Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Longtime AIDS and Anti-Drugs Activist Hank Fiolle, Dies at 51

I emailed the author of the article: 
Mike, PLEASE get your facts right:
NO ONE was tested postiviely or otherwise for HIV in 1982: 1985
"The FDA (US) approves the first HIV antibody test. Blood products begin to be tested in the US and Japan. 2nd NO one dies from AIDS" complications of AIDS" 
AIDS is a only a definition... AIDS and HIV are two differnt things. 
"he never took AIDS med's and until Recently, was never ill from the virus" Again the virus, HIV and AIDS are two different things. Also i think you need to understand / learn what was the actual cause of death. 


By Mike Szymanski

Henry Lee “Hank” Fiolle, 51, died due to complications of AIDS at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills, Calif.
He spent the past two decades helping people with addition to alcohol and crystal meth through various 12-step and drug programs.
Fiolle attended William McKinley Elementary School, Bret Harte, Walter Reed Middle School and John Burroughs High School in Burbank.
Fiolle worked as an AIDS activist after he tested positive for HIV in 1982. He never took AIDS medications and until recently, was never ill from the virus.
He worked on independent films as a production assistant and helped raise money for Aid for AIDS, the AIDS Health Foundation and many other causes. He also assisted in organizing Marianne Williamson’s spiritual lectures since the 1990s and volunteered for Crystaliarium, a drug treatment program.
He also worked as a personal assistant to comedian Paul Lynde from 1979 to just before his death in 1982 when he was on the Hollywood Squares.
Fiolle was working on a book about Mama Cass Elliot.
Above is a series of photos about his life.
(EDITOR'S NOTE: I knew Hank off and on since I moved to Studio City in 1985. He will be sorely missed by our family.)



2 comments:

  1. Elizabeth Ely: So sorry I can't save anyone . . .

    I spoke with Hank from Hollywood, as did a few others aong us. He had alternating feverish sweats and chills, and I asked a doctor here in New York to call him -- but I also needed to hear him say he was going to the emergency room, for his real medical emergency.

    Hank was clearly chasing better CD4 counts through a "detox" using almond milk and juices, and I've commented elsewhere on the dangerous scientific irrationality of that.

    In my opinion and based on limited information, he cleansed until he had set off an irreversible feverish reaction, getting rid of something still in there. A lot of these guys used drugs or had bad nutrition as young men, and detoxes work backward. A detox can hit a serious wall at some point, requiring serious supervision, alkalizing, and alternate ways of purging the waste from the body; just because garbage surfaces doesn't mean it's gone.

    The last time I heard from him was the last week of August. I assumed he was on his way off the planet because he cited every deadly drug on the list that he had just taken home from the "HIV clinic." These included Truvada and Atripla (of which Sustiva is an ingredient). Who the heck prescribes "all of the above"? Sadly, I finally deleted his message last week, or I would have transcribed it for you.

    Strange how he could get himself to the "HIV clinic" and not to the emergency room. Strange how he could consent to taking these pills he knew very well were dangerous but feared any radiation at all from a lung x-ray.

    Gay men facing this need DEPROGRAMMING from all the negativity of this suicide cult. Sorry I can't dish out more warm fuzzies instead of confrontation, but this is an addiction and it's deadly.

    I pulled Hank out of his funk long enough for him to request the list of local practitioners from David Crowe one last time, but he couldn't see any possibility of help from any of those people. Not even just moral support and advocacy should he end up in the ER. He didn't like the list, so he said he went back on the drugs. It was like a threat.

    I was there for Hank, until I wasn't doing any good being there for him.

    You can remove me from this thread, hopefully, or I can, because I don't want any harassment messages from it -- and will block anyone who sends any. I've been here before.

    Beth

    27 October Elizabeth Ely
    P.S. Thanks, David, for posting the video here. I cried, and I kept asking . . . amid all these innocent faces in the sunny '70s . . . WHAT HAPPENED TO US?

    27 OctoberDavid Crowe
    I felt that he was totally torn up about things, but never knew exactly what. He kept asking for a person experiencing exactly the same thing as him, but there just isn't anybody. I think he had lost his faith in AIDS, in the mainstream view, but was even more scared of it than when he was a true believer. It's terribly sad. I tried to help him, but just about everything I suggested he rejected for one reason or another (not medical advice, just ways to get information and help). And now people will use him to say, "Look what happens when you don't take your meds".

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  2. 27 October Elizabeth Ely
    Well said, David. And oh yeah, "Look what happens when you don't take your meds." You get diagnosed in 1987 and live until 2011. Not bad. . . . considering that most of the guys I saw in a gay club in 1984 didn't look like they even wanted to make it out of the decade alive. Someday, I want people to stop dying from just plain hysteria and the decisions it leads to. I want people to stop making my point. I want to be wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, about all this. I want to know there's a way out for them, and a way in for me to reach them with the light and a couple of dirty jokes. I want to tell them there's nothing in the world they can be that's that bad, evil, shameful, needing to be "cleansed" with almond milk and green juice. . . . I grew up in the nightclub business, and it was the same thing: People don't always show you their pain. They just turn up at some point falling off a motorcycle or dead from a drug overdose. In those sunny '70s.

    27 OctoberBrian Carter
    Truly saddening his passing. I have a lot of assumptions about this guy though and it comes from my first meeting him as he was the first to show up at an Alive and Well meeting I held after Christine's death. He struck me as mentally unstable at worst, highly confused at best. As I see it, he'd be a classic example of the mind-fuck, whereas the mind cannot easily hold together at the same time two competing thoughts or in this case, paradigms. Seems like he was always in this state of fear--fear of HIV, fear of the unknown, fear of not knowing what to do. When one get's caught in this deadly trap, experiences health problems so easily labeled as HIV disease and suffers from some sort of mentally instability, it becomes a very serious recipe for disaster. Unfortunate, yes, but clearly another story to add to the list of why it's so very very important for those who test positive to exit everything HIV and the AIDS zone as soon as possible and at all costs.

    28 October Manny El Dino
    you just can't get better CD4 count through juicing and detox,it used to depress me when I would try amazing and healthy things and still not get an increase in CD4, now I just don't pay attention to the numbers, the main CD4 count is in the bone marrow not in the blood stream. I know the fools from AIDS truth and The Body are going to blame his death on "waiting too long to take ARV's" ARVs would have killed me, I would have died with high CD4. My condolences to his family.

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