Howard Brown

Howard Brown, M.D., spent the bulk of his short life making public-health history. After attending college and medical school he served in the U.S. military. Upon being discharged he moved to Manhattan. Here he organized a groundbreaking clinic for poor people on its lower East Side.

In 1965, liberal Republican Mayor John Lindsay, eager to make this neighborhood-based clinic a city-wide model, appointed Howard Brown his Health Commissioner. When a conservative newspaper columnist threatened to reveal that Lindsay's cabinet included several homosexual men, Brown was among those who resigned his position to head off a scandal.

He became a professor of medicine and public administration at New York University in Greenwich Village. At the end of June in 1969, when what became known as the Stonewall Riots erupted on Christopher Street, he observed what was going on from the balcony of his nearby condo.

Soon afterward he joined several other closeted gay professionals inclined to help this blossoming new community by teaching gay men what they had learned about preventing V.D., short for Venereal Disease. That was the most common term for what later became commonly called sexually transmitted diseases, STDs, or sexually transmitted infections, STIs. They started a nonprofit foundation for public education. They resolved to capitalize on what they had learned during their military service, confirmed during stays in Paris, and found personfied by savvy sex workers and experienced gay men they encountered in Lower Manhattan.

The prevailing public-health model for dealing with V.D. called for funding low-priced or free clinics devoted to testing, treating, and curing infections such as syphilis and gonorreah. It counted on reaching men and women whose sexual promiscuity inclined them to get and to spread related infections by obliging treated parties to supply them with the names and contact information of possibly infected partners.

This approach did little to accomodate the lives of sexually active men and women who felt compelled to protect themselves and their own by concealing their unconventional and even illegal sexual pastimes. Chief among the latter were homosexually active men and both male and female sex workers.

One member of the Greenwich Village circle determined to produce a more viable approach to curtailing the spread of sexually transmitted infections among "outsiders" organized a Manhattan-based American Foundation for the Prevention of Venereal Disease, Inc. Its own approach was to publicize the prevention potential of post-sex washing by producing, publicizing, and circulating a regularly revised and updated booklet titled "The New Venereal Disease Prevention for Everyone."

After describing the nature and symptoms of common sexually transmitted infections, this little booklet explained that using soapy water to hand-wash involved body parts as soon as possible after engaging in sexual activity was the easiest way to keep from getting and spreading sexually transmitted infections. Each of these discussions of post-sex washing noted that it was easily and effectively done with the help of a bidet. Because of his familiarity with France and the French, its author understood bidets to be low porcelain sinks that resembled toilet bowls without flushing mechanisms -- an appliance that the French had designed to facilitate the hand-washing of intimate organs back in the 1700s.

By 1973, Howard Brown had turned his attention to bigger challenges involving homosexuality. To tackle the pervasive social conservatism and persisting personal prejudices he blamed for hobbling Establishment efforts to confront related problems, he resolved to come out publicly. "The New York Times" ran a pair of prominently featured articles to publicize the news of his revelation and its objectives -- first off, to persuade established medical and public health professional associations to rid themselves of officially spelled out ostracism.

To provide himself with an influential organizational base Howard Brown became the founding board chair of a new National Gay Task Force. This unprecedented nationwide gay and lesbian professional group was soon renamed the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Unfortunately, the groundbreaking gay M.D. who had done so much to publicize the launch of this unprecedented national gay and lesbian group soon had a fatal heart attack. His heirs proceeded to publish the autobiographical manuscript he had just completed. Reading "Familiar Faces, Hidden Lives" in the light of all that has happened since, one sees that the tragedy of this premature death included the loss of his support for the American Foundation for the Prevention of Venereal Disease, Inc. -- the first national nonprofit group devoted to teaching sexually active men and women of every orientation that post-sex washing, particularly as facilitated by bidet use, is the most feasible way for sexually active men and women of every orientation to elude related intimate infections.

Not least to protect the reputations of Dr. Howard Brown's many closeted homosexual associates, his heirs instructed officials of the New York Public Library to make his archived personal and professional papers off-limits for many decades. But the costs of this inaccessiblity include documentation and detail about the hygiene-related STD-prevention recommendations that have been publicized in successive editions of "The New Venereal Disease Prevention for Everyone."

Nevertheless, the first and second editions of a groundbreaking National Gay Health Directory, published in 1979 and 1980 by the National Lesbian and Gay Health Conference, another unprecedented national group, carried full-page ads placed and paid for by the American Foundation for the Prevention of V.D., Inc. These ads reproduced excerpts from the 10th Revised Edition of its watershed booklet about post-sex hygiene, including the suggestion that sexually active men and women of every orientation learn how to facilitate it with the help of traditional French-style bidets.

In fact, the Tenth Revised Edition of this widely advertised and circulated booklet, which arrived in 1983, included AIDS among the sexually transmitted diseases that could be eluded with the help of protective personal washing. It generalized, "Whatever the lifestyle or behavioral pattern, good personal hygiene, as always, remains essential; all individuals must wash genitals and rectal area before and after sex contact."… (plus d'informations)