Billings, Cammermeyer Named To Aids Council

State schools chief Judith Billings, who announced earlier this year that she has AIDS, has been appointed to the Governor’s Advisory Council on HIV-AIDS, Gov. Mike Lowry said Friday.

Also named to the council was Margarethe Cammermeyer of Langley. Cammermeyer, a colonel in the Washington National Guard, won reinstatement after the government initially discharged her for telling a military investigator she was a lesbian.

Since Billings’ dramatic announcement last winter, she has become a national advocate for AIDS education in public schools. She is stepping down as the state superintendent of public instruction in January after two terms.

Cammermeyer, who was chief nurse in the state Guard, was discharged in 1992.

In 1994, a federal court judge in Seattle ordered the Guard to reinstate the decorated Vietnam veteran after finding her discharge by the Army under the old automatic ouster policy for homosexuals was unconstitutional.

The government eventually dropped its appeal of Cammermeyer’s reinstatement.