Michael the Menace

Troublesome AIDS activist blasts charities; they say he’s off base

Michael A. Petrelis stands in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue on a recent humid afternoon, surrounded by a crowd of more than 100 reporters, AIDS activists, and bewildered tourists. Beside him is the corpse of his friend and fellow activist, Steve Michael, who died of AIDS.

“I have just one thing to say to the President!” Mr. Petrelis screams, pointing at the White House. “Clinton lies! We die!”

The performance is vintage Michael Petrelis: loud, angry, and delivered in a high-pitched nasal whine that is not easily forgotten. Since the mid-1980s, Mr. Petrelis has hounded politicians, closet homosexuals, and anyone else who dares to disagree with him on AIDS or gay and lesbian issues.

In 1990 he was arrested for handing out condoms in the office of conservative North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms. In 1991 he went into a bar and dumped a soda on then U.S. Congressman Steve Gunderson and announced to the world that the Wisconsin Republican was gay.

Now Mr. Petrelis has directed his ire at another target: AIDS charities. For the past year he has led an attack on organizations that help people with AIDS, lacerating them for what he contends are obscenely high salaries, a lack of public oversight, and misuse of government funds.

In addition to the “political funeral,” Mr. Petrelis’s itinerary here includes a trip to Capitol Hill to lobby for increased scrutiny of how federal AIDS dollars are spent.

“I want to shatter the myth that AIDS groups are run by Mother Teresa-like characters who are volunteers,” Mr. Petrelis says.

Charities that provide services to people with AIDS say that Mr. Petrelis’s charges are groundless, noting that their salaries are in line with those of officials at other health groups. Derek Gordon, director of communications at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, says he believes that Mr. Petrelis’s crusade stems not from concern about the services being delivered to people with AIDS, but “an insatiable desire to seize headlines.”

The focus of Mr. Petrelis’s work is the AIDS Service Provider Accountability Project, which he runs from San Francisco. On its World-Wide Web site (http://www.accountabilityproject.com), the group has posted financial information culled from the Form 990 informational tax returns of at least 45 non-profit groups — predominantly AIDS charities. He would like to post hundreds more, and in May he met with Marc Owens, director of the Internal Revenue Service’s Exempt Organizations Division, to ask for help in expediting requests for tax returns. But so far, Mr. Petrelis has been stymied by a lack of funds.

While there have been other on-line efforts to provide financial data about charities, the Accountability Project is unusual because it posts a particularly sensitive piece of information: salaries.

Mr. Petrelis’s efforts to publicize the salaries of top AIDS officials, some of which reach six figures, have touched off much controversy and left him with some strange political bedfellows. In May Mr. Petrelis persuaded Rep. Tom A. Coburn, a conservative Republican from Oklahoma, to give a speech on the House floor castigating AIDS groups over their compensation policies. “Medically necessary care is being severely curtailed while these executives line their pockets,” Representative Coburn said.

The Family Research Council, a Christian advocacy group in Washington that opposes homosexuality, then cited Mr. Petrelis in its weekly “CultureFacts” e-mail newsletter. Under the headline “High Yield Charity Work,” the item used Mr. Petrelis’s information to suggest that government and private money was being misused by AIDS organizations.

Mr. Petrelis’s seeming embrace of opponents of homosexual rights has won him few friends. His fellow activists have been enraged, engaging in what one person calls a “cyber-lynching” of Mr. Petrelis on the Internet. Some critics have gone so far as to accuse him of not being H.I.V. positive, which Mr. Petrelis says he is. “It is one of the most singularly irresponsible acts I’ve ever seen in the history of AIDS activism,” wrote one activist in an on-line discussion group.

Mr. Petrelis has also been criticized for being less than stringent in his fact checking. One of his oft-repeated examples of exorbitant AIDS salaries is that of Craig M. Shniderman, executive director of Food & Friends, a meal-delivery service for people with AIDS in Washington. According to Mr. Petrelis, as well as to an article in the San Francisco Examiner, Mr. Shniderman received a 62-per-cent pay increase in 1996, to $102,125. The only problem? It’s not true. Mr. Shniderman worked at Food & Friends for less than nine months in 1995, resulting in the dramatic increase in 1996.

Publicizing the salaries of AIDS executives is not the only facet of Mr. Petrelis’s work that has drawn the anger of some charities. He and other activists affiliated with ACT-UP — the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power — were instrumental in pushing San Francisco to pass a “sunshine law.”

The original proposal, which did not pass, would have required charities that received city contracts to open all their meetings to the public, make internal documents available to anyone who asks, and allow city-appointed observers to sit on those charities’ governing boards. A less-stringent version of the bill, which requires charities that receive at least $250,000 in city grants to have two open board meetings a year and provide some financial information to the public, was signed by Mayor Willie Brown last month (The Chronicle, June 18).

Mr. Petrelis cites the sunshine law as an example of “how my work can bring about changes that benefit a lot of people.” But even in this instance he is not free from criticism.

Tom Nolan, executive director of Project Open Hand, an AIDS organization in San Francisco, led a committee of activists and non-profit officials that brokered the compromise on the sunshine law. He says that many of the activists lobbying for the measure were willing to discuss the concerns of non-profit groups but that Mr. Petrelis made no such effort. “The other activists did something positive and contributed, and he was just running around the country,” Mr. Nolan says.

In San Francisco, AIDS officials have long grown accustomed to Mr. Petrelis’s presence as a sort of professional gadfly, and they say that they no longer pay him much mind. If Mr. Petrelis has his way, though, his actions could have ramifications for AIDS organizations across the country.

Just two hours after he pilloried the President for his AIDS policies, Mr. Petrelis is working Capitol Hill. His lobbying agenda: to push for an audit by the Government Accounting Office of how federal AIDS dollars are being spent.

Dressed in shorts and a T-shirt adorned with a button that reads “Silence = Death,” Mr. Petrelis first visits the office of San Francisco Rep. Nancy Pelosi. “There are so many questions about where the federal AIDS dollars are going,” he tells Chris Collins, a member of Ms. Pelosi’s staff.

The response is lukewarm. Mr. Collins says that his boss believes the vast majority of AIDS organizations are doing good work and that adequate oversight mechanisms are already in place.

Undeterred, Mr. Petrelis moves on to Representative Coburn’s office. Here he finds a more sympathetic ear. Roland Foster, a senior legislative aide, says that his boss would like to see an audit of federal AIDS dollars conducted but that he is worried about the cost. “We’ll see what we can do,” Mr. Foster says.

Although Mr. Petrelis obviously relishes all of the attention that his alliance with conservatives has generated, he says that he would prefer not to have anything to do with Representative Coburn or the Family Research Council.

“It’s an uncomfortable position to be in,” Mr. Petrelis says. “But there really is no watchdog mechanism over these AIDS groups.”