About Dale

Dale earned her bachelors and master's degrees from New York University. She has spent four decades working in a variety of capacities with vulnerable and marginalized women and children. Dale was a teacher of students with severe cognitive and developmental delays; produced and directed special education television shows for WNYE-TV; worked in the fields of domestic violence and residential drug treatment for women; and spent a decade as a social worker with marginalized African American women and children with HIV/AIDS during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Her commentaries on social issues have appeared in the Stamford Advocate, Greenwich Time, and other national Hearst publications. Articles about her have appeared in Newsday and the AARP magazine MY GENERATION. 

IN THEIR PRESENCE: Untold Stories of Women and Children During the AIDS Epidemic is Dale’s first book. She lives in Cos Cob, CT with her husband Warren, a retired university professor. Together they have six adult children, eight grandchildren, and enjoy birding, hiking, and kayaking.

IN THEIR PRESENCE is a witness memoir of the years I spent serving marginalized African American women and children with HIV/AIDS in Fort Lauderdale, Florida during the AIDS epidemic. As a new social worker in the Comprehensive Family AIDS Program at Children’s Diagnostic & Treatment Center in 1995, I found myself swept up in the turbulence created by the virus, a disease unlike any other because everything about it was cloaked in secrecy and fraught with stigma, misinformation, misogyny, and the overwhelming public fear of AIDS at that time. 

Embedded in the chapters are never-before-told stories of intimacies, heroic acts, joys and failures—my clients’ as well as my own. These women and children received the same terrifying diagnosis as gay men but had no powerful advocacy groups to take on their cause. Celebrities did not speak out on behalf of women with AIDS as they did for men. The women I served had no organized volunteers to shop for them, cook for or feed them when they could no longer do these things for themselves. No one came to clean their homes, help their kids with homework, or just sit and talk with them.  

You might be interested in knowing why I wrote this book. In the early decades of the AIDS epidemic, all men and women diagnosed with the virus suffered dreadfully on many levels. However, it was the women who were relegated to the shadows. They never spoke about what was happening to them for fear of discrimination and abandonment. The truth is that these female lives mattered just as much as the male lives, but most died with little public awareness that this was their disease, too. 

Decades have now passed, but for me, it was never too late to right a wrong. The women who generously invited me into their lives in deeply intimate ways deserve to have their experiences documented and read about. Their lives, their deaths, and their stories of survival should be recognized as missing chapters in the early history of the AIDS epidemic in America. 

I also wrote this book as part of my legacy to my children and grandchildren. Hopefully, by reading these stories, they will better understand the serious and determined work their mother or grandmother once did and realize how important compassion is to the human spirit. When I was doing this work, my children were young adults and understandably focused on their own lives and personal and professional aspirations. My hope for IN THEIR PRESENCE is that it will draw them into a period of my life they didn’t know much about and show them details of an unfamiliar side of their mother. For my grandchildren, who were either extremely young or not yet born, I hope my book will encourage them to be brave and step out of their comfort zones to experience the truth of other people’s lives—people who, on the surface, may not appear to be like them. As I have learned, doing this can be transformative.