Living, years later, with HIV

It's easy for most of us to forget that, not too long ago, an AIDS diagnosis meant certain death.

Sue Kehler remembers. She was one of dozens of people, mainly extras, in the 1993 film Philadelphia who had the disease or were HIV positive.

She may be the only one left.

"It was an experience that made me feel special," she says, recalling how Tom Hanks saw her feeling woozy, asked if she'd eaten, and demanded a break.

Jonathan Demme wanted his groundbreaking film - the first big production about AIDS - to reflect reality.

Kehler remembers an extra named Mark Sorensen, his face covered with lesions from Kaposi's sarcoma, who told a joke in the medical clinic scene. She giggled - her only speaking part, although she is visible a lot in the courtroom, sitting behind Hanks and Denzel Washington.

Demme rushed a rough, unscored video copy of the film to Sorensen's home in Malvern on Sept. 16, 1993; he died the next day. Most of the others were dead within a year.

Yesterday marked 19 years since Kehler found out that she was infected.

It so happens that this year is the 15th anniversary of Philadelphia and the 20th anniversary of the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania, the only independent firm in the nation that focuses entirely on AIDS discrimination and related issues. Kehler will speak at a Law Project celebration tonight at City Hall. Demme will join a panel discussion led by author/screenwriter/saxophonist James McBride.

The Law Project's mission and the film's theme - a gay lawyer with AIDS (Hanks, in an Oscar-winning performance) is fired by his blue-chip firm and hires a homophobic ambulance-chaser (Washington) to sue for discrimination - clearly overlap.

"We're 25, 30 years into the epidemic and people are still losing their jobs because of HIV, people are still being denied services," said Ronda Goldfein, the Law Project's executive director, who put together the $150-per-person fund-raiser.

Bias accounted for less than 10 percent of the firm's 2,100 cases last year. Help in getting people public benefits made up the bulk of the work. Both were always part of the mission, Goldfein said, although the ratio has changed.

HIV was far from Kehler's mind in 1989, she said, as physicians tried for months to figure out why their pregnant patient was developing fevers and swollen glands.