'I have AIDS'

Ali Gertz saw her illness as a chance to open people's minds about AIDS

BY DAVE MARCUS | Newsday Staff Writer

June 4, 2006

If life had followed Ali Gertz's plans, by now she would be a successful artist. She'd have a husband and children. They'd go bodysurfing in Westhampton Beach and come home to a dog and "millions of cats."

Life didn't follow her plans. Instead, Ali Gertz became an icon, a symbol of another time. Fourteen years after her death, she's still the girl next door with AIDS.

Gertz was a beautiful, outgoing illustrator who attended an elite private school in New York and summered in Westhampton with her family, descendents of founders of Gertz department stores. For a time, a naive nation thought that people like her didn't get AIDS.

"In those days, everyone thought that AIDS was limited to gays and drug users," said her mother, Carol Gertz, sitting in a sunny corner of her East Side apartment in Manhattan recently. "They couldn't believe that it could infect someone who was heterosexual, especially a woman."

Ali's father, Jerrold, a real-estate developer, had been one of those doubters before stunned doctors realized his daughter was HIV-positive in 1988. "Until then, I felt that all that coverage about AIDS was a big hype to get funding," he said.

Then Ali Gertz went public, revealing that she had been infected with the HIV virus at age 16 during a brief romance with a bartender friend. People magazine put her on the cover, and "20/20" featured her. The United Nations showed a film about her, and Molly Ringwald starred in a TV movie about her life. Esquire magazine named her "Woman of the Year."

Her courageous disclosure was a turning point in the fight against AIDS in New York and across the country. Mainly, it was a recognition that people like her did, indeed, get AIDS.

"She opened people's eyes to the fact that this wasn't just a disease of young gay men and injection-drug users," said Dr. Donna Futterman, director of the Adolescent AIDS Program at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.

Alison's illness also gave her parents a mission, one they have continued since the death of their only child.

They want to educate people, especially high school and college students, about the threat of AIDS. Concerned Parents for AIDS Research, a nonprofit foundation they founded, has raised $5 million.

Another foundation, Love Heals, founded by Ali's three best friends, sends speakers to schools. Many of the speakers are HIV-positive; others are health educators.

Reminders of Alison Gertz fill her parents' apartment -- photos of her with flowing hair and a broad smile, awards from AIDS organizations, meticulous pen-and-ink architectural drawings she made. As Jerrold Gertz looks at a snapshot of his daughter taken right after her birth in 1966, he tells about how she was born six weeks premature. "She couldn't wait," he said. "She was always strong-willed."

That strong will became especially apparent during her illness. In 1988, at age 22, she was hospitalized with persistent fever. For two weeks, doctors probed and X-rayed for a host of diseases. Finally, a specialist diagnosed it: HIV, he told the incredulous family.

Within minutes, Ali announced that she was going to help others, recalled her friend, Victoria Leacock, a filmmaker. Relatives advised against going public. "AIDS has always been seen as something to be ashamed of -- especially because it's transmitted by sex," Carol Gertz recalled. "And you know about our country and sex."

Ali persisted. In 1989, a newspaper profile quoted her saying that many Americans ignored news about AIDS because they dismissed it as a disease of gay men, poor drug users and blood-transfusion recipients. "They can't turn the page on me," she said. "I could be one of them, or their daughter."

Within hours, the Gertz family was fielding calls from anxious parents as well as an Australian TV crew. People from around the world sent letters addressed to "Ali Gertz, Westhampton Beach, Long Island."

Some callers confessed that they had AIDS and were afraid to tell neighbors. Some were unkind, and she and her parents had to switch to unlisted numbers. Still, in the 24 hours after ABC aired the Molly Ringwald movie, "Something to Live For" in 1992, nearly 200,000 people called the federal AIDS hotline -- a record.

The exposure was painful for the Gertz family. Jerrold says the media exaggerated the family's wealth: His father had founded the Gertz department stores in Long Island and Queens, and Carol co-founded Tennis Lady, a chain of shops, but they didn't live an extravagant life. The ABC movie transformed the Gertz beach cottage into a Gatsbyesque mansion. Still, Jerrold says, "If Ali helped save one life, the exposure was worthwhile."

"She absolutely had an impact," Futterman said of Monte.fiore. "That really helped us spread awareness at all levels of society."

Soon after Ali went public, so did Elizabeth Glaser, whose husband, Paul, had starred in the "Starsky and Hutch" television series. And so did Mary Fisher, the scion of a prominent Republican family and a former assistant to President Gerald Ford.

When Ali felt well, she traveled to speak at schools. When she was weak, her parents and friends took turns staying by her bedside. Her parents still remember the minute-by-minute details of the repeated times when her immune system weakened and she had to be hospitalized.

Carol Gertz still shakes her head at the unfairness of it all. She prided herself on her close, honest relationship with her daughter. Ali had told her when she planned to lose her virginity. Together, mother and daughter had gone to a gynecologist so Ali could get birth control pills. "In those days, we worried about pregnancy," Carol said. "We didn't even think about sexually transmitted diseases or AIDS."

Part of their anger is directed at those who waited too long to join Alison Gertz in talking about AIDS, the Gertzes say. They criticize the late President Ronald Reagan for not using his power to warn about the disease or increase funding when epidemiologists tracked thousands of cases in the early 1980s.

Like her daughter, Carol Gertz has spoken to groups of teens, telling them that abstinence is the only sure way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases. But she says teenagers are inundated by commercials, music videos and Internet sites that glorify sex, so teens also need to know about condoms.

"The fact is, many teenagers are having sex," Carol said. "Adults cannot stick their heads in the sand."

The Gertzes also worry about the toll AIDS is taking on the developing world, where some studies show that thousands of HIV-positive children are born every day.

Ali would have turned 40 this year. Her friends still talk about the last day of her life, a torpid Saturday in August 1992.

Ali was 26 and bed.ridden in Westhampton Beach. Her parents, grandmother and friends gathered around her. Ali's beloved Pekingese, Saki, joined them. Ali hadn't eaten for a week, and she hadn't been able to drink water for four days.

Victoria Leacock turned to Ali's doctor. "I don't understand why she's still alive," Leacock said.

"Her heart's only 26 years old," the doctor responded, "and it doesn't know any better."