Familiar Faces, Hidden Lives: Story of Homosexual Men in America Today

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. After being discharged he moved to Manhattan and organized a groundbreaking clinic for poor people on its lower East Side.

In 1965, liberal

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Republican Mayor John Lindsay, eager to make this 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 homosexuals, Brown was among those who resigned.

Soon afterward he became a professor of medicine and public administration at New York University in Greenwich Village. When the Stonewall Riots erupted at the end of June in 1969, he was able to watch them from the balcony of his nearby condo.

Thereafter, it appears, he joined several other closeted homosexual professionals out to reduce the related increase in sexually transmitted infections by starting a nonprofit foundation devoted to teaching sexually active men and women about post-sex hygiene -- the approach he had been introduced to while serving as a military medic and found feasible for patrons of his community-based clinic.

By 1973, Howard Brown was ready for bigger challenges. To tackle persisting prejudice in the medical and public health professions he declared his homosexuality publicly, resulting in a pair of prominent articles in the "New York Times." Soon afterward he agreed to serve as the founding board member of an unprecedented nationwide professional group named the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Months later, at the age of 50, Howard Brown had a fatal heart attack. In "Familiar Faces, Hidden Lives," his posthumously published book, he hints that the tragedy of this death included a hobbling of the American Foundation for the Prevention of Venereal Disease, Inc. -- the first American nonprofit organization dedicated to publicizing that post-sex hygiene, particularly as facilited by bidet use, is the most feasible way for sexually active men and women of every orientation to elude related infections.

Presumably to protect the reputations of his 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 seclusion include the full story of this public-health pioneer's precocious advocacy of post-sex hygiene and bidet use to prevent sexually transmitted infections, which in 1981 came to include HIV infections and AIDS.

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