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_________________________________________________ ACT UP confronts red-ribbon-wearing animal extremists AIDS group chants: "Your shoes don't match your views, you'll see it on the news Peta supporters surround ACTUP activists as they protest for valuable, life-saving research for immediate release contact: Steve Michael or Wayne Turner at 202.547.6780 (Washington, DC, June 22, 1996) Peaceful HIV+ AIDS activists and their advocates today protested animal extremists who refuse to repudiate acts of violence against AIDS research and researchers outside the Ramada-Renaissance Hotel in Washington.. "It was frightening," states Wayne Turner as he watched his lover, HIV positive AIDS activist Steve Michael and Hank Carde, a Washington man with end-stage AIDS surrounded by PETA members. "I couldn't believe it, well-dressed men and women screaming at Gay men with AIDS. All we were doing was focusing on the absolute and clear need for the use of animal models in our collective and urgent quest for a cure." Notes Wanda James, an African-American grandmother with AIDS who leads support groups for women at the HIV Community Coalition, "These people are supporting rats? They must be crazy What about the people dying?" Michael notes, "I was sickened, yuppies with t-shirts stating opposition to vital AIDS research, wearing red ribbons. Their hypocrisy is killing thousands of Americans and millions of people throughout the world. PETA and their associated sub-groups and cells cannot put on the red-ribbon and use it as a shield to protect their terrorists attacks against valuable research around AIDS. Red ribbons don't save lives, but AIDS research will. Cheryl Spector of ACT UP Washington stated that, "I'd rather see 50,000 rats die if it means we can help save the life of even one person with AIDS." Spector's brother, Stan died over a decade ago of an AIDS related complications. She has witnessed over a hundred friends die and was personally insulted that people visiting here in Washington donned red-ribbons. "You have to earn your red-ribbon." Michael adds, "Entertainment figures that support PETA are hurting people with HIV and AIDS. Hollywood has-beens can't resurrect their fading careers over the graves of people with AIDS. They have no clue what it is like to be surviving with an HIV and AIDS diagnosis, living on $119 in food stamps and in constant fear that the congress and president are going to cut Washington's AIDS funding once again. Our message to them is simple. Cash in some of their designer- fake fur coats and start ACTing UP for those of us with HIV and AIDS." States ACT UP'er Hank Carde, a retired United States Navel Commander with three tours of combat duty in Vietnam, "(A)s someone who has participated in five clinical trials with experimental drugs,. all of them highly toxic, some of them painful, I think everyone whether human or animal are burgeoned to do whatever they can to accelerate finding cures for such serious diseases as AIDS and Breast Cancer." A coalition of AIDS service, research, and advocacy organizations including the National Association of People with AIDS, the American Foundation for AIDS Research, and the National Black Women's Health Project issued a consensus document maintaining their support of laboratory animals for life-saving medical research. ACT UP members with HIV and AIDS are available for on-camera and on the-air-interviews to debate and challenge animal extremists at 202.547.6780 AIDS activists also available for Spanish Language interviews