Free Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings by The Century for Young People: 1961-1999: Changing America Page A

officer reports that the vehicle has exploded.” I felt this terrible cold drenching doom pouring over me. I could almost feel ice water pouring down over my head and chilling me deep into myself. Looking around me, I saw people who had been standing and cheering a moment before sink back down to their benches. Many people put their hands over their faces as if to blot out the sight. Other people put their hands to their throats, as if they themselves were being physically assaulted. One of my colleagues looked at me and asked, “What’s happened? Where are they?” I said, “They’re dead. We’ve lost them, God bless them.” And she got angry. She kind of pushed me and said, “Stop kidding. What happened? Where are they?” And I said, “They’re dead.
    They’re dead.” And at that moment we looked up again, and the pieces of the
Challenger
began tumbling out of that pillar of smoke. That massive vehicle had been shredded into tiny little pieces that were falling like confetti out of the sky.
    Fear was also stalking America in the form of a new and deadly disease. For years medical science had been scoring one success after another. Its achievements promised to make human life better than ever. Then came the AIDS epidemic. AIDS stands for “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.” First detected in the early 1980s, it was believed to be a “gay disease.” Homosexual men were being struck down by a mysterious onslaught of unusual infections that their bodies could not fight off. Before long, AIDS was also diagnosed in intravenous drug users, prostitutes, hemophiliacs, and some immigrants from Haiti and Africa. Because there was no clear understanding of what this deadly disease was, how it spread, or how to treat it, fear and hysteria quickly swept much of the nation.
    For more than a decade, activists had been struggling for gay rights, and they had made considerable progress. But the arrival of AIDS brought a backlash against the gay community. Some conservative critics went so far as to claim that AIDS was God’s revenge against “immoral” people. All thefinger-pointing and name-calling often hid the sad fact that real people were dying, including babies who had gotten AIDS from their infected mothers. By the late 1980s the death toll was climbing toward a hundred thousand, and just about everyone in America knew someone whose life had been affected by the disease.
    Bruce Woods Patterson, born in 1953, saw the devastating effect of AIDS on the gay community in New York City and pitched in to help.
    G MHC [Gay Men’s Health Crisis] had hired me on full time to work with Jerry Johnson on the AIDS hot line. What I didn’t know at the time was that I had changed careers forever. We were all nonprofessionals back then, working by the seat of our pants and just trying to get GMHC’s name out there. [Johnson’s] instincts were what we call “client-centered” and “nondirective,” which means that you accept the caller where they are, and you support them where they are, and you do not judge them, whatever you do. And you don’t tell them what to do. You ask what they want to do and you ask them how they think they can do it, and in the end you help them figure out the options.
    One of the great challenges of a hot line is that you get one chance to make adifference in the lives of the callers. In our case, we had to do that in under ten minutes, the prescribed time limit on most calls, and you have to maintain your anonymity, another requisite. It’s really the only way to stay emotionally distant from the caller, although there are calls I carry around with me to this day. People called who were bed-bound, crying and sad with no hope. They’d start talking about how they used to be young and beautiful and had a future and how they had lost their identity, independence, and pride. A lot of people called and