Now 65, with her AIDS held at bay by drugs, Fowler travels the country sharing her story with other seniors, giving them the same safe-sex message that younger people have been hearing for years. "I decided to put another face to the epidemic—an old, wrinkled face—to show people that HIV doesn't discriminate," she says.
Indeed, AIDS among the elderly is on the rise—up 360 percent during the past 10 years. The reason, experts say, is that too many seniors think they are immune. "There are very few messages out there for older people telling them that they are at risk," says Nathan Linsk, a professor of social work at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "Most prevention information is targeted at younger people."
Fowler, a retired journalist in Kansas City, Mo., decided to do something about that. In 1995 she helped found the National Association on HIV Over 50, which provides information on health care and social services for those touched by HIV. Fowler makes 50 speeches a year on the subject. "Jane is a marvelous speaker," says the group's treasurer, William Rydwels, 68. "She shows that you can survive AIDS and have a good life."
Until her diagnosis Fowler had been known mainly for her byline and her dinner parties. The only daughter of the late Frank Pecinovsky, a postal service supervisor in the Kansas City area, and Ursula, a high school home economics teacher, Fowler graduated from the University of Kansas in 1957 and joined The Kansas City Star the next day. There she met and fell in love with another writer, whom she married two years later.
While on a six-month trip to Europe with her husband, Giles, in 1961, Fowler became interested in food writing. She wrote food features and profiles for the Star while rearing her son Stephen, who was born in 1964. Eleven years later she joined Bon Appétit, then headquartered in Kansas City. After the magazine moved to Los Angeles, she took up freelancing.
Her marriage did not fare as well as her career. In 1983 she and her husband split up. "I did not seek a single life," she says. "I dated for the first time in a quarter century."
She does not want to name the man she believes infected her, other than to say that he was a writer whom she dated casually for several years. He had already moved from Kansas City when an insurance company denied her a policy because a blood test showed "a significant abnormality." When family and friends urged her to be retested, the results came back positive for HIV. The news was hard to take. "I did not sleep that night," she says. "I was stunned and devastated."
In '95 Fowler learned at a dinner party that her New Year's date from 10 years earlier had died. "I threw down the receiver," she recalls. "I was wailing and stomping my feet." Until then Fowler had tried to hide her disease. "I withdrew," she says. "I did not have the courage to put myself in situations that might be painful, where I might experience rejection or prejudice." But after that, with the support of her son, now a freelance writer in San Francisco, she decided to speak out.
She did so at a March 1995 conference on HIV—without letting her name be printed in the program—at the urging of her physician Dr. Sharon Lee, who treats about 500 HIV and AIDS patients in Kansas City. She got a standing ovation. "That started me on my way," says Fowler, who is happy she has come to be identified with her crusade: "Today I am a poster girl for a health cause that is neither chic nor pretty."
Florestine Purnell
Giovanna Breu in Kansas City
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Saved by the Bell Reunion
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