"The Pit Bull of AIDS Litigation"

Alice Philipson - Berkeley based solo practitioner, 1987

In the 1980s, queer lawyers were still reluctant to come out publicly. They could lose jobs, clients, positions, possibly cases decided by homophobic judges. But in the year 1980, 10 lawyers came together to found BALIF [Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom]. My lesbian sister Alice, a solo practitioner in Berkeley, soon came into its orbit.

Shortly afterwards, healthy young gay men began dying in alarming numbers. Informally known as the "gay plague," fear and stigma dictated the initial public response. By 1983 public health workers were fully aware of the potential scope of the AIDS crisis. Still, the Reagan administration wouldn't even mention the disease until 1985, two weeks after Rock Hudson had publicly come out (and died) with his diagnosis.

In the meantime, the plague was raging in the Bay Area. Eventually, two thirds of the men of BALIF died. Lawyers went to the AIDS wards of San Francisco General Hospital to write up emergency wills for young men who had never conceived they'd need such a thing at their age. And there they found out about many other abuses -- men who lost their jobs, their rentals, access to their deceased partner's lives on the mere suspicion that they were gay. When HIV testing became widespread in 1986 (but without cure or mitigation), gay men were exposed to a whole new wave of discrimination and stigma, plus the cold-blooded violation of right to privacy and the exposure of medical information. Returning home from a short stay in the hospital, an AIDS patient might find the contents of his apartment strewn on the street.

The BALIF lawyers started an AIDS Legal Referral Panel, the first of its kind, and the cases that seemed the most unjust, the most tangled, the most hopeless -- these they handed to my sister, who became known as "the pit bull of AIDS litigation." Burning with rage and sorrow, she went after the insurance companies who immediately voided their policies, HR departments who disclosed the HIV status of their employees, hospitals who informed their patients through voicemail that their tests had come back positive, landlords who used the possibility of an AIDS diagnosis as a pretext for bouncing tenants out of rent controlled apartments. All of it was illegal, and she had to combat the constant stream of lies and obfuscations coming from these institutions. She could only get them to acknowledge the harm they had done through trial or the threat of trial. (Not that they cared. It was only faggots and their ball-busting bitch of a lawyer.)

As her clients descended into the final stages of their illness, she became their advocate in life as well as in law. They loved her, and she couldn't help but love them in return. But they died; they all died. Alice had to work feverishly sometimes to get a judgment before her clients passed. She had to watch as the midwestern families who had refused to visit their dying sons came out to claim the body, clean out the apartment that son might be sharing with his lover, and bar the man who was himself prostrate with grief from attending the funeral.

She wasn't alone, although she was the most out there. The men were exhausted and, if not sick themselves, depleted by the loss of friends and lovers. There was so much work to be done, and the lesbians of BALIF stepped up big time: advocacy, activism, practical care, human kindness. They showed up, as did so many lesbians, in their glory of "getting shit done." The interns who worked for my sister volunteered for duty at the AIDS Legal Referral Panel for two years after passing the bar.

My sister died in 2022, and I didn't think to ask her the question that I then had to pose to her intern and her wife: Why did she do it? Why expend her knowledge, passion, and diminishing strength on these men? The answer was the same from both women and would have been her answer as well: "These are my people." We were part of the same community.

And this too is women's history.

–Robert Philipson

Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, Dogged by Domesticity

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