TIME: Were there any particular obstacles you encountered as a journalist, and then spokesman, on the AIDS beat in the 1980s?
BUNN: Back in that day, TV technicians were reticent, sometimes refused, to even put microphones on people with AIDS. I made a point in my stories of bringing a crew with me that had been educated about how the disease is transmitted, because I felt that it was incumbent on me to show them the utmost respect. These people were coming out at a time when the result of them being interviewed could get them fired, evicted, “out” them to their families and friends. The epidemic thrust people out of the closet because they were now sick and dying. So there was a tremendous amount of courage being displayed just by agreeing to talk to me.
When I was at WHO, for one of the largest single gatherings of health ministers in the history of the U.N., I was asked to put together a video on the epidemic that would empower ministers of health with info they could take back to their Prime Ministers and cabinets. The script I handed in to be translated had the phrase “gay or bisexual men,” but a Farsi translator said, “You can’t say this.” So I went back and rephrased it as “men who had anal sex with other men,” using a level of frankness I had not needed to use before.
How did you make the epidemic hit home for people who thought they weren’t at risk?
When I was a journalist, what we’d try to focus on, in addition to those whose stories we were telling particularly at that time, [was that] the virus is not limited to gay or bisexual men, it’s not limited to IV drug users, this is a sexually transmitted disease. One of the things we didn’t do, we didn’t talk about what [the interviewee’s] sexual preference was. We talked about what their symptoms were. We talked about what it was like to live with this disease.
When Rock Hudson‘s diagnosis became public, all of a sudden everyone got it. The business [side] at KPIX said, “Can you do a documentary?” So we put one together in four days with everything we had covered. Now our station was engaged, and we launched an AIDS education program with the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the city’s health department.