Fisher Brings Quiet Voice, Caring Heart to AIDS Controversy : HIV-positive mother is coping with illness, attending to her family and spreading the message she brought to the GOP convention.

By MARLENE CIMONS

Feb. 17, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON — For Mary Fisher--mother, artist, philanthropist and HIV-positive woman--the moment is now.

She tries hard not to think about the future: her future, or the possibility that her children will face their future without her. When she feels the fear, it comes “in that reflective place you find yourself in at night, when you’re forced to find a quiet time,” she said.

“I allow my work and my children to fill my time, so I don’t have to think about those things on a daily or hourly basis,” she said. “I couldn’t get through the days if I did.”

Nor does Fisher dwell on her medical situation with her two young sons, who are now 6 and 4. Neither of them is infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS.

“The best thing I can do for them is be with them, look them straight in the eye, answer their questions as best I can and be here, be involved in their lives as best I can,” she said. “They know I have a disease. I don’t know if they’re relating it to what their dad had--and I don’t know if I want them to relate to it, because I’m not sick.

“I don’t want to instill my fears--if I have them--in my children,” she added.

It has been nearly two years since Fisher, 45, seared the public consciousness with her speech before the Republican National Convention.

Standing before her fellow Republicans, she spoke in calm, gentle tones--but delivered a personal story that shocked the hall into silence.

“I think she reaches people that activists like myself can never reach, which is people who respond to maternal warmth and not to yelling,” said playwright Larry Kramer, a close friend of Fisher’s who is a founding member of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power).

“That’s why she is as important as we are, maybe more so,” he said. “We’re a funny pair because she’s always saying to me: ‘Larry, I wish I had some of your anger.’ And I’m always saying to her: ‘Mary, I wish I had some of your compassion.’ I see her speeches on TV and say: ‘Mary, why don’t you get angrier?’ And she says: ‘Larry, I can’t.’ But I think she’s exceedingly effective being as she is, and I don’t want her to change a decibel.”

Fisher challenged the Republican Party to confront the AIDS epidemic with candor and compassion and to make the issue its own.

Since then, she has traveled the nation, speaking in churches, schools, prisons--wherever there is an audience that can learn from her message: If it can happen to me, it can happen to you.

In many quarters, “people perceive AIDS as a depressing subject and don’t want to take personal responsibility,” Fisher said from the home she now rents in a Maryland suburb outside Washington, where she moved her family from Boca Raton, Fla., last summer.

“They try to make me an exception,” she said. “I am not unusual. I am unusual only because I am speaking out. . . . The point is, there are a lot of me’s out there, women with small children who are (HIV) positive, women who are devastated, women who are scared to talk about it. I know, because they come to me when I am traveling. It’s truly amazing.”

In some ways, Fisher is wrong--she is unusual in the framework of the AIDS epidemic: She is wealthy -- the daughter of longtime GOP fund-raiser and Detroit real estate mogul Max Fisher -- and she works for herself at home (she creates art using handmade paper) so she has no “workplace problem” with AIDS.

And she has enough money to keep her children sheltered, although she has not isolated them.

Moreover, she is a longtime Republican with impeccable political credentials and connections.

Fisher includes former Presidents Gerald R. Ford and George Bush and their families among her closest friends. She once worked in the Ford White House, and photographs of Ford and her two sons, Max and Zachary, adorn her living room.

But AIDS is the great leveler, so she is also right--in many ways, she is no exception at all.

Fisher was infected by her former husband, Brian Campbell, who reportedly was at one time an intravenous drug user. He has since died of AIDS. Women infected through heterosexual contact have become a rapidly growing population.

Fisher said it took a long time for her to come to grips with her infection--and to speak about it.

“The discovery that we are HIV-positive tends to divide our lives into ‘before’ and ‘after,’ ” Fisher wrote in a newly published collection of her speeches, “Sleep with the Angels,” subtitled, “a mother challenges AIDS.”

The book, she says, “is not just about AIDS, it’s about children. It’s about religion. It’s about how we as a people deal with each other, and it’s about my life, my relationships with others and the unconditional love that’s out there.”

Kramer, who is quick to criticize others involved in AIDS activities, has only praise and affection for Fisher.

“It’s impossible not to like Mary because she is so caring and loving and motherly and interested, and because she puts her arms around you and gives you wonderful hugs,” he said.

Fisher learned in July, 1991, that she was infected, but she said it took six months before she was ready to tell her story publicly.

After she did, and after she spoke to the GOP convention, Bush appointed her to the now-defunct National Commission on AIDS, replacing Earvin (Magic) Johnson, the HIV-positive retired Los Angeles Lakers star who quit over what he said was an unresponsive Administration.

Fisher also founded the Family AIDS Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising AIDS awareness nationwide.

The network, she says, plans to give “care-giver” awards this spring because “they are the people who take care of us. They are the people who do not leave this epidemic.” She also said she hopes that the organization can raise enough money for small AIDS research grants.

Currently, Fisher has no symptoms and takes no AIDS medication. “I feel really healthy, and am doing fine,” she said. “As far as I know, everything is good.”

Fisher said she intends to keep doing everything she is doing for as long as she can, speaking quietly and forcefully about the epidemic to whoever will listen.

“If we can create a dialogue and keep it going, I believe it’s the only way we can make a difference,” she said.