by activists, which stands for AIDS Coalition To Unlease Power.
 
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Lindsey Buckingham

Also present for this interview are Mick, John, and Stevie, but not Christine.

https://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=pkU-sj90ewI

Fleetwood Mac ~ Dutch Interview ~ 1976

Again . . . Mick Fleetwood is just a regular guy. He's not a particularly big activist.

But if he were . . . and, say, a pretty seasoned and experienced activist at that, so that by the time AIDS hit the public radar in 1981, Mick would know how to coalition build, know how to talk with a variety of people, know how to pace himself, etc, etc, etc.
 
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raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
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--My wife's a big Stevie fan, and I worked for awhile with Lindsay Buckingham's cousin--

Rumors beat out the Star Wars soundtrack for best album at the 77 grammys.

[Their producer was Colbie Caillait's Dad]

Alot of Mick and John MacVie's outfits from the 70s look a bit Ian Anderson-like

Good to see the group featured in a TL
 
nestle_groundbreaking_boycott_saves_millions....jpg


Let's say some of the anti-Nestle protests in the '70s (for unethical marketing of infant formula in the Third World) is some of the early activism Mick cuts his teeth on.
 
Bush [Sr.] Calls for Compassion, and Cure, for AIDS Victims, Los Angeles Times, Marlene Cimons, March 30, 1990.

http://articles.latimes.com/1990-03-30/news/mn-178_1_aids-organizations

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. . . In a speech that was unusually personal for Bush, he said that he and his wife, Barbara, "have had friends who have died of AIDS. Our love for them when they were sick and when they died was just as great and just as intense as for anyone lost to heart disease or cancer or accidents."

And he likened the heartbreak of babies infected with AIDS to the leukemia death of his own daughter, Robin, in 1953, two months before her fourth birthday.

"We asked the doctor the same question every HIV family must ask: Why? Why this was happening to our beautiful little girl?" he said at a meeting of the National Business Leadership Conference on AIDS. . .
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[President Bush, Sr.]
. . . "Once disease strikes, we don't blame those who are suffering," he said. "We don't spurn the accident victim who didn't wear a seat belt. We don't reject the cancer patient who didn't quit smoking. We try to love them and care for them and comfort them. We do not fire them, or evict them or cancel their insurance." [Emphasis added]

He strongly endorsed House passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination in the private sector against the disabled, including those with HIV infection or fully developed AIDS. The Senate has already approved the measure.

"We're in a fight against a disease--not a fight against people," Bush said. "And we will not--and we must not in America--tolerate discrimination." . . .
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This is pretty good stuff. And when President Bush, Sr. talks about the death of his three-year-old daughter from cancer, at that point, in Texas Hold'em poker terms, he's all in.

Still, 1990 is relatively late.

The question is, with more celebrity activism, and more activism in general just on the part of regular citizens, could this point have been reached sooner?
 
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Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, CDC, Atlanta, Georgia, June 5, 1981.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/june_5.htm

'In the period October 1980-May 1981, 5 young men, all active homosexuals, were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. Two of the patients died. All 5 patients had laboratory-confirmed previous or current cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection . . . '

I think this was the first publication in the United States of what would become known as AIDS.
 
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Carl Sagan may have been 1981 Humanist of the Year, but I don't think he said one damn word about AIDS, at least not in the early days.

And for someone who for a while was arguably the number one public scientist in America, this may have been a significant missed opportunity.
 
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In the late '70s and early '80s, James Garner and Mariette Hartley did a series of commercials for Polaroid. People thought they were really married. They weren't! But they could have perhaps lightly played on this to advance the public discussion on AIDS.

And actors are somewhat more likely to have met out-of-the-closet lesbian, gay, and transgend persons and to have learned, hey, just a regular person.
 
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Moses Malone (left) and Julius "Dr. J" Erving were the two big names on the 1983 Philadelphia 76ers Championship team. Of course, all the players and coaches contributed. The Sixers swept the Lakers winning Game 4 at the LA Forum on May 31, 1983.



And just because Julius speaks up on some issues, this does not obligate him to speak up on others.

And in the early days, AIDS was just a really hard issue.
 
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Point being, activism is a set of skills and is in no way easy. :)

It's at least as hard as managing a basketball or baseball team over a long season with a lot of ups and downs!
 
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So, what Mick might do is first approach some of his former colleagues from the Nestlé corporate responsibility campaign and ask, Can you help put me in contact with a couple of the New York activists?

And maybe Mick and a colleague meet with two or three activists. And he says, I'm just here to listen and learn. I can't make any promises.

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And, open Time Line. Please feel free to jump in.
 
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GMHC/HIV/AIDS Timeline

http://www.gmhc.org/about-us/gmhchivaids-timeline

Introduction
On June 5, 1981, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued its first warning about a relatively rare form of pneumonia among a small group of young gay men in Los Angeles, which was later determined to be AIDS-related. Since that time, tens of millions of people have been infected with HIV worldwide.

1981
  • The Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report an alarming occurrence of a rare cancer (Kaposi’s sarcoma) in otherwise healthy gay men. They first call the disease “gay cancer” but soon rename it GRID (“gay-related immune deficiency”).
  • The New York Times announces a “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.”
  • Eighty men gather in writer Larry Kramer’s apartment to address the “gay cancer” and to raise money for research. This informal meeting provides the foundation of what will soon become Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC). [New York City area] [Emphasis added]
  • The CDC declares the new disease an epidemic.
  • First mainstream news coverage of the CDC’s June 5 MMWR by the Associated Press and the LA Times on the same day it is issued. The San Francisco Chronicle reports on it the next day.
1982
  • Nathan Fain, Larry Kramer, Larry Mass, Paul Popham, Paul Rapoport, and Edmund White officially establish GMHC.
  • An answering machine in the home of GMHC volunteer Rodger McFarlane (who will become GMHC’s first paid director) acts as the world’s first AIDS hotline — it receives over 100 calls the first night. [Emphasis added.]
  • GMHC produces and distributes 50,000 free copies of its first newsletter to doctors, hospitals, clinics and the Library of Congress.
  • GMHC opens its first office on West 22nd Street.
  • GMHC creates the landmark Buddy program to assist PWAs (People with AIDS) with their day-to-day needs.
  • The CDC changes the name of the illness called GRID to AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). The National Institutes of Health (NIH) rejects a proposed study to determine whether women get AIDS.
  • In late 1982 AIDS and the first federal funds ($5.6 million) are allocated for medical research.
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These two highlighted events would make for good scenes in a movie, although perhaps too much. That is, not fully believeable even though they did in fact happen.
 
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typewriter.jpg


https://www.nlm.nih.gov/news/surviving_and_thriving.html

In 1982, Michael Callen [sitting at typewriter] and Richard Berkowitz, two gay men with AIDS living in New York, wrote How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach. The short manifesto described ways for men to be affectionate and sexual while dramatically lessening the risk of spreading and contracting AIDS. This booklet was one of the first times men were told to use condoms when having sex with other men.
There are a lot of forms of activism over and above marching with signs, and of course nothing wrong with marching with signs. Just that it's not the only game in town.
 
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