A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

Working on this week's main cover story about AIDS and the singles scene, Martha Smilgis discovered that many men and women were reluctant to talk about the fact that a casual affair could bring on the deadly virus. "In the bars, it's tricky to ask about AIDS," says Associate Editor Smilgis, who wrote the story. "Most people still think it's a gay disease and haven't really thought much about the problem. Your question begins a process of education."

Smilgis' own education in the subject began while she was Los Angeles bureau chief for PEOPLE magazine from 1982 to 1986. From there, she co- ordinated the cover story on the last days of Rock Hudson and the effects of the crisis on the homosexual community. "Often, a specter of death seems to hang around the victims," she notes. Therefore she was shocked to hear that a business acquaintance had died of AIDS two months after she had praised him "for looking fit and trim." Assessing the potential for heterosexual transmission is complicated by the virus' long incubation period. "What we don't know is exactly how this virus works and how it will affect the population ten years from now," Smilgis says. "There are many unknowns. That's very scary."

Smilgis came to TIME in 1974 as an editorial assistant in the Nation section. The next year she left the magazine for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, where she did her best to parlay a political-science degree earned at the University of $ California, Berkeley, into the skills required to cover baseball and soccer. She began a three-year writing stint at PEOPLE magazine in 1977, where she both interviewed celebrities and braved the disco and drug dens of New York City for articles. In 1980 she became TIME's show-business correspondent in Los Angeles, then worked there for PEOPLE, and has now come home, we feel, to write and plan pieces for the Living section. "This story is a perfect example of what the section can do," says Smilgis. "It treats a social issue from a human viewpoint, taking the temperature and mood of the country while explaining exactly what is at stake."

Two companion stories round out our coverage of the AIDS phenomenon. Associate Editor Claudia Wallis examines the ability of U.S. doctors to deal with the 270,000 cases expected by 1991, and Staff Writer Michael Serrill explores the lessons to be learned from the battle against the virus in Africa, where the disease appears to be raging in pandemic proportions.