Jun 17, 2005  |  By: YUSEF NAJAFI  | COMMENTS     

“I was wrong,” former Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) claims in an upcoming book about his outspoken opposition to laws that provided AIDS funding during his tenure in the United States Senate.

In the new memoir, “Here’s Where I Stand,” due out Aug. 30, the 83-year-old Republican who retired in 2003 after five terms, explains that his thoughts on the AIDS epidemic began to evolve during his final years in office.

According to the Associated Press, Helms cites his involvement in the fight against AIDS in Africa as the reason. He credits this involvement, in part, to a friendship he formed with North Carolina evangelist Franklin Graham. He also mentions the influence of Bono, lead singer of the Irish band U2.

“It had been my feeling that AIDS was a disease largely spread by reckless and voluntary sexual and drug-abusing behavior and that it would probably be confined to those in high risk populations. I was wrong,” he writes in the new book.

For longtime ACT-UP founder Larry Kramer, Helms’ apology is not enough.

“It’s too little, too late,” Kramer said. “What would be enough would be that the 60 million who voted against us in the last election suddenly felt as repented as Jesse Helms does.

“This is a man who hates us — and I mean hates us. He, along with his fellow conservatives, would wish us all dead.”

Kramer, author of the 1978 novel “Faggots” and the AIDS-inspired 1986 play “The Normal Heart,” initially did not want to comment on the unreleased book because he has not read it. But after being read passages of the book from an AP report, Kramer reacted with anger.

“I don’t know what he’s apologizing for,” he said. “Is he apologizing for all the hateful things he did to gay people all these years? It doesn’t sound like it.”

Random House officials did not return calls seeking comment. Helms was not available for comment by Blade press time.

AIDS and civil rights activists have been outraged by the former senator’s comments throughout the years. And Helms has never shied away from sharing his perspective.

“I’ve never heard once in this chamber anybody say to the homosexuals ‘Stop what you’re doing.’ Do you realize that if they would stop what they’re doing, there would not be one additional case of AIDS in the United States?” he said in 1996, according to a CNN report.

Controversial change of heart
His new 336-page memoir, comes three years after a stunning turnaround when Helms said, “I know of no more heartbreaking tragedy in the world today than the loss of so many young people to a virus that could be stopped if we simply provide more resources.”

In an editorial he wrote for the Washington Post that same year, Helms asked for an additional $500 million in aid money to help initiate preventative care in Africa.

At that time, he continued to hold onto his belief that the “homosexual lifestyle” is the cause of the spread of the epidemic in America.

Early reports of the book, from descriptions of the advance proofs in the News & Observer of Raleigh, have not mentioned anything regarding a change in Helms’ anti-gay views.

In “Here’s Where I Stand,” Helms, who opposed almost every civil rights bill while in the Senate, explains that voluntary integration between different races would have eventually occurred in the U.S. without pressure from the federal government, or civil rights protests.

“We will never know how integration might have been achieved in neighborhoods across our land,” he writes, “because the opportunity was snatched away by outside agitators who had their own agendas to advance.”

Helms ran for the Senate in 1972, at which point he said a “spiritual rebirth” was needed to stop “the freight train of liberalism.”

Throughout his career, Helms promoted low taxes, anti-communism and the right to pray in public schools. In 1995 he became chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.