
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 6, 1990                   TAG: 9006060431
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-2   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: By Los Angeles Times
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

AIDS-FIGHT SYMBOL DAN TURNER DIES

Dan Turner, who survived eight years with AIDS, becoming in the process a personification of hope to those with that fatal disease, has lost his historic struggle.

The onetime playwright and actor was 42 when he died Monday in San Francisco, ending a battle that had begun in February 1982 when doctors - who then were seeing the illness for the first time - were able to tell him only that he had "gay cancer."

Thanks in part to an inexplicable suppression system that kept in check the AIDS virus that normally proves fatal in a few years or even months, Turner lived to help found many support groups.

Among them were the AIDS Foundation, People with AIDS and the AIDS Switchboard.

Turner was one of the first two patients diagnosed at San Francisco General Hospital, before the disease was called Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. He was told only that he had a rare cancer, Kaposi's sarcoma, which had surfaced as five spots on his ankle.

by CNB