X-Message-Number: 3614
Date: 06 Jan 95 00:54:50 EST
From: Mike Darwin <>
Subject: CRYONICS Aids Patients as market targets

I may be the only person in the world who has actually done exactly what has
been suggested: run ads in appropriate places trying to get terminal HIV
patients interested in cryonics.

This was done in the mid to late 1980's.  

I am a gay man and I approached a number of widely read free publications such
Frontiers, Updates, etc.  Advertising rates in The Advocate were so high as to
be unaffordable except as classified ads.  Of all the Editors I talked to, and

there were many, only the Editor of Update was willing to take any of the ads my
lover and I had generated.  These ads ran from blunt, to very tasteful and

discreet.  Updates would only take my more tasteful ads (which was what I REALLY
wanted to run anyway).  It cost several hundred dollars to run these  ads which
had an illustration (line drawing) of an attractive male with a reflective
expression on his face.  The ad was designed to fit in with the rest of the

style of the ads in the  magazine and George, the Editor, helped me with layout.

The reaction:

1) Nost magazines were positively venemous to me over the phone.  Some editors
screamed that not one penny should be spent on such schemes and people should
work to find ways to stay alive and CURE AIDS NOW: Not surrender and wait for
someone else to bail them out.

2) Most people were not as nice as the people memtioned in #1 above.

3) We got ZERO, I mean ZERO reuests for information.  We did get about half a
dozen hate filled letters which are probably still somewhere in the Alcor
archives, along with the ad copy.

4) I personally contacted several high profile terminal AIDS patients one of
whom came out to see the lab and with whom I became good friends.  I met him

through a newspaper  series on his struggle to beat AIDS (he said in one article
that he wanted to liver forver).  He visited Alcor, we socialized from time to
time.  He felt cryonics could work, "but it just wasn;t for him."  The  Orange
County Register ran a lovely obiturary for him.  The accompanying photo showed
his family and freinds releasing colored ballons when they scattered his ashes.
He was fully conscious to the end. He also knew that manoey would not a be a
problem if he chose cryopreservation.


Finally, being a gay man in his very late '30's I can tell you that I have  made
no small effort to persuade CLEARLY DYING friends and former sexual
partners/friends of the reasonableness of cryonics.  I have not onlty been

unsuccessful, but describe my success rate as LOWER than in any other population
I have tried to inform about cryonics with the exception of journalists: in
which case I know of only one success (despite THOUSANDS OF EXTENDED PRO
CRYONICS HOURS OF CONVERSATION WITH THESE PEOPLE) and that is Charles Platt.

I knew Leonard Matlovich passingly  well.  I stayed in his apartment in the
Castro on several occassions and talked to him abour gay related issues and his
military experiences for hours on end.  (Leonard, incidentally, was the gay
airman on the cover of Time magazine in the middle 70's and who more or less
launched the crusade for gays in the military.)  Leonard was a rational, sweet,
decent man who was also highly principled.  Sitting on my window at home is a
picture of him sitting in the oval office in the President's chair (Midge
Costanza smuggled him in during the Carter years).  I also have a personally
autographed copy of his Time magazine cover.  What I am trying to say here is

that I knew this man reasonably well; not as a close freind, but as a friend.  I
tried talking to him about cryonics on several ocassions.  He was absolutely
revolted at the idea.  Refused to even discuss it.

He has a headstone in Arlinton National Cemetery.  It is very lovely.  It has a
pink triangle and and is engraved (I may be a little off here) "My country gave
me a medal for trying to kill a man, and excluded me from serving it for loving
one."

Needless to say I still have contact both directly and indirectly with many gay
men as friends.  Most are my age.  Most are infected.  No social gathering, no
matter how festive is without mention of how so and so's doing or "did you know
that so and so died a few days ago."  Death is omnipresent.  They all know what
I do.  Therse people all know about cryonics backwards and forwards.  I see
their funeral notices often and go to memorial services for those close enough
to warrant it.  Almost all are cremated.


My conclusion: AIDS patients make a great base for marketing cryonics.  Exceeded
only by the parents of dying children.  And how many children are frozen?

Forgive my cynicism.  But I have been at this long and hard for many years.  I

no longer advocate cryonics at all to anyone.  I will render an opinion if asked

and that is all.  I no longer discuss my work except as research with friends or
others I know or meet casually.

As time has passed I have come to see cryonics as a two edged sword.  And I can
tell you from bitter experience Don Laughling is wrong about one thing: you CAN
loose.  And so far it hasn't been much of a winner's game: not even to those
cooling their heels and/or heads in liquid nitrogen.


After long reflection I have come to believe that at least PART of the reason
cryonics is so hard to sell is that they (that mass of public John and Jane
Does) know something we don't know as well not knowing what we do know.  In a

clumsy way, I am stating here that cryonics has a lot of hidden costs, downsides
and dangers.  It is NOT a no-load proposition.  It took me a long time to see
that.  It has conveerted from a zealot to something quite different.

For that insight, I am not sure whether I should weep with gratitude or regret.
Probably asome of both.


Mike Darwin

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