Leanza Cornett, Miss America who was crusading AIDS activist, dies at 49

In 1992, Leanza Cornett was a part-time college student, a full-time singing mermaid at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., and an ambivalent contestant preparing for the Miss Florida pageant.

She was advised to find a cause, a signature issue to champion if she were crowned.

For the previous year, she had been volunteering with young AIDS patients. When she informed local pageant directors that she wanted public awareness of the disease as her issue, they winced and asked if she had a second choice.

She recalled telling them, “You know what, I don’t care. If this is not OK, this is not an organization I want to be a part of.”

Months later, Cornett was named Miss America 1993 - and turned her yearlong reign into a crusade to bring attention to AIDS and promote safe sex. At a time when AIDS was considered a terminal illness and HIVpositive people faced discrimination, Cornett jolted the pageant’s prim reputation and made headlines for bringing her pro-condom message into schools.

“Girls, no love unless he wears a glove,” she told her teenage audience. “Boys, if you love her, wear a cover. Don’t leave home without it.”

Cornett clashed with some nervous educators but often managed to prevail, one way or another. At a school that tried to bar her from using graphic words, she made a deal to substitute her speech with a question-and-answer session - knowing full well the students would bring up the R-rated topics for her.

When a rural school district in Florida refused even to let her utter the word “AIDS,” she reluctantly complied - and promptly told a Rotary-Kiwanis luncheon audience that same day how she had been censored.

“I can adhere to any school board’s needs,” she said. “But I will not be an accomplice to the spread of this disease. People are dying from this disease. I feel guilty that I didn’t speak about it. I don’t want to lay blame, but the school board should feel guilty.”

Journalists were present at the lunch, and the dustup became national news.

Cornett, 49, who went on to a career as a television host, died Oct. 28 at a hospital in Jacksonville, Fla., after suffering a serious head injury two weeks earlier in a fall at her home in that city, according to Elizabeth Tobin Kurtz, a longtime friend.