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STATEMENT BY DAVID WOJNAROWICZ (CONTINUED)

recently that citizens should have love and compassion for people with AIDS. If you follow his dangerous reasoning in regards to his stance on safer-sex information (he will only condone abstinence), he would prefer that all people remain at great risk and then when they contract AIDS he will shower them with love and compassion as they lay dying. I shudder to think of him prowling the halls ad rooms of the archdiocese-run AIDS residences (more aptly called: warehouses of death), falling to his knee's to hold the hands of dying men, women and teenagers and rolling his eyes heavenwards. He, as a representative of the vatican, is so homophobic in statements and actions, that he is promoting violence against Lesbians and Gays. Our public funds are endlessly spent tracking down serial killers; we at least know where this one lives - so why aren't public officials and local police doing something about this man.

If the N.E.A. is successful in rescinding the grant for Artists Space on the grounds that the essay is too political, then I would expect congress to reconvene immediately and lift the tax-exempt status of the church and make them pay back taxes for the last two centuries.

O'Connor joins the team of Helms, Dannemeyer, and Bill Buckley; men who seem to have so much trouble with what may be their own feelings of same-sex attraction that they spend their lives trying to annihilate us.

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There have been statements made in the last week that seem to use the fact that I have AIDS as an excuse for the tone of my writings; for my anger at these individuals. This is insulting to me. Anybody has the right to be outraged and the right to express these things. I have been writing about these issues in this 'tone' well before my recent diagnosis with AIDS.

We as a society have been in this political climate before. It is cyclical and similar bigots and extremists have reared their conservative/fascist heads before in order to conduct witch-hunts. (Yesterday in Missouri, novelist and playwright Larry Kramer experienced another example of the repressive actions of this government. In a phonecall I was told by a friend that local officials in Missouri apparently tried to close down a production of Kramer's play: THE NORMAL HEART, on the grounds that they deemed it obscene,) Years ago this kind of climate manifested itself in the public spectacle of the McCarthy trials. McCarthy was able to conduct his deadly circus while the press and citizens witnessed the debacle in silence. McCarthy was only stopped when he was confronted by people of conscience in positions of power. Now is the time for politicians of conscience to come out on public record; now is the time for citizens of any persuasion to come out on record; now is the time for all journalists of conscience to come out on record in opposition to these men and women of politics and organized 'religion' who are conducting the 'moral' witch-hunts and helping to ensure the spread of this AIDS epidemic through denial of pertinent safer-sex information. Now is not the time for restraint to be shown in the form of our words and gestures, for men like Helms, Dannemeyer and O'Connor show little restraint in their zeal to trample the constitution. (END OF STATEMENT)