History

Campbell began publishing a series of articles about his KS diagnosis for the San Francisco Sentinel, the first titled “I Will Survive: Nurse’s Own ‘Gay Cancer’ Story.”

Calling himself the “KS Poster Boy,” Campbell continued to share his experiences in the column “Gay Cancer Journal.”  His AIDS activism would go on to include being pictured in San Francisco’s first AIDS poster, organizing the first candlelight vigil to raise AIDS awareness, and eventually becoming one of the first openly gay men to appear on the cover of a major news magazine when he posed for Newsweek with his lover Bobby Hilliard.

Starting with a case of shingles in February 1981, Campbell suffered from a series of unusual illnesses, including Leukopenia later that summer.  After a hike with his boyfriend in September 1981, he noticed KS lesions on his feet.  He was formally diagnosed as having KS by dermatologist Marcus Conant, M.D., in October 1981.  This would be Dr. Conant’s first diagnosis of a patient with what would become known as AIDS.

After joining the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in early 1982, Campbell cowrote the first San Francisco safer sex manual, Play Fair!, using his nun persona, Sister Florence Nightmare RN.  The booklet was among the very first to use plain sex-positive language and humor to give practical advice.

“Showers: A Benefit to Aid Gay Men with Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Other Gay Related Immunodeficiencies” was considered a major success as both a fundraiser for people in need and as a way to address the gay community about the health crisis.

The mega-dance party featured live performances by Evelyn “Champagne” King, the Ritchie Family, and the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus.  It also included a promise from GMHC President Paul Popham that his fledgling organization could be relied upon to be a clearinghouse for the latest information on the “medical emergency” facing the community.

During his address to attendees, Popham announced that more than 150 people had already died of Kaposi’s sarcoma and other immunodeficiency diseases, and “about that many more are very ill and may leave us, too.”

At the time, federal funding was not yet available for reserach or disseminating information about the new fatal illnesses slowly spreading among members of the gay community.  The GMHC was among the first organizations to begin soliciting donations from its own community to put into place research funding streams, compassionate care programs, and awareness/information campaigns.

Not only did the event provide GMHC with seed money for its service programs, it also attracted “a flood of new volunteers,” according to David France in his book How to Survive a Plague.

“The multiple successes of the fundraiser dramatically shifted the AIDS consciousness of gay New Yorkers,” wrote David Román in his book Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture and AIDS.  “It boosted the morale of a city under siege, and put into motion a series of smaller, more localized fundraisers throughout Manhattan.”

Among those fundraising events in 1982 were Maneuvers’ “tea dance benefit” for the St. Mark’s Clinic, a benefit performance by the cast of the Broadway show Dreamgirls, and various events at Don’t Tell Mama.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco community was busy planning its own large-scale fundraiser.  On June 13, 1982, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and Hollywood star Shirley MacLaine hosted the Dog Show and Parade event, which benefitted the Kaposi’s Sarcoma Clinic at the University of San Francisco Medical Center.

In Chicago, performance benefits at venues like the Riverside Club and Park West helped to provide the funding needed to launch the Action AIDS program at the Howard Brown Memorial Clinic.

While the federal government and the White House seemed to be stymied by this new disease spreading in the country’s largest cities, local LGBTQ communities were spinging into action.  The age of the big-city AIDS benefit had begun.

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Sources:

How to Survive a Plague by David France (Penguin Random House, 2017)

Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture and AIDS by David Roman (Indiana University Presss, 1998)

The foundation’s goal was to provide information on Kaposi’s Sarcoma to local gay men.  Frank Jacobson, Richard Keller, Bob Ross, and Dr. Paul Volberding were also organization founders.

In the first year, the organization existed in a very small office on Castro and 18th Street, seeing a limited number of clients and operating a single-telephone information and referral Hhotline. The organization was operated entirely by volunteers.

It wasn’t long before the organization gained recognition locally and nationally as a trusted source of information.  As the epidemic grew, the organization expanded with funding from local and state sources and grassroots community fundraising. They were able to hire paid staff.

In 1983, the organization split into national and local chapters, and in 1984 the local chapter renamed itself the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and officially separated its affiliation from the National Kaposi’s Sarcoma Research & Education Foundation.

Still active today, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation continues to promote health, wellness, and social justice for communities most impacted by HIV, through sexual health and substance use services, advocacy, and community partnerships.  SFAF currently serves more than 25,000 a year.

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Source:

San Francisco AIDS Foundation, “Our 40 Years of History: From 1982 to 2022”

The emergency meeting with the representative from San Francisco was held at the LA Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center (now called the Los Angeles LGBT Center).  The four activists decided to set up the telephone hotline in the only space available to them: a closet at the Center.

Sawaya, Drew, Redman and Munro, along with eight additional volunteers, would undergo training by Dr. Joel Weisman and then take turns answering the telephone and reading information from a carefully prepared fact sheet.  Word quickly got out about the hotline, which would start to receive more than 20 calls a day.

In December 1982, the Los Angeles chapter of the Kaposi Sarcoma Foundation would host “Christmas Present,” a $25 event at a private home in Bel-Air to raise money for the hotline.  Music is provided by Mother Lode DJ Stewart Barkal, and refreshments are donated by local restaurants, coordinated by Truffles owner Steve Wilson.

Sawaya, Drew, Redman and Munro would go on to found AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA), which would become the oldest and largest organization in Southern California providing educational and support services for people living with HIV/AIDS.

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Sources:

AIDS Project Los Angeles, “History”

Under the leadership of Dr. Thomas Marsella, NWAF began raising money for public education programs for the Seattle area and setting up volunteer-run support services for persons with AIDS.  One of the first projects was the production and distribution of the AIDS awareness pamphlet “Can We Talk?”

Also instrumental in the foundation’s early days was Dr. Robert Wood, a New York-born internist who moved to Seattle in 1975 to finish his medical training and remained to provide care for people living with AIDS.  Dr. Wood, who served as the foundation’s second president, was diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1985. He would go on to become King County’s first AIDS control officer.

In 1986, NWAF opened its first office in Pioneer Square at 619 Third Avenue, and hired a full-time executive director.  In the first year the office was open, a Seattle plumbing company refused to send plumbers to unclog the foundation’s sink, stating that the plumber would be in danger of contracting HIV.

“What did they think they were going to do, have sex with the sink?” responded then-president Robert Rohan, according to historylink.tours.

In 1987, NWAF held its first AIDS Walkathon fundraiser, which attracted more than 2,000 participants and raised about $335,000.  Speaking at the event was Congressman Mike Lowry, who criticized the Reagan administration for viewing AIDS as a moral issue.

“It’s not a moral issue, but the most important health issue in the history of the world,” Rep. Lowry said. “Today we’re going to vote with our feet to get the money the federal government should be providing. And we’ll keep voting until we get the money.”

When HIV infections in the Seattle area spiked in 1990, NWAF launched a new public education campaign called “Keep It Up, Seattle!” to remind gay and bisexual men to adhere to safer sex practices.  In 1991, the foundation turned its focus to at-risk women with a series of skills-building workshops.  NWAF also began training businesses on how to humanely address HIV in the workplace.

The 1991 AIDS Walk raised a record $1.5 million. The next year, the foundation expanded its outreach program, placing volunteers in bathhouses, public parks, bars, clubs, and other late-night venues.

In 2001, the Northwest AIDS Foundation would merge with another Seattle AIDS service organization, the Chicken Soup Brigade, to form the Lifelong AIDS Alliance (now known simply as Lifelong).

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Sources:

  HistoryLink.org (an online encyclopedia of Washington state history)
https://www.historylink.org/file/22555

  HistoryLink.tours – https://historylink.tours/stop/northwest-aids-foundation/

Published in the New York Native, Kramer provides a blistering assessment of the impact of AIDS on the gay community, the quickly rising numbers of sick and dying gay men and the slow pace of scientific progress in finding a cause for AIDS.

Kramer’s historic essay opens with:
“If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble. If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get.”

This essay was just the beginning for Kramer, in what would become a lifetime of activism and advocacy.  He would go on to write The Normal Heart, the first serious artistic examination of the AIDS crisis, and he would found ACT UP, a protest organization widely credited with having changed public health policy and the public’s awareness of HIV and AIDS.

“There is no question in my mind that Larry helped change medicine in this country. And he helped change it for the better. In American medicine there are two eras. Before Larry and after Larry,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci.

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Sources:

New Yorker Magazine, “Larry Kramer, Public Nuisance,” by Michael Specter, May 5, 2002

The Bilerico Project on LGBTQ Nation, “Larry Kramer’s Historic Essay: AIDS At 30,” June 14, 2011

Considered a political milestone for the HIV/AIDS community, the event drew about 18,000 attendees and was remarkable for the galvanizing effect it had on the  LGBTQ and expanding AIDS communities.

Held at Madison Square Garden, the show featured Leonard Bernstein conducting the circus orchestra and opera diva Shirley Verrett singing The Star Spangled Banner.

“Leonard Bernstein walking across the length of the Madison Square Garden in his white dinner jacket to conduct the circus orchestra in the national anthem, while 18,000 gay men and their friends and families cheered, was one of the most moving moments I have ever experienced,” recalled activist and organizer Larry Kramer in his 1989 book Reports from the Holocaust.

Proceeds raised by the event would go a long way to support programs at the Gay Men’s Health  Crisis, which had already distributed 250,000 copies of its safe sex brochure and coordinated hundreds of volunteers providing household assistance and compassionate care to men stricken with AIDS.

But the event was much more than a money generator, according to David Roman in his book Acts of Intervention.

“Gathering over 17.000 supporters of AIDS consciousness and intervention in 1983, and at the circus no less, was and could only be a political landmark,” writes Roman.

About a month after attending the circus event, Andrew Holleran would write of his experience in an essay for The New York Native:

“We sang the words of Francis Scott Key amidst the spotlights, in the great cavernous space filled with hearts dedicated to the same goal, and not a few moist eyes — I felt two identities which are most often separated in time and place, merge: homosexual and American.”

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Sources:

Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist by Larry Kramer (St. Martin’s Press, 1989)

Acts of Intervention by David Roman (Indiana University Press, 1998)

Tens of thousands of people also turn out in marches in New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, and Houston.  In San Francisco, 10,000 activists walk for hours from the Castro to City Hall behind a banner reading “Fighting For Our Lives.”

Organizers Bobbi Campbell, Bobby Reynolds, Dan Turner and Mark Feldman succeed in their goal of putting “a face on the disease.”

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Sources:

APLA Health, “35 Years: A Collective Voice of Advocacy”

The Body, “AIDS Project Los Angeles | Public Policy and Communication”

Ramsauer was a freelance lighting designer and hardware store manager who became the first person with AIDS to be the subject of a national television program when he was interviewed by Geraldo Rivera on 20/20.

His final televised wish was that people might gather in Central Park to remember those who had died of AIDS.  The following month on June 13, more than 1,500 would gather in Central Park for  a candlelight vigil to commemorate Ramsauer and others who died of AIDS.  The event featured a eulogy by Rivera, a speech by New York Mayor Ed Koch, and a reading of the names of the 600 people known to have died from AIDS by that time.

”Kenny Ramsauer wanted the people of New York and of this country to learn about the disease,” Rivera told the people gathered at the park’s Naumberg Bandshell on that early summer evening. ”He wanted society to know the discrimination and negative publicity that has allowed this disease a mortal head start.”

The vigil was considered the first large gathering acknowledging the existence of the epidemic.

David France, author of How to Survive a Plague, attended the vigil with a friend and later wrote:

“The plaza was crowded with 1,500 mourners cupping candles against the darkening sky.  As our eyes landed on one young man after another, it became obvious that many of them were seriously ill.  A dozen men were in wheelchairs, so wasted they looked like caricatures of starvation.  I watched one young man twist in pain that wsa caused, apparently, by the barest gusts of wind around us.”

Frances goes on to write that 722 cases of AIDS were reported in New York at the time, but judging from the scene around him, the numbers were likely considerably higher.

“We had found the plague,” he wrote.

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Sources:

The New York Times, “1,500 Attend Central Park Memorial Service for AIDS Victim” by Lindsey Gruson, June 14, 1983

How to Survive a Plague by David France (MacMillan, 2017)

Written by Berkowitz and Callen, both New Yorkers living with AIDS, the pamphlet was groundbreaking by being among the first to promote safer sex practices, offering pointed advice on condom use and promoting self-empowerment for those diagnosed with AIDS.

As one of the first publications to recommend the use of condoms to prevent the transmission of STDs in men having sex with men, the pamphlet is considered one of the foundational publications in the advent of modern safe sex.

Sex in an Epidemic was widely read by gay men living in New York City.  In the melee of all the confusion and desperation about AIDS, a comprehensive guide appeared to help gay men navigate the risk of developing the seemingly fatal syndrome while also enjoying a sex life.

In 2017 — 34 years later — David France would write about Berkowitz and Callen’s efforts to educate their community about AIDS in his book How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS.

According to France’s account, Sex in an Epidemic originally started as an article proposed by Berkowitz with medical guidance from his openly gay doctor, Joseph Sonnabend, M.D., that proposed a new “sexual ethic” for men who had sex with men.

Berkowitz couldn’t find a publication willing to publish the article, largely due to his reputation of being “sex-negative,” which he and Callen unfairly acquired after they wrote an article about “the consequences of sexual overconsumption” for the gay publication the New York Native.

“Deep down, we know who we are and why we are sick,” they wrote for the November 8, 1982 edition of the Native.  After publication, the article drew a torrent of angry criticism from readers of the Native, as well as from gay periodicals across North America, including the Toronto newspaper Body Politic, which accused Berkowitz and Callen of creating unnecessary panic in the community.

Even so, Berkowitz, who was open about his history as a sex worker, was more determined than ever to find ways to save lives.  In the new writing project, he decided to take a different approach than the one he and Callen put forth in their Native article.

This time, Berkowitz was focused on a sex-positive message.  He wanted to share information about the kinds of intimacy gay men could engage in safely, rather than what gay men shouldn’t do.  When gay publications rejected the article Berkowitz proposed, Dr. Sonnabend recommended that they format the information as a pamphlet “in the model of left-wing and feminist political tracts,” according to France.

At that point, Callen got involved in the project.  He and Berkowtiz would meet to work on Sex in an Epidemic at Dr. Sonnabend’s office or at Callen’s loft in Tribeca.  Callen’s partner, Richard Dworkin, also assisted in assembling the editorial content.  Their process involved revisiting the painful mistakes of their approach to their Native article and applying lessons learned from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and other guides to influencing people.

“Their self-assigned mission was outsized, almost radical,” wrote France.  “In order for safe sex to staunch an epidemic, it had to be embraced by the entire community of gay men — a fundamental and universal change in behavior … This was how they invented what they called ‘safe sex.'”

Callen and Berkowitz took care to ensure all their advice was sex-positive and affirming.  They used frank and playful language in their risk assessment of various acts of sexual intimacy.  And, in a groundbreaking move, they promoted the use of condoms — something that very few gay men used at the time — as a way to avoid the AIDS virus as well as other sexually transmitted diseases.  They even included a passage on love.

“Men loving men was the basis of gay male liberation,” they wrote, “but we have now created ‘cultural institutions’ in which love and even affection can be totally avoided.”

They went on to advise that if readers love the subjects of their sexual intimacy — even those of the briefest of liaisons — then they will not want to make them sick.

The initial 5,000-copy printing of the 46-page Sex in an Epidemic cost about $1,000, donated by Callen and other patients of Dr. Sonnabend.  Berkowitz, Callen and Sonnabend distributed copies throughout New York City, primarily in shops and bars frequented by gay men.

Within weeks, the post-office box they included in the pamphlet began to receive letters.  They expected a response similar to the Native article, hate mail with accusations branding them traitors to the gay liberation movement.  But they were surprised to instead receive letters of appreciation for the work they produced and with requests to send copies to various locations around the U.S.  They immediately printed more copies to meet the demand that grew each week.

Then, on August 18, Jonathan Leiberson reviewed Sex in an Epidemic for the New York Review of Books.  Soon afterward, Sex in an Epidemic received attention from the Greenwich Village bookstore B. Dalton, which had created a window display around the 46-page guide.

Word was getting out.  Best of all, gay men began to use condoms.

“One night on Christopher Street, I watched a team of lesbians on a flatbed truck lovingly hurl the things into the air like rose petals over the heads of their gay brothers,” wrote France in How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS.

Condom manufacturers responded to the consumer demand in the largely gay communities by developing new products in a range of sizes, textures and colors that appealed to the market.  Transmission rates for all sexually transmitted diseases began to slow as a result.

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Sources:

POZ magazine, “How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: 30th Anniversary” by Joseph Sonnabend, M.D., May 17, 2013

www.RichardBerkowitz.com, “How to Have Sex in an Epidemic” (full text)

New York Review of Books, “Anatomy of an Epidemic” by Jonathan Lieberson, August 18, 1983

The AIDS Legal Referral Panel was founded in 1983 by attorneys Frederick Hertz, Steven Richter, Mark Senick, and Gary James Wood.  It was originally a committee of the LGBT organization Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom (BALIF), but its founders recognized the group’s potential as a stand-alone non-profit organization.

Concerned that gay men in the Bay Area were near death from complications of AIDS, Hertz, Richter, Senick and Wood sought to create a legal resource that included the creation of wills and setting of durable powers of attorney.  Drafting legal documents such as these allowed individuals to die with dignity and fulfill their wishes about healthcare and disposition of assets.

The four began by publicizing a phone number where people with AIDS could call to receive legal help and by recruiting other attorneys to join them.  Soon, the legal community was leveraging its skills and resources through ALRP to respond to the AIDS crisis by providing those dying with AIDS the right to die with peace of mind.

As Hertz recounts, “[Preparing emergency wills] was wrenching.  But if people asked me how I kept my sanity, it was through using my legal skills in a way that really helped people.  I was doing something productive and meaningful and focused my grief on making a difference in people’s lives.”

Four founders and ten original Panel members sustained the organization for several years without any other infrastructure.  First led by BALIF co-chair Steve Richter with a list of telephone numbers, then by Gary James Wood when Richter developed AIDS in 1983, the organization operated solely as a volunteer-staffed organization until 1986, at which time ALRP hired attorney Clint Hockenberry.

With Hockenberry at the helm, ALRP grew from a grassroots community of concerned attorneys to an established lawyer referral service. Fundraising efforts excelled and extensive recruitment, training, and supervision of ALRP’s pro bono attorneys began. ALRP also partnered with the Bar Association of San Francisco’s Volunteer Legal Services Program, which increased the legitimacy and visibility of the organization.

Hockenberry expanded outreach to better serve people of color, children, women, injection drug users, non-native English speakers, and the homeless. During his tenure, ALRP hosted the first national AIDS Law Conference and published the first AIDS Law Manual, extended outreach to other counties, garnered Ryan White CARE Act funds, and founded ALRP’s Public Policy Project. ALRP became an independent organization in 1990, separate from BALIF, with a formal Board of Directors.

In March 1992, Clint Hockenberry passed away from AIDS, but under his leadership ALRP had grown from an organization that formed in reaction to a crisis to an agency creatively and proactively responding to and anticipating the ever-changing needs of the HIV/AIDS community. As those with HIV/AIDS began living longer, Kristin Chambers, ALRP’s second Executive Director, and her successor, Irwin Keller, continued Hockenberry’s model of dynamic client services.

Under Chambers’ and Keller’s tenures, the 1990s saw an expansion of services and public policy efforts and an improved client referral system that better served the legal needs of the HIV/AIDS community. Full-time housing attorneys were hired when rising real estate prices left many in the HIV/AIDS community confronting homelessness.

In addition, “Working in the Cycle of HIV,” an educational manual published in conjunction with AIDS Benefits Counselors (now Positive Resource Center) and the Employment Law Center, was created to respond to the large numbers of people with HIV/AIDS who wanted to return to the workplace after experiencing positive outcomes from new treatments. On the public policy front, ALRP advocated for national health care reform, continued and improved HIV privacy and confidentiality protections, and Social Security reform to provide expanded, fair, and adequate access to benefits.

By 2000, when Bill Hirsh became ALRP’s fourth Executive Director, ALRP had grown from solely serving patients at San Francisco General Hospital to serving clients in seven Bay Area counties. From preparing emergency wills and powers of attorney, ALRP now provided legal assistance to clients in all areas of civil law. Instead of a simple lawyer referral service, ALRP was now an organization that provided both direct legal representation and personalized attorney/client referrals.

ALRP is the first organized legal outreach effort for those with HIV/AIDS in the United States, and many original Panelists from 1983 remain active in the organization to this day. Initially formed to draft emergency wills and other necessary documents for terminally ill clients, ALRP has shifted its focus to issues illustrative of the fact that those with HIV/AIDS are living longer lives than ever before and facing more complex legal needs.

What started in 1983 as a small circle of attorney friends has grown to a full-time staff of fifteen and a Panel of over 700 volunteer attorneys donating over $1 million each year in pro bono legal services. Since its inception, ALRP has handled over 76,000 legal matters for people living with HIV/AIDS.

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Sources:

AIDS Legal Referral Panel, “ALRP Milestones” and “History”

University of California Libraries, “AIDS Legal Referral Panel Records”

Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom

“An evening with Debbie Reynolds and Friends” was the largest and most successful of the early San Francisco fundraisers, according to David Roman, author of Acts of Intervention.  The event raised $43,000 for the newly formed Kaposi Sarcoma Research and Education Foundation.

In his book And The Band Played On about the early years of the AIDS crisis, Randy Shilts would write:

“The fundraiser for the National KS/AIDS foundation had all the raciness of a true San Francisco event. When host Debbie Reynolds introduced the surprise guest — actress Shirley MacLaine — with the comment that MacLaine had great legs, MacLaine responded by pulling down the top of her long strapless gown, demonstrating that she had other equipment to match. The crowd cheered enthusiastically: ‘We love you, Shirley!’  Not to be outdone, Reynolds lifted the rear of her slitted gown to reveal her brief black underwear.”

Reynolds would go on to appear in another benefit for the organization at the Hollywood Bowl.

“Reynolds was known to always be available, without perks, to lend her name and talent to fighting the AIDS epidemic,” writes journalist Karen Ocamb.  “And her fondness for the gays never disappeared either, landing the role as Kevin Kline’s mother in the satirical 1997 film In & Out, and playing her Emmy-nominated role as Deborah Messing’s eccentric mother in NBC’s Will & Grace.”

Reynolds’ last role would be Liberace’s mother in the 2013 HBO movie Behind the Candelabra.

In 1984, Kaposi Sarcoma Research and Education Foundation would be renam, ed the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

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Sources:

Acts of Intervention by David Roman (Indiana University Press, 1998)

And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts (MacMillan, 1987)

The Pride LA, “Debbie Reynolds, Early Hollywood AIDS Activist” by Karen Ocamb, December 29, 2016

Callen, who earlier that month was open about his condition in a New York magazine article, was not even allowed to return to his desk at work to collect his personal belongings.

“Too many of his colleagues had expressed fear about working with him,” wrote David France in his book How to Survive a Plague.

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Source:

A group of volunteers created HCN to provide an organized response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, according to the Greater Fort Lauderdale LGBT Chamber of Commerce.  HCN created the first programs in South Florida for HIV/AIDS crisis intervention, social support and education.

In 1998, HCN would merge with another HIV/AIDS service provider, Community Research Initiative, which was founded in 1989.  The new organization would be called Care Resource, and is considered South Florida’s oldest and largest HIV/AIDS service organization.

The infant, called “Sammy” by his family members, contracted the virus through a blood transfusion he received as a premature baby.

His parents, Helen and Jerry Kushnick, who ran an entertainment agency in West Hollywood, would become AIDS activists and found the Samuel Jared Kushnick Pediatric Immunology Research Center at Chaim-Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv, Israel, according to the Los Angeles Times.

As the parents of one of the first babies living with AIDS, the Kushnicks had to navigate a difficult and treacherous path, first in the struggle to find treatment for Sammy and ultimately in the effort to give him a proper burial.

When officials at the mortuary learned Sammy had died of AIDS, they refused to dress the infant for burial, Helen Kushnick told the LA Times.  Later, the Kushnicks were hit with $94,000 in medical bills, which their insurance company refused to cover (the Kushnicks would fight and win in court).

From the start, the Kishnicks decided to go public with their story.

“It was clear to us then that AIDS was not a homosexual disease, but a virus,” Helen Kushnick told the LA Times.  “That mislabeling caused years of apathy on the part of the government and the public in the struggle against this deadly killer. We were killing in the name of morality.”

Kushnick, who said she received calls from mothers around the country who had babies with AIDS, was convinced that other infants received transfusions, perhaps from AIDS-infected donors, without knowing it.

Sammy was not diagnosed correctly until two months before his death.  The Kushnicks said they had never been told that their son had received 20 blood donations from 13 individuals during his first seven weeks of his life.

As AFA’s Director in the early years, Knight set ambitious goals, ensuring assistance was allocated to those who needed it most.

In the 1980s, most people who developed full-blown AIDS would die within a short time, and AFA prioritized the need for people to die with dignity in their own homes.  In the coming years, AFA would go on to help more than 16,000 men, women, and children.

As a Black woman who had been supporting her family as a sex worker for more than 10 years, Lockett was uniquely experienced and positioned to create an effective program that sex workers would respond to.  She was motivated by her awareness of how the public commonly scapegoated gay men for transmitting HIV and the fear that the next group to be villified would be sex workers.

Without shame or evasion, Lockett announced that her organization would focus “on prostitutes and their sexual partners including transgender individuals” — making it one of the first organizations in the country to provide HIV education, prevention and street outreach.

Housed in a tiny office in Oakland, Cal-PEP survived its first year with a $30,000 state health department grant.  With these funds, Lockett developed HIV education materials feedback on the new AIDS crisis appropriate for sex workers with input from community members.  As she conducted outreach, she collected data while protecting the privacy of her clients and used the data to receive additional funding from the city and state.

Under Lockett’s leadership, Cal-PEP would go onto provide health education, disease prevention, risk reduction, treatment, and support services to people at high risk for or currently living with HIV/AIDS — using cultural relevance, humility and grace as her guiding principles.  The organization would grow to reach clients in East and West Oakland, and other communities throughout Alamedia and San Francisco counties.

Over the years, Cal-PEP would grow to a team of 20, and the organization’s annyal budget would increase to $2.2 million.  The organization’s mission would expland as follows: “To provide tailored health education, disease prevention, risk reduction and support services to people at highest risk for HIV/AIDS in a language that they understand.”

After 35 years as CAL-PEP’s executive director, Lockett would retire in 2019.  On the occasion of her retirement, POZ magazine recognized Lockett’s achievements.

“What if Lockett had not decided in 1984 to respond as she did?” AIDS United asked POZ readers. “Of the Cal-PEP recipients now, 20% are sex workers, 83% are African American, 8% are Latinx and 1% are Asian -Pacific Islander.  For 35 years, they have known that Cal-PEP speaks their languages and can help them. Some people inspire us by living for their cause.”

Just one month earlier, Campbell spoke at the National March for Lesbian and Gay Rights at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco.

Campbell told the crowd that he had hugged his boyfriend on the cover of Newsweek, “to show Middle America that gay love is beautiful.”  He held 15 seconds of silence for the 2,000 who had died of AIDS at that point “and [for] those who will die before this is over.”

He then laid-out a series of concerns for politicians to address — including increased funding for both research and support services and a warning of the potential for discrimination with the advent of a test for HTLV-3 (now known as HIV) — and appealing to all candidates in the upcoming elections to meet with people with AIDS.

Two weeks after his DNC speech, Campbell appeared on CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. While the rumors and fear of AIDS had reached a mainstream audience, the facts had not, so Campbell was placed in a glass booth, with technicians refusing to come near him to wire up microphones for the interview.

At noon on August 15, 1984, exactly a month after his DNC speech and after 2 days on life support in intensive care, Bobbi Campbell died at San Francisco General Hospital.   His parents and his partner Bobby Hilliard were by his side.  Bobbi Campbell was 32 years old and had lived for over 3½ years with what was by then called AIDS.

His partner Bobby Hilliard would succumb to the deadly disease not long afterwards.

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Photo of quilt panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt

Lyon travelled from the Bay Area to the nation’s capital to speak before a Congressional hearing on the government’s largely non-existent response to the AIDS crisis.  Accompanying him on the panel were activists Michael Callen of New York and Anthony Ferrara of Washington.

“I came here today with the hope that this administration would do everything possible, make every resource available — there is no reason this disease cannot be conquered,” said Lyon in 1983 in his testimony.  “We do not need in-fighting; this is not a political issue.  This is a health issue.  This is not a gay issue.  This is a human issue.”

Lyon was born in 1948 in Houston, later moved to Chicago and then San Francisco.  He was a branch manager for the San Francisco Maritime Shipping Company when he was diagnosed with AIDS in early 1983.

Little more is known about Lyon, because his health began to decline in the year following his moment in the political spotlight.  However, his early contribution to the fight against AIDS survives at the National Museum of American History.  In 1990, the museum added his section of the AIDS Quilt to its collections.

Lyon’s ashes were scattered, along with the ashes of many others who died of AIDS, on the White House lawn during an ACT UP protest in 1996.

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Photo of quilt panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt

Hosted by Gloria and Larry Demann at their Bayfront home, the sold-out event raised more than $200,000 for the AIDS Medical Foundation, the first private organization dedicated to supporting research on AIDS.  AMF, which would become the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR), was founded by New York doctors Mathilde Krim  and Joseph Sonnabend.

Dr. Krim would appear at “From the Pines with Love,” telling attendees that the funds raised that night would go toward creating a facility in New York solely devoted to the treatment of AIDS, according to the Fire Island Pines Historical Preservation Society.

Long before there was a solid understanding of HIV/AIDS, an effective form of treatment, or widespread social service support for individuals living with AIDS, Chicago House formed to fulfill a fundamental need: a place to live and die with dignity, according to Chicago House’s website.

Earlier in 1985, nearly 100 community activists gathered at the Baton Show Lounge to address the need for housing for people with AIDS.  The AIDS crisis had begun to hit Chicago hard, and individuals diagnosed with AIDS lost much more than their health.  They commonly found themselves without a home, a job, or the support of loved ones as symptoms progressed, often rapidly.

“The one thing we all had was that we had one thing in mind. We had friends who were dying, and to see their families and their lovers turn away from them — it was like they had the plague, and of course they didn’t. It was shattering,” said Arlene Halko, a Chicago House founder who was among the group gathered at the Baton Lounge.

While the services and mission at Chicago House have expanded considerably since 1985, the organization continues to focus on housing the most vulnerable.

How Warwick was able to get three superstars to join her in the recording studio was the result of having a collection of creative geniuses for friends, the audacity to just ask, and serendipity.

When Warwick first heard “That’s What Friends Are For,” she envisioned singing it as a duet with Stevie Wonder, according to Song Facts.  The song’s composers, Burt Bacharach and his then-wife, Carole Bayer Sager, agreed to produce the recording, happy to see their song have another chance to reach an audience.  They originally wrote the song for the 1982 movie Night Shift, where it was recorded by Rod Stewart and played over the closing credits.

Warwick put down her tracks, and then invited Wonder to do his part.  On the day Wonder was scheduled to record, Elizabeth Taylor and Neil Simon came to the studio to hear him sing. Knowing of Taylor’s commitment to AIDS research, Bayer Sager suggested to Warwick that they arrange for the song royalties to benefit HIV/AIDS research.  Everyone agreed it was a great idea, Warwick told People magazine in 2019.

They decided there was room for another singer, so Gladys Knight was invited.  But then Warwick ran into Elton John in the grocery store.

“I said, ‘I’m recording tomorrow and I need you.’ That’s how simple it was,” Warwick told People.

The group became a quartet, aka “Dionne Warwick and Friends.”

The next day, Warwick, Knight and John arrived at the recording studio, and were joined by Bacharach and Bayer Sager — and Elizabeth Taylor, who was determined to see the project through.

Knight and John each recorded their parts, and Bacharach and Bayer Sager then went to work to assemble the four vocal tracks into a final recording, according to Song Facts. Later, the singers would perform together for a music video of “That’s What Friends Are For.”

“It was a very emotional evening in which a lot of tears were shed,” Bayer Sager told The New York Times.

In January 1986, “That’s What Friends Are For” rose to number one on the Billboard charts and remained there for four weeks.  The song would win a Grammy Award for “Best Pop Performance by A Duo Or Group With Vocal” and another for “Song Of The Year.”  It was Warwick’s fifth Grammy Award, and Elton John’s first, according to Song Facts.

In February 2011, Warwick, Wonder, Knight and John would reunite at amfAR’s kickoff event for New York Fashion Week and give a live performance of “That’s What Friends Are For.”

The conference was organized by the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, with co-sponsors the National Minority AIDS Council, and the National Conference of Black Mayors, and was funded by a U.S. Public Health Service grant.

Other conference topics include:

• the disproportionate impact of HIV and AIDS on African Americans,
• the role of IV drug use and heterosexual transmission in the AIDS epidemic within black communities,
• the need for culturally competent AIDS education for black communities,
• the lack of representation in gay and black media outlets of the epidemic among African Americans, and
• a plea to black churches to respond to the epidemic.

Frederick Garnett, a black man living with AIDS, addresses the conference, bringing public awareness to the racial disparities in how the AIDS epidemic is addressed in Washington, DC, where he lives.

A staff psychologist at St. Elizabeths Hospital and the founder of a support group for Persons Living With AIDS, Garnett says that although African Americans make up half of the people with AIDS in Washington, DC, they are largely absent from clinics and support groups.

Born in Chicago and a graduate of Northwestern University, Garnett had studied for a doctorate in psychology at Adelphi University, completing all but his dissertation before moving to Washington in 1983.

Fifteen months after the 1986 National Conference on AIDS in the Black Community, Garnett would die at the Hospice of Northern Virginia on Oct. 22, 1987, of complications resulting from AIDS, at the age of 32.

Three weeks before his death, Garnett would receive an “American Who Cares” award from the National AIDS Network for his dedication to AIDS education in minority communities.  Garnett served as a board member of the National Association of People With AIDS, the National Minority AIDS Council, and the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington.

Proposition 64 would have declared that HIV/AIDS and the “condition of being a carrier” of the virus  are communicable diseases and, therefore, subject to the reporting requirement to the State Department of Health Services.

Proposition 64’s supporters, led by the LaRouchian group PANIC (Prevent AIDS NOW Initiative Committee), say it would require any individual who carries the AIDS virus, even without the disease’s symptoms, to be reported to state authorities and barred from schools or jobs in restaurants.  State officials could quarantine such carriers, they contended.

LGBT activists in California argue that the initiative would lend an air of legitimacy to job discrimination against homosexuals, and public health authorities say it would deter people with HIV/AIDS from seeking treatment if there were a requirement to report them.  This, they say, would further the spread of the disease undetected.

Proposition 64 is opposed by the 34,000-member California Medical Association and most statewide elected officials, including members of both political parties.  Nearly every major newspaper has recommended a “no” vote.

Torie Osborn, the southern California coordinator of the No On 64/Stop LaRouche campaign, told the Washington Post that campaign leaders had considered focusing on LaRouche’s bizarre politics — based on conspiracy theories, economic doom, anti-Semitism, homophobia and racism.

But polling data suggested that to many voters, “it really doesn’t matter who is behind the initiative,” Osborn said.

LaRouche’s PANIC team operated their campaign out of a Los Feliz headquarters, which became besieged by death threats and vandalism.

The quilt panel measured three feet wide by six feet long — the size and shape of a grave plot.

The idea of the quilt came to Jones in November 1985 while he planned the annual candlelight march honoring the 1978 assassinations of gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone.

Jones learned that over 1,000 San Franciscans had been lost already to AIDS-related illnesses.  For the candlelight march, he asked each of his fellow marchers to write on placards the names of loved ones who had died of AIDS, and at the end of the march, Jones and others stood on ladders and taped the placards to the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building.  The wall of names reminded Jones of a patchwork quilt, and an idea was born.

ACT UP’s first-ever demonstration takes place at the busy intersection of Wall Street and Broadway, near Trinity Church, a location selected with the goal of disrupting the morning rush hour.

Formed in New York City in early 1987, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (more commonly known as ACT UP) brought widespread attention to the AIDS epidemic and helped make significant advances in AIDS research.

ACT UP’s first demonstration in 1987 targeted pharmaceutical companies that were profiteering from the epidemic (especially Burroughs Wellcome, manufacturer of AZT).  ACT UP also accused the industry of not conducting research to find a cure or better treatments for HIV/AIDS.

Some 250 protestors, many of whom laid down in the street and/or held signs, called for corporate and government action to end the AIDS crisis.  The protest targeted pharmaceutical companies that were profiting from the epidemic and specifically called out Burroughs Wellcome, the company manufacturing the high-priced treatment of AZT.

Demonstrators chanted “We are angry! We want action!” and “Release those drugs!”  Seventeen people were arrested that day.

A flyer announcing the protest listed several immediate demands, including:

• the release by the FDA of new experimental drugs to treat HIV/AIDS,
• the availability of drugs at affordable prices,
• a program to educate the public to combat the spread of AIDS, and
• policies to end AIDS-related discrimination in the workplace, housing, insurance, and medical treatment.

Soon after the demonstration, the FDA announced it would shorten its nine-year drug approval process by two years.  Meanwhile, other chapters of ACT UP began to spring up in other cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago.

Dissatisfied with the response from the FDA and pharmaceutical companies, the New York chapter of ACT UP would stage numerous demonstrations — including three more on Wall Street — in the next several years, drawing national attention to the AIDS crisis.

Ann Northrop, a former journalist who became an organizer with ACT UP New York, told The New Yorker that they intentionally created public spectacles to draw in the media and capture public attention.

With the theme “Come Out and Celebrate Pride,” the parade organizers encouraged everyone to take to the streets during the event.  Organizers also told community members to donate money to HIV/AIDS organizations rather to the making of parade floats, according to Hannah DeRousselle in Houston History magazine.

By then, the Pride Parade, which was founded in 1979, was drawing smaller crowds, reflecting the devastation of the community by the spread of HIV and the effects of a growing hostility toward gay people in general due to the AIDS Crisis.

The inaugural Seattle walkathon raised more than $335,000.  Walking with other volunteers was Michael Otto, an AIDS patient who was released from the city’s Swedish Hospital so he could participate in the event.  According to historylink.org, Otto walked part of the route and rode the rest in a van. He died two months later at the age of 33.

HIV surfaced in Washington state in late July 1982, when a Seattle man was diagnosed with AIDS.  Later that year, another man was diagnosed with the AIDS-related conditions of neumocystis pneumonia and a bacterial infection.

Three weeks before his death, Garnett would receive an “American Who Cares” award from the National AIDS Network for his dedication to AIDS education in minority communities.  Garnett also served as a board member of the National Association of People With AIDS and the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington.

Born in Chicago and a graduate of Northwestern University, Garnett studied for a doctorate in psychology at Adelphi University, completing all but his dissertation before moving to Washington in 1983.

Fifteen months before his death, in July 1986, Garrett addressed the National Conference on AIDS in the Black Community, bringing public awareness to the racial disparities in how the AIDS epidemic is addressed in his adopted hometown of Washington, DC.

A staff psychologist at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and the founder of a support group for Persons Living With AIDS, Garnett expressed his concerns to conference members that although African Americans made up roughly 50% of people living with AIDS in Washington, DC, they were largely absent from clinics and support groups.

The conference was organized by the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, with co-sponsoring organizations National Minority AIDS Council and National Conference of Black Mayors.

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Photo of quilt panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt

Loder was a key leader in development of an LGBT witness among United Methodists in southern California during the early 1980s, recalls his friend Morris Floyd.

Feeling called to the United Methodist ministry, Loder studied philosophy and religion and served as a student pastorate while at Kansas Wesleyan University in the early 1970s, according to Floyd.  However, Loder chose to not hide his identity, and by the time of his graduation from KWU, the denomination had incorporated into its Discipline the language describing same-sex relationships as “incompatible with Christian teaching.”

“Lyle’s dream of serving as a United Methodist clergyman was never realized,” writes Floyd in the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network.

Instead, Loder would go on to help build a local congregation that would welcome lesbian and gay United Methodists in the Hollywood area.  By 1986, Loder would be an active member of HUMC and he would share with the congregation that he was living with AIDS.

In October 1987, the Health and Welfare Ministries Division of the Board of Global Ministries hosted a consultation conference on AIDS at a hotel near the San Francisco airport.  Loder was invited to help plan the conference and participate in a panel discussion about the needs of people living with AIDS.

“Lyle’s participation on a panel, sharing his story, and in the midst of it, despite everything, his love for God and his refusal to give up on the United Methodist Church,” recalls Floyd.  “He was frail and only a few weeks from death, though he did not know it at the time.  If ever God’s Spirit was present anywhere, it shone in Lyle in those hours.”

On November 29, 1987, the day before his birthday, Loder was admitted to the hospital, where he was visited by his brother.  When Loder died a few days later, many friends came to his hospital room, spread rose petals on his bed, and sang hymns

Memorial services were held at HUMC and again at Loder’s home church in Kansas.  Loder was the first of the HUMC family to die of complications of HIV/AIDS, but he wouldn’t be the last.

A memorial plaque inside the church narthex carries the names of Loder and 34 additional members of the congregation who died in the early years of the pandemic. On World AIDS Day in 1993, members of HUMC fashioned two giant red ribbons and attached them to the tower of the church.  In 1996, more permanent ribbons replaced them and remain today.

Loder’s life is also memorialized by three panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, one of them made by church and community worker Donna Kay Campbell.

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Photo of quilt panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt

The founder of the Bank of Los Angeles and a successful lawyer, Andelson raised large sums for liberal politicians at parties in his Bel-Air home and at his restaurant, Trumps.  He served as a Founding Board Member for the Kaposi’s Sarcoma Research and Education Foundation, which later became the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

Born in Boyle Heights, Andelson was the first openly gay University of California Regent.  His nomination by Gov. Jerry Brown to the UC Board of Regents was met with a nasty confirmation battle but he ultimately served as a Regent from 1980 to 1986.

The Los Angeles Times called him a “Democratic Party heavyweight, once regarded as the nation’s most influential gay political figure.”  Andelson was instrumental in the 1980 appointment of one of the first openly gay judges in California, Rand Schrader.

Additionally, Andelson was a member of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, a founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art, director of the ACLU Foundation, and a member of a committee of the 1984 Olympic Games held in Los Angeles.

The Andelson Collection at the UC Santa Barbara Library supports the teaching curriculum and research interests of faculty and students in LGBTQ+ studies across the disciplines.

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Photo of quilt panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt

After AIDS activists joined together in 1986 to fight the discriminatory AIDS initiatives proposed by Lyndon LaRouche, it was only a matter of time before ACT UP chapters began to pop up in major California cities.

In San Francisco, LGBTQ activists were particularly ready to join the ACT UP network.  A group had formed to recruit activists (via the “AIDS Action Pledge”) to engage in civil disobedience if the LaRouche initiative passed.  To put the pledge into action, an affinity group called Citizens for Medical Justice (CMJ) was created.

After California voters shut down LaRouche’s Proposition 64, which mandated at all “carriers” of the AIDS virus to be reported to public health officials, the CMJ renamed itself ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, and joined ACT NOW (the AIDS Coalition to Network, Organize and Win).

According to archival ACT UP documents,  1988 would be a busy and productive year for ACT UP/San Francisco.

Almost immediately after establishing itself as an ACT UP chapter, the San Francisco activists shut down the west coasts office of Burroughs-Wellcome in Burlingame.  Police arrested 19 members in that action.

In February, the group organized a demonstration outside the San Francisco hearings of the findings of the President’s Commission on the HIV Epidemic.  Formed the previous year under President Ronald Reagan, the commission was widely regarded as conservative-leaning, unqualified, and out of touch.  Commissioners included Cardinal John O’Connor; John J. Creedon, the CEO of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; Penny Pullen, a state legislator who would go on to found the anti-gay group Illinois Family Institute; and Dr. Theresa L. Crenshaw, an opponent of condoms as an HIV-prevention method.

In March 1988, ACT UP/San Francisco protested Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) for their AIDS and lesbian/gay exclusionary policies.

In October, they organized a protest of AIDS-phobic episode of NBC’S television series Midnight Caller. They also joined activists from around the country to shut down the main headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

In December, when the Midnight Caller episode runs, the chapter organizes a protest at San Francisco NBC affiliate KRON, where 20 activists were arrested. They also staged a sit-in at San Francisco General Hospital to protest the hospital’s refusal to treat patients with Foscarnet, a drug caught in FDA red tape.

ACT UP/San Francisco would remain active into the mid-1990s.

Woodroof’s Dallas Buyers Club was among the first of several AIDS buyers clubs that sprang up in the U.S. at a time when effective HIV treatment was not available, according to Biography / A&E Television network.

AZT was the only drug on the U.S. market to treat the disease, and accounts vary as to whether Woodroof was unable to take AZT due to the debilitating side effects or that he was denied AZT because “he was too far gone.”

Diagnosed with AIDS in 1986 and given just weeks to live, Woodroof researched various medicines being used in different parts of the world to counteract AIDS’ effects, spending hours in libraries researching experimental and other drugs.

“I am my own physician,” he was known to say.

Woodroof determined that he would have the best chance of survival if he treated himself with a combination of dextran sulfate, Procaine PVP and other medications — antivirals that were available in other countries but not in the U.S.  That didn’t stop him from acquiring these medications and using them.

Woodroof, who made his living as an electrician, found that he could legally purchase many of the medications he wanted just over the Texas border in Mexico.  When other AIDS patients came looking for these same medications, Woodroof’s doctor and a fellow patient sent them to Woodroof for help, and the Dallas Buyers Club was born.

He began buying large quantities of the AIDS medications and distributed them out of his Oak Lawn, Texas apartment. Within months, his club became a huge network of buyers and sellers, all of whom attempted to fly under the radar of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  Woodroof’s club served not only local people with AIDS but people around the world who learned about the medications the Texan was making available.

Woodroof’s story would become the basis for the 2013 film The Dallas Buyers Club, and actor Matthew McConaughey would play Woodroof and win Best Actor honors at both the 2014 Academy Awards and Golden Globes.

To prepare for his role, McConaughy listened to audio tapes of interviews with Woodroof and read Woodroof’s diaries provided by the family.

“At the beginning of this journey he’s a two-bit cowboy, and by the end of it, he’s a damn scientist,” said McConaughy upon the release of the film.  “He did have an engineering mind, which he’d put to good use to make something of a living as an electrician …  Once he grasped that he had HIV, he gains purpose, he had this one clear thing to do — stay alive. Everything else followed from that.”

In spite of crackdowns by the FDA and other federal regulators, the Dallas Buyers Club would flourish.  Woodroof would charge club participants a fee for membership and sell the medications to them at cost.  Unable to continue work as an electrician, he embraced the Buyers Club as his full-time job.

“The FDA largely turned a blind eye when it came to the Dallas Buyers Club’s operations, but there were times when it had no choice but to intervene in the importation of illegal drugs,” writes Bogar Alonso for Biography.  “One drug in particular was blocked by the FDA upon delivery, though Woodroof had come to rely on it for his health. Though he wasn’t allowed to sell it on the market, the FDA would eventually let Woodroof keep his own personal stash.”

Woodroof would die of AIDS-related illness on September 12, 1992.

“His fight brought added awareness to the disease, and the awareness in turn helped countless victims find Woodroof and attain a level of help otherwise unavailable,” states Biography.

Matlovich was featured on the cover Time magazine in September 1975, under the headline “I Am a Homosexual.”  He was wearing his Air Force service uniform, with his nameplate attached on one side and his medals on the other.

Matlovich challenged the military ban on gay service members by coming out in a letter to his commanding officer and simultaneously in an interview with Time magazine.  The Air Force responded by issuing Matlovich a general discharge.  He decided to fight it and got it changed to an honorable discharge. He then tried to get the Air Force to take him back, but was unsuccessful.

“He … was the epitome of a perfect soldier, one of those people that stuck his neck out, and he was proud to be the person to challenge that law,” said Jeff Dupre, a longtime friend of Matlovich who spoke with NPR in 2015.

Matlovich, who followed in his father’s footsteps by enlisting in the Air Force, served three tours of duty in Vietnam, where he received a Bronze Star for heroism under fire, and a Purple Heart for being seriously wounded in a land mine explosion, according to The Legacy Project.

He went on to teach Air Force “race relations” courses, where he realized that prejudice and discrimination against gays were similar to that against Black people.  He reached out to Frank Kameny, an Army veteran who co-founded a chapter of the Mattachine Society in Washington DC.  Kameny was intent on challenging institutions whose policies forced people to remain closeted, and he was looking for a test case to challenge the military ban on homosexuals.  Matlovich stepped forward.

Kameny worked with Matlovich to orchestrate the latter’s public coming out — simultaneously to the Air Force and the readers of Time magazine.  Matlovich’s discharge in 1975 was followed by a five-year legal battle and eventually an order from the U.S. District Court to reinstate him. The court, however, declined to give a ruling on the ban itself.

Convinced that the Air Force would find some other reason to discharge him if he reentered the service, Matlovich accepted the Air Force’s offer of a financial settlement and devoted the remainder of his life to championing the fight against anti-gay discrimination.

In the late 1970s, Matlovich spoke out against Anita Bryant’s anti-gay crusade in Florida and California Proposition 6, which sought to ban gay and lesbian teachers from public schools.  In 1978, Matlovich’s story was made into a film titled Sergeant Matlovich vs. the U.S. Air Force.

On May 19, 1987, Matlovich appeared on Good Morning America and disclosed that he had contracted the AIDS virus.  He delivered his final public speech on May 7, 1988 in front of the California State Capitol during the March on Sacramento for Gay and Lesbian Rights.  He died just weeks later.

Matlovich’s body was buried with full military honors in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., according to Making Gay History.

His headstone reads “A Gay Vietnam Veteran” and is inscribed with the words he made famous: “When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.”

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Photo of quilt panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt

Proposition 102, a ballot initiative sponsored by political extremists, proposed to require healthcare professionals and others to report anyone they have ”reasonable cause to believe” is infected with HIV.

The signature campaign to put the measure on the 1988 November ballot in California was sponsored by Paul Gann, an anti-taxation crusader who contracted AIDS after receiving a blood transfusion, and U.S. Rep. William E. Dannemeyer, a Republican from Orange County.

“This single piece of legislation will have more to do with prolonging the epidemic than anything I can imagine,” Dr. Mervyn Silverman, president of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, told the Los Angeles Times.

Dr. Silverman was part of a group of top AIDS researchers who gathered in San Francisco to voice their opposition to Prop 102, which would be listed on the California ballot in November.

With him were two colleagues from San Francisco General Hospital: Dr. Paul Volberding and Dr. Andrew Moss.

Dr. Moss said that people come forward for testing and counseling, “because they trust us not to put their names on government lists.”

Dr. Volberding, who was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes and head of AIDS programs at San Francisco General, said that a mandatory reporting law would “scare away research subjects and drive the epidemic underground.”

“Clinical research in California could come to a grinding halt,” added Volberding, who at the time was conducting trials of new treatments.

In 1988, state law already mandated the reporting of the names of people with clear symptoms of AIDS.  But Prop 102 sought to go further, and require doctors to report everyone they “reasonably believed” to be infected with HIV, regardless of whether they exhibited any symptoms.

“It’s Orwellian, to say the least,” Dr. Silverman said.

Just two years before — in 1986 — activists had successfully defeated Prop 64, a 1986 ballot initiative promoted by political extremist Lyndon LaRouche that would have required all persons with HIV to report their condition to the state Department of Health, regardless of whether  they had HIV-related symptoms.  For the 1988 ballot, the new target for HIV/AIDS advocates was Prop 102.

Federal officials say as many as 1.5 million Americans may be infected with the virus and more than 73,000 have the disease, one-fifth of them in California. AIDS is spread through exchange of bodily fluids, as in sexual intercourse or the sharing of hypodermic needles, and may be contracted from mother to unborn child. ‘Protective Gear’ for Workers

The event, titled “Hooray for Hollywood, was one of the most famous benefits in Pines history at one of the most historic party houses on Fire Island, according to the Fire Island Pines Historical Preservation Society.  Showman Peter Allen and comedian Joan Rivers performed, as well as Chippendale Dancers and the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes.

Gloria DeMann, owner of the Manhattan restaurant Café Pacifico, often opened the doors of her home for big parties, and she went all-out for this one.  Proceeds for the benefit went to God’s Love We Deliver, a three-year-old organization that provided free, nutrious meals for people with AIDS.

God’s Love was founded in 1985 by hospice volunteer Ganga Stone, who began cooking and delivering meals (by bicycle) to one of her clients, Richard Sale, a 32-year-old New York actor who was dying of AIDS.  Stone soon recruited her roommate, Jane Ellent Best, and other friends to help her, and an organization was born.

Sale was born in Texas in 1952, graduated from Denton High School in 1970, and attended the University of Michigan.  He acted in New York stage productions, but then died of AIDS-related illness on August 29, 1985 at the age of 33.

Stone, who was told by a minister that “you’re not just delivering food, You’re delivering God’s love,” would lead her organization of a handful of volunteers into a world-class service provider with a budget of $23 million.  In 2021, the year Stone died at the age of 79, God’s Love would distribute 2.5 million meals to 10,000 people homebound in the New York metropolitan area.

Arrington traveled around North America to speak at AIDS conferences and, along the way, decided to somehow — as an openly gay man with HIV — become a minister in the Baptist Church.

Born in February 1960 in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, Arrington grew up as one of three siblings with a strict father and a religious mother, according to a 2021 interview Arrington gave with Outwords. As a child, Arrington was a child with special needs. He was prescribed glasses when still an infant and was required to wear special medical shoes.

Arrington told Outwords that he remembered his grandfather called him “twisted.” In elementary school, he was misdiagnosed with “mental retardation” and placed in special education classes. He realized he was gay when he was six years old. At eight, Robert found sanctuary in his family’s church, a place that he said saved him from suicidal thoughts.

When Arrington was 14, his father was killed and his family left New York to stay with his maternal grandparents’ home in North Carolina.  During those years, he felt invisible and unmoored, he told Outwords.

He eventually found his way to the care of his Aunt Shirley, who often took in the family’s rejected children.  With her encouragement and nurturing, Arrington graduated from high school and enrolled in college.  His goal was to enter the ministry, and a cousin advised him to get married to demonstrate that the “gay demon was no longer inside him.”  So he married a woman, and when the marriage failed, he spiraled into alcoholism.  According to Arrington, it was likely during this difficult time in his life, when he regularly engaged in reckless and self-destructive behavior, that he contracted HIV.

In the fall of 1988, he suffered a near-fatal bout with pneumonia and a collapsed lung.  His doctor informed him that he had HIV and a life expectancy of five years.

Arrington returned to North Carolina, expecting his health to quickly deteriorate.  But when he recovered from his respiratory illness and began to feel healthy, he started traveling to HIV/AIDS conferences in the U.S. and Canada for a series of speaking engagements.

He realized he still wanted to be a minister, and began a six-year battle to become an ordained pastor at his family’s conservative Baptist church.  Unfortunately, church leaders refused to fully accept him and would only ordain him as a “non-practicing homosexual.”

So he found a church that would accept him as he was.  In 2003, he became ordained in the LGBTQ-affirming Unity Fellowship Church (UFC) Movement.

With the help of his aunt, Pastor Arrington founded an HIV care team at his family’s Baptist church. In his 40s, he returned to college and earned his Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies from the University of North Carolina. When he was 49, Pastor Arrington was commissioned by the UFC Archbishop to open the first UFC church in South Carolina – the Unity Fellowship Church of Charleston.

In the first few years of leading the new church, Pastor Arrington held memorials for two young men who lost their lives to AIDS-related illness, both tested too late for medical treatment to prolong their lives.

In 2014, Pastor Arrington told The Post and Courier that he would always be available to offer a shoulder, a prayer, and an empathetic ear to other Black people struggling with their sexuality and HIV infection.

His church holds HIV testing days, but the turnout can be thin, because people fear being seen at them.

“They’ve been so hurt by the churches here,” he told The Post and Courier. “You have pastors preaching that they are going to hell or that this is a punishment from God.”

Pastor Arrington said that he and his church is different.  Instead of judgment, he offers acceptance and help.

In 2021, Pastor Arrington said, “I got health problems, but I’m determined to do this until my Big Boss takes me out of this body and I return back to spirit, which I came from.”

In a recent Facebook post, Pastor Arrington wrote:

California voters overwhelmingly rejected a controversial ballot measure that proposed to force doctors and other health professionals to report HIV+ people and trace everyone they might have infected.  Proposition 102 was sponsored by Congressman William Dannemeyer, a socially conservative Republican from Orange County who was gaining notoriety nationwide for his anti-gay legislative proposals and homophobic rhetoric.

AIDS activists, scientists and doctors, and HIV service providers throughout California celebrated the defeat of Prop 102.

“I think the voters have rejected the introduction of politics into public health in California,” Dr. Michael Gottlieb, the first researcher to report AIDS cases in the U.S., told Associated Press.

Others said that Prop 102’s defeat in California should give leverage to Congress and incoming president George Bush when they are confronted by religious leaders regarding the country’s approach to addressing the epidemic.

“This was a clear message from the electorate of a state that is regarded as a trend setter,” Dr. Burton J. Lee III of Memorial-Sloan Cancer Center in New York told the Los Angeles Times.  Dr. Lee was a member of President Reagan’s AIDS Commission and an adviser to Bush on AIDS.

Finding himself on the wrong side of California’s battle was Gov. George Deukmejian, who surprised many by endorsing Prop 102 just days before Election Day.

“Gov. Deukmejian, you are a scandal and a disgrace,” Benjamin Schatz, the director of the AIDS Civil Rights Project of National Gay Rights Advocates, told a crowd at an election night rally in the Bay Area. “Don’t even think of coming to San Francisco.”

Following the governor’s endorsement, LGBTQ groups and medical professionals doubled down on their efforts to defeat the measure — and their work paid off.  Just months ago, polls showed that likely voters were ready to pass Prop 102, but many minds were changed over the next few months by an intensive voter education campaign led by groups like Californians Against Proposition 102 and Life AIDS Lobby.

The opposition campaign warned voters that, if passed, the measure would destroy efforts to contain and cure the illness by driving HIV+ people away from the health-care system, where they receive counseling on how to avoid spreading the illness.  Prop 102 would also scare away potential research subjects, opponents said.

When state leaders (with the exception of Deukmejian), medical groups, and U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop publicly joined the opposition to the measure, its fate was sealed.  Much like the 1986 LaRouche initiative to quarantine people living with AIDS, Prop 102 was seen by most voters as a danger to the existing healthcare and research systems in place for addressing HIV and AIDS — and an infringement on human rights.

“Once again, the voters of California have said no to an initiative that was mean-spirited and ill-advised, and have given the California Medical Association and AIDS researchers their vote of confidence,” said Susan Jester, an activist who organized the opposition campaign in southern California.

The loss didn’t appear to slow down Rep. Dannemeyer, who told the LA Times that he planned to introduce Prop 102’s provisions to Congress.  He also said he would pressure the California Medical Association to bring in leadership more aligned with his views.

“It’s a disappointment, certainly, but the war goes on,” Rep. Dannemeyer said.

Amidst the celebratory mood in activist gatherings on election night was also the somber acknowledgement that another, less impactful but still important measure — Prop 96 — was passed by voters.

Staring on January 1, 1989, the measure will allow courts to order HIV tests in sex crimes.  Compulsory tests can also be ordered on behalf of police officers, firefighters and other first responders who are assaulted.

“Ninety-six was passed by the California voters, because they weren’t informed about the initiative,” Rodney Scott, a spokesman for the opposition campaign in southern California, told the Associated Press.

Proponents of Prop 96 promoted it as a victim’s rights measure.

“It’s not,” Scott said.

Benjamin Schatz agreed, saying the success of Prop 96 was “less a statement of voter sentiment about AIDS than a statement about crime.”
_ _ _ _ _

Photo by Ted Sahl, from the San Jose State University’s Ted Sahl Archives, shows activists (left-to-right, unidentified man, Ken Yeager and Paul Wysocki) celebrating the defeat of Proposition 102.  They are cutting a cake that reads “Thank you Volunteers.”

Armstrong was president of the Concerned Republicans for Individual Rights (which later became the Log Cabin Republicans) and worked to bridge differences between the GOP and San Francisco’s gay community.

As someone known for prioritizing gay rights above party politics, Armstrong was a well-liked activist even in a locale known as a Democratic Party stronghold.  In 1986, Armstrong was elected “Mr. CMC Carnaval” at the Folsom neighborhood street fair.  He was a member of the local leather scene, as was his partner Jerry Roberts.

When the City of San Francisco began to take actions toward closing bathhouses, Armstrong teamed with Thomas H. Steel, a prominent civil rights lawyer, to represent San Francisco bathhouse owners who organized against regulation in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.  Steel would die on July 18, 1998 of AIDS-related illness at the age of 48.

Earlier in 1988, Armstrong was presented with a Certificate of Honor from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.  He had also been honored by the Golden Gate Business Association and had received several Cable Car Awards for his community service.

Famous for his song “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” Sylvester is the lead singer and co-creator of one of the all-time top LGBTQ anthems.

Born in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, Sylvester had been a member of the ’60s group the Disquotays — which was “somewhere between a street gang and a sorority house,” as one former member puts it.

He moved to San Francisco in 1970 at the age of 22 and joined the Cockettes, a “cross-dressing hippy performance art troupe,” and sang blues and jazz standards in his gospel-trained voice in solo segments of the show, writes Alexis Petrides in The Guardian.  In the early 70s, he made a bid for mainstream success fronting the Hot Band.

“But the U.S. wasn’t ready for an androgynous black man doing covers of Neil Young songs and A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Petrides writes.  “Band members were threatened with violence when they toured in southern states.”

Sylvester’s career was beginning to take hold in 1978, when “Mighty Real” is released on his second solo album and then later as a single.  When the song catches fire, he would travel to London to perform to packed clubs and be mobbed by fans.  Sylvester would release another 12 albums, many of them featuring top hits and nightclub mainstays.  An album containing Sylvester’s final studio recordings, titled Immortal, woud be posthumously released.

Today, In the Life is widely regarded as a literary and cultural milestone in gay literature.

A native of Philadelphia, Beam attended Franklin College in Indiana, where he studied journalism and was an active member of the black student union and the Black Power movement.

After earning a his master’s degree in communications, Beam returned to Philadelphia in 1979, and explored literature on gay figures and institutions while working at the LGBT bookstore Giovanni’s Room.  Discouraged by the lack of community for Black gay men and lesbians, Beam began writing articles and short stories for gay publications.

In 1984, he received an award for outstanding achievement by a minority journalist from The Lesbian and Gay Press Association.  In 1985, he became the first editor of Black/Out, a journal produced by the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays.

Beam continued to collect materials about being Black and gay, and find ways to increase their reach. In 1986, he produced the first collection written by Black gay men, called In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology.

When Beam died, he was in the process of compiling the sequel, “Brother to Brother.”  His mother, Dorothy Beam, and poet Essex Hemphill would go on to complete the work and publish it in 1991.

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Photo of quilt panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt

The clinic was forced to shut down in December 1988 when Boston-based Lexington Insurance Co. pulled its coverage.

“There are easier ways to meet Liz Taylor then by pretending you have the most stigmatized disease of this century,” Callen would tell the Los Angeles Times in a month later.

In an attempt to counter accusations of “faking AIDS” because he appears healthy almost seven years after he was diagnosed with AIDS, Callen puts the rumors to rest by publishing the pathology report of  his Kaposi’s sarcoma diagnosis.

The LA Times article notes that Callen’s long-term survival isn’t unusual, citing a 1987 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine which finds that 20.7% of “non-IV-drug using gay men with AIDS” are still alive four years after diagnosis.

This is one of many indications surfacing that living long-term with AIDS is possible.

“Who’s in charge here? Nobody, it seems,” they write. “Since the epidemic began nine years ago, the county’s only major organized response has been to open an outpatient clinic, which has proved grossly inadequate.”

People needing an initial visit must schedule it eight weeks in advance, the activists contend.

They continue: “People with temperatures of 103 or higher sit for hours on hard wooden benches waiting for help.  Some receive chemotherapy in crowded hallways, vomiting in bags.  Others in the same hallways, stripped to the waist, have IVs hooked to their arms.”

The activists express anger about LA County’s failure to put to use $8.6 million in AIDS funding, saying, “services go unprovided, facilities unrehabilitated, staff unrecruited and more patients continue to suffer and die needlessly.”

In the op-ed, Cashman, Fall, and Morello show compassion for the hard-working county healthcare staff, crediting them with being “caring” and doing their best amid “poor conditions.”

West Hollywood’s HIV Center was the result of the persistence and diligence of local activist Ron Shipton, who at 43 years old was living with HIV.  He decided that the community deserved to have access to up-to-the-minute information about HIV that was regularly published in medical journals and he set about to make it happen.

Shipton spoke with a librarian at the local library and also wrote to City Council, asking why he and his friends should spend hundreds of dollars on medical journals “when the rich city of West Hollywood could buy it for the library.”

He asked for the library to start carrying a subscription to the AIDS Targeted Information Network, which publishes abstracts of important medical journal articles about the virus and the disease.  With initial funding of $20,000 from the City of West Hollywood and County of Los Angeles, the library secured a subscription for public use and then went much further.

The HIV Center, which was the first of its kind in the country, opened with a robust collection of materials that included periodicals, pamphlets, books and, perhaps most importantly, a computer terminal with free access to the Computerized AIDS Information Network (CAIN).  Library staff and volunteers were trained to help visitors with navigating reference system.

Volunteers from the HIV/AIDS service organizations Being Alive and West Hollywood Cares advised the library on the selection of reading materials and with information on testing, treatment and support facilities.

“I think there is something there for everybody, Dan Solliday of Being Alive told the LA Times.   “We have tried to get well-rounded resources for college students and clinicians.”

The City would continue to fund updates and expansions of the HIV Center’s resources, including the addition of a free STD Clinic coordinated by Being Alive for testing, vaccines, treatments, and preventative services.

First housed in the original West Hollywood Library at 715 N. San Vicente Blvd., the collection would move in October 2011 to a newly constructed library at 625 N. San Vicente Blvd. and would be renamed the Ron Shipton HIV Information Center.

Peter Scott was an LA-based lawyer who gave up his practice to advocate for gay rights.  With his partner David Mixner, Scott organized large-scale campaigns to defeat state ballot measures that would have permitted discrimination against members of the LGBTQ community.  He also led the fight in California to speed up testing of experimental AIDS drugs, which resulting in a 1987 drug-testing law.

Scott was so influential that when he was hospitalized in August of 1986 with AIDS-related illness, the Los Angeles Times ran a story on it.

Scott was born in Texas and attended the University of Texas, Austin law school, according to United Press International.  In the 1970s, he moved to Los Angeles to start a private law practice.

After moving into political consulting and activism in the late ’70s, Scott co-founded MECLA (Municipal Election Committee of Los Angeles), which became the most powerful LGBTQ political group in Los Angeles County.  He was active in political fundraising until his illness worsened.

He was also the former chairman of the Los Angeles AIDS Project (APLA).  In 1985, Scott and actress Elizabeth Taylor organized the annual APLA fundraiser, which raised an unprecedented $1 million.  The event was co-chaired by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and former First Lady Betty Ford.

Scott was diagnosed as having AIDS in 1986, just as he was planning to run for the state assembly, challenging majority leader Mike Roos. Instead of running for office, Scott shifted his focus to fundraising for an AIDS cure, according to The New York Times.

A memorial service was held at St. Augustine’s by the Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Monica.  State Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp eulogized Scott as a man of courage who made a difference, according to the Los Angeles Times.  Also paying respects were former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., Assemblymember Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), U.S. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) and Los Angeles Councilmember Joel Wachs.

More than 800 arts organizations, museums and galleries throughout the U.S. participated by shrouding artworks and replacing them with information about HIV and safer sex, locking their doors or dimming their lights, and producing exhibitions, programs, readings, memorials, rituals, and performances.

Founded in 1988, Visual AIDS utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over.  The contemporary arts organization is dedicated to raising AIDS awareness around HIV issues today, by producing and presenting visual art projects, exhibitions, public forums and publications — while assisting artists living with HIV/AIDS.

The organization supports the preservation of the work of artists with HIV/AIDS and the artistic contributions of the AIDS movement.

ACT UP protesters occupy the NIH campus, calling on scientists to develop more drugs for people with AIDS and the federal government to disseminate drugs equitably.

Promoted as “Storm the NIH,” the demonstration challenges the NIH to address the issue of growing numbers of women and people of color being diagnosed with HIV/AIDS.

Days later, activist G. Harold Mehlman would write in The Washington Post, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease, the saying goes. I’m here to tell you that ACT UP and lots of others will be squeaking to the high heavens until drugs to save the lives of our citizenry affected with the HIV disease are made available.”

Their efforts convince policy makers to change regulations, which results in a new regimen of drugs used to treat AIDS made available in 1996.

Born in Oakland, Samuels was a popular comedian and sometime comedy teacher.  In the mid-1970, Samuels and then-comedy-partner Marty Cohen were regulars on Merv Griffin’s television show and several other variety programs.  In 1977, Samuels performed solo in a comedy skit on the TV show Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and would embark on a solo career officially in the early 1980s.

Dubbed San Francisco’s Dean of Comedy by his friends and competitors, Samuels was also part owner of the Holy City Zoo club, a small but influential comedy club located at 408 Clement Street between 5th and 6th Avenues in San Francisco.

Samuels died at Garden Sullivan Hospital in San Francisco.

“Night Without Light” was launched to coincide with Visual AIDS “Day Without Art” on World AIDS Day.  For fifteen minutes, from 7:45 to 8:00 p.m. on December 1st, the lights on Manhattan’s historic buildings, bridges, monuments and Broadway’s theatre marquees are turned off, including the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, United Nations Building, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York Life Building, MetLife Tower,  Grand Central Terminal, Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and George Washington Bridge among others — transforming the Manhattan skyline into a visual reminder of the impact of AIDS.

In future years, San Francisco would join New York City and also darken its skyline by turning off the architectural illumination on key landmarks as a symbolic reflection for the lives lost due to HIV.

Founded in 1988, Visual AIDS utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over.  The contemporary arts organization is dedicated to raising AIDS awareness around HIV issues today, by producing and presenting visual art projects, exhibitions, public forums and publications — while assisting artists living with HIV/AIDS.

The organization supports the preservation of the work of artists with HIV/AIDS and the artistic contributions of the AIDS movement.

Modeled after the successful women-focused PAC Emily’s List, which helped Anne Richards win the election for Texas Governor in November 1990, the Victory Fund sought to have the same impact and influence, but with a focus on LGBTQ candidates.

William Waybourn, who for several years led the Dallas Gay Alliance’s HIV/AIDS programs, moved to Washington, D.C. to found the Victory Fund with Vic Basile.  Basile left his position as Executive Director of the Washington-based Human Rights Campaign (then called the Human Rights Campaign Fund) to work with Waybourn on the new organization.  Both were seasoned activists who spent the 1980s demanding legislative action to address the AIDS crisis and experiencing constant disappointment from elected leaders who viewed the needs of the LGBTQ community as a low priority.

In 1991, the U.S. had less than 50 openly LGBTQ elected officials at any level of government.  Weybourn and Basile believed that boosting LGBTQ representation in public office would be key to advancing equality.

Through the Victory Fund, Weybourn and Basile began to build a network of supporters who pledged to assist viable LGBTQ candidates endorsed by the organization.  They were joined by Roberta Bennett, David Detrick, Lynn Greer, Tim McFeeley, Howard Menaker, David Mixner, Hilary Rosen, and John Thomas.  Weybourn became the first Executive Directory.

Seattle City Council candidate Sherry Harris became the first Victory Fund endorsed candidate.  With an initial donor network of just 181 members, the Victory Fund helped Harris defeat a 24-year incumbent to become the first openly lesbian Black city council member in the U.S.

This single election resulted in more members of the LGBTQ community running for office and more LGBTQ voters being willing to rally around candidates who could better represent them.  Members of the community with deep pockets were similarly inspired, and the Victory Fund overshot its 1992 fundraising goal of $80,000 by more than three times the amount — $260,000.

Among the candidates receiving Victory Fund support that year was Tammy Baldwin, who became the first openly lesbian member of the Wisconsin Assembly in 1993.  Victory Fund would continue to support Baldwin’s campaigns over the years (two more successful elections to the state assembly, three successful elections to Congress, and ultimately successful elections to U.S. Senate).

Meanwhile, the Victory Fund continued to evolve and get stronger.  In 1993, the Victory Institute was launched to help train future candidates and campaign workers. The organization successfully lobbied White House officials and Senators to appoint Roberta Achtenberg to the position of Assistant Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, making her the first openly LGBTQ presidential appointee to a Senate-confirmed position.

In 1994, 14 of Victory Fund’s 28 endorsed candidates won their elections.  Among them were Sheila James Kuehl, who won her race to become the first openly LGBTQ person in the California state legislature, and Bonnie Dumanis, a San Diego Republican who was elected as Municipal Court Judge.

In 1996, Victory Fund went big and endorsed 50 candidates.  With the organization’s help, Ed Flanagan became the first openly LGBTQ person elected to a statewide office, winning his race for State Auditor in Vermont.

Before founding the Victory Fund, William Weybourn was a leader in the Dallas LGBTQ community.  He was journalist for The Dallas Times Herald who decided the community needed a “center” and in 1980 opened Crossroads Market in the gay-friendly neighborhood of Oak Park.  Located at the intersection of Throckmorton and Cedar Springs, Crossroads Market sold everything, from candy to furniture, books and gifts, and “anything gay-related,” according to The Dallas Way‘s profile of Weybourn.

The shop offered free coffee and a free-to-use copy machine, and became an important gathering spot.  Not much later, the Dallas Gay Alliance opened a community center a few doors away, cementing the area’s importance as a vital community asset.

While many of Weybourn’s friends battled HIV-related illnesses, Weybourn struggled with his own health issues.  In 1984, he had a heart attack while driving home.  He was only 36 years old.  He had another heart attack 12 years later, and over the course of 20 years, several stents were placed in his heart, according to The Dallas Way.

The devastation of HIV/AIDS on the Dallas community also took its toll on Weybourn’s mental health.

“I can’t answer how others got through their grief, but Craig (Spaulding, his partner) and I tried to avoid focusing on death, but instead focused on how fortunate we were to know and care for someone for the short time they were alive,” he told The Dallas Way in 2022.

Vic Basile, Weybourn’s co-founder at the Victory Fund, was also steeped in HIV/AIDS activism in the 1980s.

Basile was the first Executive Director of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), serving during the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, from June 1983 to June 1989.  The HRC was created initially to fund Congressional candidates who supported issues important to the LGBTQ community, and quickly found itself struggling to identify elected officials willing to fight for HIV/AIDS funding.

During this time, Basile supported the outing of gay politicians who worked against LGBTQ interests.

In 1989, he told the Washington Post, “Those who participate in the (gay) community and then vote against it are guilty of hypocrisy — hypocrisy that causes harm to a whole class of people…. Their duplicitous, devious, harmful behavior ought to be exposed.”

Later, Basile was Executive Director of Movable Feast, a Baltimore charity which delivered meals to homebound HIV and AIDS patients, and then Counselor to the Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

The event becomes the world’s largest and most successful AIDS fundraisers to date.

The atmosphere for the 10-kilometer event ranged from “the revelry of a pep rally” to “the somberness of a wake,” wrote reporter Jerry Gray in his coverage for The New York Times.

Gray spoke to many walkers, including some people living with HIV/AIDS and friends of those who had died from AIDS-related illness.

“The perception is that it’s ‘a gay disease, but it’s not. It’s everybody’s family. It’s everybody’s friends,” participant Carole Mayer said to the NYT reporter.  She walked wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the message “In Loving Memory of Mike 12/7/49-5/7/91.”

Willie Sandoval, who identified himself as a person with AIDS, told the NYT: “I’m here for people who will never march again, because they are dead.”

Founded in 1986, AIDS Walk New York was the largest walkathon in the world.

The mission of the new group — called the  Treatment Action Group (TAG) — was to work effectively with government scientists, drug company researchers, and FDA officials on speeding up the development of new HIV therapies.  In fact, many scientists and government officials were impressed with the level of knowledge that TAG founding director Peter Staley (pictured) and other members had and welcomed their input.

Prior to founding TAG, Staley and other members of ACT UP’s Treatment and Data Committee (many of whom were HIV positive) learned how to become their own researchers, lobbyists, drug smugglers, and clinicians.

In a 2013 interview with Martha Henry of the Harvard AIDS Initiative, Staley expressed regret that they weren’t able to keep TAG within ACT UP.  At the time, the split seemed inevitable because the Treatment and Data Committee wanted to work in tandem with government researchers and drug companies, while the more radical members of ACT UP viewed federal research programs and the pharmaceutical industry as the enemy and wanted a more antagonistic approach.

But TAG did, after all, have its roots in activism, and the group announced itself in spectacular fashion.  As its first big action, TAG members spent the summer planning on an action that would bring nationwide awareness to the problem of AIDS stigma while also “zapping” one of the country’s most anti-gay politicians, U.S. Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina.  Helms was notoriously opposed to government funding for HIV/AIDS research, prevention, and treatment.

TAG’s director, Peter Staley, devised a plan to put a giant condom over the home of Senator Helms, and enlisted a select crew of TAG members to help.  By September, they had everything in place, and on Sept. 5, 1991, they went to the senator’s two-story house in Arlington, Virginia to unfurl the giant yellow condom printed with the message “A condom to stop unsafe politics — Helms is deadlier than a virus.”

The activists were detained briefly by police but were allowed to go free once they complied with the police order to remove the giant condom from the house.  Helms was not home at the time, but the incident succeeded in getting nationwide media attention, according to the History website.

With the condom action, Staley hoped that ACT UP radicals would see that they could still employ theatrical, attention-getting actions while working with the scientists seeking better treatments.

But TAG would go its own way and, as separate entities, ACT UP and TAG would both be very effective in pushing the federal government to fund research into new and better treatments for HIV and AIDS.

Following the approval of several effective antiretroviral drugs in 1995, TAG would be successful in persuading the government to work with the pharmaceutical industry on research that would identify long-term effects of the new HIV therapies.

In 2002, TAG would raise awareness about the impact that tuberculosis was having on people with HIV in the developing world. In 2007, the organization would receive a $4.7 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to foster increased international advocacy on TB/HIV research and treatment.

In 2012, Staley would become a leading subject in the Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague, and he would become a 2016 Fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics.  Staley’s memoirs of his activism and advocacy, Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism, would be published in October 2021.

“The plague that killed a generation of gay men cannot be forgotten, and Peter saw it all from the front lines,” CNN reporter Anderson Cooper writes in the forward of Staley’s book.  “He wasn’t the only one, but he was a key member of a brave group of people who stood up and fought back so that others, you and I, might live and be free.”

Staley would also co-found the PrEP4All Collaboration, whose mission is to make HIV medication available to everyone who needs it, and the COVID-19 Working Group – New York.

Duane’s announcement is the first time a candidate seeking elected office openly disclosed being HIV positive.  At a time when many considered it professionally ruinous to disclose their infection, Duane boldly challenged the stigma and used the public view into his personal health to his advantage.

“In one sense, it’s nobody’s business that I’ve tested positive for the presence of HIV virus in my blood,” Duane stated in a letter mailed to 40,000 district households.  “But I am a candidate for public office and I believe in being candid.”

In the letter, Duane also said that as an elected city official, he would fight for more funding for AIDS research and health care.

“That’s what I believe, and have for a long time. Maybe I believe it a little more strongly because of my own circumstance,” he wrote.

Duane was running in the third district, which had been recently configured to include the Manhattan neighborhoods of SoHo, Greenwich Village, Clinton and Chelsea and had the highest concentration of LGBTQ voters in New York City, according to The New York Times.

Duane’s main opponent in the City Council race was Liz Abzug, the 39-years-old lesbian daughter of Congresswoman Bella Abzug.

Source:
New York Times, August 8, 1991, “Gay Candidate for City Council Says He Has AIDS Virus”

Infected with the AIDS virus in 1987 from a blood transfusion during the birth of her second child, Mason is known for being the commission member most unafraid to speak out against the Bush administration for treating AIDS as a moral issue rather than as a public-health issue.

She is also known as a strong voice among people with AIDS who are angry that AZT is the only AIDS drug approved by the U.S.

Mason refused to distinguish between what sanctimonious politicians called the “innocent victims” of HIV and the rest of those living with the disease.  Yet she was aware of her priviledge, telling the press that Bush appointed her because, ″I was perfect. I was Southern, I was white, I was articulate and I got AIDS in a nice way.″

Before becoming ill, Mason worked as a reporter for the Appalachian News Express in Pikeville and the Hartford Times News, both Kentucky weeklies.  She also wrote short stories.

Mason, originally of Whitesburg, Ky., founded Kentuckiana People With AIDS, the first Kentucky-based group dedicated to fighting for a cure. She also was a member of the AIDS Action Council, a national AIDS lobbying group.

She spent untold hours with Kentuckians, listening, laughing, educating, telling stories and being a lifeline for rural HIVers, according to Kate Black in her profile on Mason in POZ magazine.

She was president of the National Association of People With AIDS when Bush appointed her in 1989 to the commission created by his predecessor, Ronald Reagan.

Right before Belinda Mason died at the age of 32, she told her family, “Well, bye-bye y’all.”

In 2016, the legislature of the State of Kentucky would honor Mason with a resolution to “reflect on the many accomplishments Belinda Mason made as a notable woman in Kentucky’s history.”

“For her uncommon courage in the face of death, for all that she accomplished as an AIDS
advocate during a time in this country when it was unpopular to do so, and for being a
daughter of this great Commonwealth,” the resolution states, “this honorable body posthumously honors her for her many contributions to human rights on Women’s History Month.”

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Photo of quilt panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt

Demonstrators gathered at the Westwood Federal Building in Los Angeles in the morning and the Ronald Reagan State Office Building in downtown LA in the afternoon. Protesters splattered red liquid on the state building and broke a heavy glass door before disbanding after a standoff with police.  Two demonstrators were arrested.

That evening, about 2,000 whistle-blowing, chanting demonstrators gathered in West Hollywood, where they torched a California state flag and burned Wilson in effigy.  The protesters then marched from West Hollywood to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Wilshire Boulevard, where Wilson was attending an event.

When the activists arrived at the museum, they shouted, “Civil rights or civil war!”

Later, about 150 demonstrators gathered at the Century Plaza Hotel in Century City, where Wilson was a guest.  A man and a woman were arrested on suspicion of assault after protesters rushed the hotel’s front entrance and knocked down a helmeted police officer.

In San Francisco, angry protesters marched from San Francisco’s Castro District to the State building in Civic Center, where Gov. Wilson had an office.  The situation took a violent turn when the front doors were smashed and offices were set on fire.  The Bay Area Reporter described protestors kicking in glass doors and causing over $150,000 in damages to the building.  This would become known as the “AB 101 Veto Riot.”

The demonstrations go on for about three weeks, and transformed thousands of people into activists. Some people were out every night.

“Probably the biggest demonstration started at San Vicente and went west on Sunset to UCLA, where we disrupted an outdoor speech being given by Wilson,” recalled Steve Martin, who was President of the Stonewall Democratic Club at the time.  “The police said there were 5,000 in the streets; it looked closer to 10,000 to me.  As we marched back to West Hollywood, Sunset looked like a river of demonstrators.”

AB 101 would have prevented job and housing discrimination based on sexual orientation.  Gov. Wilson, a moderate Republican, initially promised to sign such legislation into law, but reversed his decision after his office received complaints from anti-gay activists.

“We were blatantly lied to, and we are angry,” John J. Duran, co-chair of the Lobby for Individual Freedom and Equality, told the Los Angeles Times.  Duran said Wilson promised to support anti-discrimination legislation in meetings with gay activists during his gubernatorial campaign.

About one year later, California AB 101 was passed by state legislature and signed by signed by Pete Wilson.

Heltsley, who wrote under the name Paul Martin, was an assistant editor at Drummer magazine and often led workshops at QSM and San Francisco State Unviversity.  He was one of the founders of San Francisco Leather Bears and a member of the National Leather Association and the Phoenix Uniform Club.

Heltsley also composed music in a variety of genres, including jazz, punk and electronica.  Prior to moving to San Francisco in 1988, he performed in a punk band in Seattle.

“He cared passionately about the physical , psychological and spiritual implications of Leather and SM,” Heltsley’s partner, Roy Cameron, told the Bay Area Reporter.

“As an expression of his deep personal love of the people in his life, and his desire not to have his friends worry about him, Paul remained silent, even to the end, as to the seriousness of his illness,” Camerson said.

A tree was planted in the AIDS Memorial Grove at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park as a permanent tribute to Heltsley.

A resident of Washington D.C. from 1975 to 1985, Hockenberry was president and executive director of Gay and Lesbian Pride Day, executive co-director of the 1983 National AIDS Vigil, and a founder of the Whitman-Walker Clinic and Langston Hughes/Eleanor Roosevelt Democratic Club.

While attending Georgetown University Law Center, Hockenberry was president of the Gay and Lesbian Rights Coalition, which successfully sued for recognition from the university.

Hockenberry was executive director and chief lobbyist of the Greater Washington Americans for Democratic Action from 1982 to 1984. From 1985 until his retirement, he was executive director of the AIDS Legal Referral Panel, a public-interest legal service in San Francisco.

He was also editor and writer of AIDSLaw, a manual of legal services for persons with HIV and AIDS.  He won awards from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the State Bar of California for his work.

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Photo of quilt panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt

Pruzman documented the queer history of San Francisco throughout the 1970s and 1980s, according to Gary Aylesworth of the Bay Area Reporter. His work was published in Drummer, Manifest, Sports Illustrated, and the San Francisco Examiner’s Image magazine, as well as in Geoff Mains’ book Urban Aboriginals.

“Although he worked in photojournalism for years, his fine art photography is brilliant and important,” wrote Aylesworth.  “There are, perhaps, a quarter of a million slides in his collection.”

Born in 1946 in Seattle, Pruzman studied mime in Paris with Etienne Decroux in the 1960s.  As Decroux’s first assistant, he taught mime to many who would become notable performers, like Bill Irwin  , Geoff Hoyle, and Leonard Pitt.  He returned to the U.S. and taught mime in New York City.

Pruzman took an interest in floral arranging after taking a class in Japanese ikebana, and in 1973, he moved to San Francisco, where he began working as a horticulturist and photographer.  Advancing his parallel interests, he became a member of the California Horticultural Society and photographed the first Haight Street Fair in May 1978.  He also photographed the Castro Street Fair, early Pride Parades, and the Folsom and Up Your Alley Fairs through 1991.

In addition to documenting San Francisco’s gay and leather communities, Pruzman regularly photographed opera stars like Pavorotti and drag artists like Divine.  Harvey Milk, Wavy Gravy, Nancy Pelosi, Jane Dornacker, Robert Mapplethorpe — all were captured by Purzman’s camera.

Friends told the Bay Area Reporter that Pruzman’s apartment was filled with exotic plants. He curated many gardens throughout the Bay Area, and longtime friend Nancy McNally said Pruzman inspired her to create the AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park, which would open about a month after Pruzman’s death with a memorial service and planting in his honor.

Marsha P. Johnson was an icon of the LGBT rights movement who was involved in the Stonewall uprising in 1969 and later became an AIDS activist.

Born in 1945 in New Jersey, Marsha moved to New York City when they were 17 and took a job waiting tables.  After befriending street hustlers in Times Square, Marsha came out as gay and changed their name from Malcolm Michaels Jr. to Marsha P. Johnson, according to the National Women’s History Museum.  Their new surname came from the Howard Johnson’s restaurant near Times Square, and the “P” stood for “pay it no mind” – a reference to their gender fluidity.

Marsha invariably identified as gay, a transvestite, and a queen. Today, Marsha’s gender expression could perhaps most accurately be called gender non-conforming or transgender, but these terms were not broadly in use during Johnson’s lifetime.

On the first anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, Marsha marched in the first pride parade, an event that was then called Christopher Street Liberation Day.  Soon after, Marsha founded the radical activist group Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) with their friend Sylvia Rivera, according to the Smithsonian’s profile of the icon.

In 1973, Marsha and Sylvia were banned from participating in the pride parade by the host committee consisting of gay men and lesbians.  They were told that they were concerned that drag queens would give their march “a bad name.”  Marsha and Sylvia responded by marching defiantly ahead of the parade.

Marsha also had a presence in the City’s art scene, modeling for Andy Warhol and performing onstage with the drag troupe Hot Peaches.  When The Cockettes drag troupe in San Francisco formed an East Coast troupe, The Angels of Light, Marsha was asked to perform with them.

Marsha and Sylvia established STAR House, a shelter for homeless gay and trans youth, and paid the rent for it with money they made themselves as sex workers, according to the New York Historical Society.  Marsha was a “drag mother” of STAR House, in the longstanding tradition of Houses as chosen family in the Black and Latino LGBT community.

By 1990, Marsha was HIV positive and an early member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, according to The New York Times.  When gay bashing in New York City became an epidemic in the early ‘90s, Marsha was one of the activists marching in the streets, demanding justice.

In early July 1992, Marsha’s body was found floating in the Hudson River with evidence of a severe injury on the back of their head.  While initially ruled a suicide by the New York City Police Department, Marsha’s death was widely thought to have occurred under suspicious circumstances and activists demanded the case be re-opened as a possible homicide.

Marsha’s body was cremated, and their ashes were scattered over the Hudson River off the Christopher Street piers. Police allowed Seventh Avenue to be closed while Marsha’s ashes were carried to the river. After the funeral, a series of demonstrations and marches to the police precinct took place, to demand justice for Marsha.

In December 2002, a police investigation resulted in reclassification of Marsha’s cause of death from “suicide” to “undetermined.”  The case remains unsolved.

Marsha P. Johnson was one of the 50 inaugural “pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes” inducted in 2019 on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in New York City’s Stonewall Inn.

At that point, Glaser’s foundation had raised $13 million for pediatric AIDS research.  Many of the money she raised went to the Ariel Project, named for her late daughter, seeking ways to prevent the transmission of AIDS from mother to child.

In her speech, Glaser told the assembled Democratic delegation along with millions of TV viewers that her daughter Ariel died of AIDS exactly four years ago.

“She did not survive the Reagan Administration,” Glaser said.  “I am here, because my son and I may not survive four more years of leaders who say they care but do nothing.”

While giving birth to her first child in 1981, Glaser received an emergency blood transfusion, which unknowingly infected
her with HIV.  She passed the virus onto her children through breast-feeding and in utero before she was diagnosed with AIDS-related illnesses.

In 1988, she created the Pediatric AIDS Foundation (now called the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation) to raise funds for pediatric HIV/AIDS research.

Her DNC speech is listed as #79 in American Rhetoric’s Top 100 Speeches of the 20th Century, listed by rank.

On December 3, 1994, Glaser died at the age of 47 from AIDS complications at her home in Santa Monica.  Her son Jake has remained relatively healthy due to a mutation of the CCR5 gene that protects his white blood cells.

Klose said he had been inspired to become an activist by Larry Kramer’s essay “1,112 and Counting” in The New York Native in 1983.  In that essay, Kramer demanded to know why wealthy homosexuals were not responding to the AIDS crisis.

“I read the article, and said to myself, ‘Here I am,'” Klose said.

At the time, Klose was a Beverly Hills developer with strong connections to the LGBTQ community.  He started raising money for the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center of Los Angeles (now the Los Angeles LGBT Center) and the Triangle Institute.

On June 1, 1987, Klose was among those arrested at a White House demonstration protesting the lack of an AIDS response from President Reagan.

He then helped organize and finance lobbying efforts for the 1988 AIDS research and education law, a cornerstone of the comprehensive federal AIDS effort.  He later became co-chairman of the Human Rights Campaign Fund’s board of directors, and helped the fund’s budget grow from $1 million to $5 million in a few years.

In 1991, Klose helped lead a U.S. contingent to the meeting of the International Lesbian and Gay Human Rights Commission in Moscow, one of the first publicized gatherings of LGBTQ people in Russia.

Klose contributed much of his own wealth to organizations conducting HIV/AIDS research and providing social services.  In addition to his earnings as a developer, his wealth included an inheritance from his father, who owned Dairy Queen franchise in Texas, with 800 outlets.

Woodroof’s Dallas Buyers Club was among the most successful of several AIDS buyers clubs that sprang up in the U.S. at a time when effective HIV treatment was not available, according to Biography / A&E Television network.

Diagnosed with AIDS in 1986 and given just weeks to live, Woodroof decided to take his healthcare into his own hands.  He researched various medicines to counteract AIDS’ effects being used in different parts of the world, spending hours in libraries researching experimental treatments.

“I am my own physician,” he was known to say.

Woodroof determined that he would have the best chance of survival if he treated himself with a combination of antiviral medications that were available in other countries but not in the U.S.  He then set about to acquire these medications and use them.

Woodroof, who was an electrician, found that he could legally purchase many of the medications he wanted just over the Texas border in Mexico.  When other AIDS patients came looking for these same medications, the Dallas Buyers Club was born.

He began buying large quantities of the AIDS medications and distributed them out of his apartment in Oak Lawn, Texas. Within months, his club became a huge network of buyers and sellers.  Woodroof’s club served not only local people with AIDS but people around the world who learned about the medications the Texan was making available.

In spite of crackdowns by the FDA and other federal regulators, the Dallas Buyers Club would flourish.  Woodroof would charge club participants a fee for membership and sell the medications to them at cost.  Unable to continue work as an electrician, he embraced the Buyers Club as his full-time job.

Woodroof’s story would become the basis for the 2013 film The Dallas Buyers Club, and actor Matthew McConaughey would play Woodroof and win Best Actor honors at both the 2014 Academy Awards and Golden Globes.

To prepare for his role, McConaughy listened to audio tapes of interviews with Woodroof and read Woodroof’s diaries provided by the family.

“At the beginning of this journey he’s a two-bit cowboy, and by the end of it, he’s a damn scientist,” said McConaughy upon the release of the film.  “He did have an engineering mind, which he’d put to good use to make something of a living as an electrician …  Once he grasped that he had HIV, he gains purpose, he had this one clear thing to do — stay alive. Everything else followed from that.”

Alan was infected with HIV from a blood transfusion administered when he was 2 days old; he was diagnosed with HIV in 1988 at the age of 8.

Upon being informed of her son’s HIV diagnosis, Judy Ritchie became an expert in pediatric HIV/AIDS so she could tend to and, in some cases, fight for Alan’s healthcare needs.  A lifelong resident of Glendale, Ritchie used her knowledge to educate other parents in the community, according to the Glendale News-Press.

“Parents’ attitude [was] this won’t happen to our family,” Ritchie told the News-Press. “We found out it does happen to your family … People were very surprised to find out you could get it that easily … They were very grateful to know what I was telling them and surprised to know how widespread it was.”

Following the death of her son, Ritchie would become PTA President at Herbert Hoover High School in Glendale.  She also continued her relationships with doctors at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, so she could receive and relay information about pediatric HIV/AIDS.

At Ritchie’s urging, Glendale community activist Marilyn Gunnell would found Glendale Leaders for AIDS Awareness during the height of the AIDS epidemic, according to the News-Press.

According to Gunnell, she told Ritchie: “Judy, I will give you my promise that something good will come out of this.”

Glendale Leaders for AIDS Awareness would go onto have a meaningful impact on the city and community.

In 1997, Ritchie would be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a chronic disease of the brain and spinal cord. Still, she remained active in the Glendale community until her death on July 26, 2021.

The hunger strike received worldwide media coverage, drawing attention to the plight of the 215 HIV+ Haitians being detained at Camp Bulkeley along with 52 relatives and dependents, according to the Guantánamo Public Memory Project.

The refugees were supported by many human rights organization, perhaps most ardently by the NAACP.

In February of 1993, six NAACP members in the Miami-Dade branch engaged in a three-week hunger strike to call for better treatment of detainees.  The same month, civil rights leader Reverend Al Sharpton also went on a five-day hunger strike.

As far back as 1991, the NAACP rallied their supporters to engage in civil disobedience to protest the treatment of Haitians in the camps. Activists in south Florida, where a large Haitian-American community lived, responded to the call for action.

The president of the Miami-Dade branch of the NAACP, Johnnie McMillian, organized many of the relief drives for detainees.  McMillian said the refugee camp was “like a concentration camp and a condition which no American would want to experience.”

Still, President Clinton would not release the refugees for another six months.  In June 1993, on the eve of a human rights conference, he finally ordered the release of the refugees in response to a court order from a federal judge who ruled that U.S. could not continue to detain HIV-positive refugees at a location ill-equipped to care for them.

In 1987, the Helms Amendment added HIV/AIDS to the list of diseases that precluded immigration into the U.S., a restriction that remained in place for more than 20 years. In 1993, the law led to the quarantine of 215 HIV+ Haitians in Camp Bulkeley at Guantánamo Bay; 52 relatives and dependents were also housed with them.

Barred from the U.S., the fate of these men, women, and children remained unclear under two presidential administrations, those of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Following the deaths of his friends Ryan White in 1990 and Freddie Mercury in 1991, Elton John established EJAF, a nonprofit organization to support innovative HIV programs focusing on prevention, education, direct care and support services.

In early 1993, John started hosting his annual Foundation Academy Awards Party, which has become one of the biggest Oscar parties in Hollywood and one of the most successful fundraisers anywhere.

The first party was produced by activist Patrick Lippert, according to Claude Bernardin and Tom Stantin in their book Rocket Man: Elton John from A-Z.  Lippert, who was executive director of the 1991 nationwide campaign Rock the Vote, died of AIDS-related illness a few months after the Oscar party.

John continues to throw his Academy Awards viewing party every year, and the event keeps moving to larger and larger venues to accommodate the growing number of attendees to this invitation-only event.  In the late 1990s, the party was held in the upscale Beverly Hills restaurant Spago, and in recent years, the event has been held under white tents erected in West Hollywood Park.

Guests pay an entry fee in order to attend and, once inside, they are encouraged to pledge donations to EJAF in between the Academy Awards broadcast and also make bids in the auction held at the end of the event.  In 2018, the event raised almost $6 million, according to the Los Angeles Times.

EJAF puts donated money toward programs and organizations committed to ending HIV and AIDS.  One current grant recipient is AIDS United and its Fund for Resilience, Equity and Engagement (FREE), which focuses on providing support to Black gay, bisexual, queer and same-gender-loving men and transgender and gender-nonconforming people in the U.S.  EJAF also provides multi-million-dollar grants to HIV/AIDS organizations in Africa and other parts of the world most impacted by HIV infection.

EJAF also has dedicated $125 million to its Rocket Fund, a campaign to ensure that LGBTQ+ people across the globe have access to quality health services responsive to their needs.

Established as one of the top philanthropic funders of HIV/AIDS grants worldwide, EJAF has raised over $600 million to support HIV-related programs in 90 countries, according to EJAF.  The foundation estimates the number of people reached with education, prevention services, treatment, testing and other support to be more than 100 million.

Tittle was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988.  For four years, his sister Ruth Tittle traveled from Lexington, Kentucky to Los Angeles to help care for Loyd.  In 1992, Ruth moved to West Hollywood to care for her brother full-time and to help him with running his West Hollywood businesses.

Loyd suffered from cytomegalovirus (CMV) colitis, and as a result he couldn’t absorb nutrition.  As with many people with AIDS, this condition led to loss of body mass, commonly known as “wasting.”  Loyd was in the hospital 11 times in the last year of his life.

A plaque remembering Loyd Tittle is on the sidewalk in front of Capitol Drugs, part of the AIDS Memorial Walk.  His sister went on to become one of the founding members of the Foundation for The AIDS Monument.  She also served on the City of West Hollywood’s Lesbian and Gay Advisory Board and worked on the Gay and Lesbian Elder Housing project.

Prompted by years of discrimination against gays and lesbians by Los Angeles County Sheriff deputies, Fairchild proposed that West Hollywood create an independent police department, one that could be directed to treat the community with respect.

Fairchild served on the City of West Hollywood’s Public Safety Commission, participated in many ACT UP/LA demonstrations, and campaigned in Sacramento for a state gay rights bill.

In 1991, Fairchild bankrolled an impressive campaign to create a separate police department for the City of West Hollywood after many community members were outraged by the LA County Sheriff’s Department’s overly aggressive response to an LGBT demonstration protesting then-Governor Pete Wilson’s veto of AB 101, the California gay rights bill.  Many community members believed that this was just the latest incident in a long history of discrimination by the Sheriff’s Department against members of the LGBT community.

The new police department initiative was just narrowly defeated — the margin was 51% to 49%, according to John Duran, who co-authored the initiative with Fairchild.

“But it forced the LA County sheriff’s department to reform itself and become more LGBT inclusive,” said Duran.

“The initiative came about because the city has no control over how many officers protect its streets at any given time, and because the sheriff’s price tag increases annually at twice the rate of inflation,” West Hollywood resident Paul Amirault stated in a letter to the LA Times.

“The City of West Hollywood lost a good friend [on] April 16 with the death of gay activist Christopher Fairchild,” said Amirault, who was chair of West Hollywood Citizens for Better Police Protection.

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Photo of quilt panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt

As LA Shanti’s first Executive Director, Warner laid the groundwork for a successful volunteer-run, community-based organization that provided clients with the opportunity and resources to die with dignity.  Under Warner’s leadership, LA Shanti would become a leader in quality service programs using the Shanti model of compassionate presence.

Warner also served as Program Director of the AIDS education group West Hollywood CARES, and organized the National Candlelight March in 1983 and in 1990.

As Warner stepped down from LA Shanti’s leadership team in 1991 and prepared to move to San Francisco, he received Shanti’s first Commitment to Service Award. The same year, he received LA County’s Community Service Award and a certificate of recognition from the state Senate.

Warner served as consultant to two television movies dealing with the subject of AIDS –“Our Sons” on ABC and the Emmy Award-winning “An Early Frost” on NBC.

Warner would die on his 38th birthday with his companion at his side.

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Photo of quilt panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt

Until earlier this year, Owles was a special assistant to State Senate minority leader Manfred Ohrenstein, according to The New York Times.  He was also a founding member of GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which still today monitors the coverage and depiction of LGBTQ people in the media.

Born in Calumet City, Illinois in 1946, Owles attended the University of Illinois and then served in the Air Force.  At the age of 20, he helped found the Gay Activists Alliance in New York City with Arthur Bell, Morty Manford, Martin Robinson and others. As president of GAA from 1970 to 1971, Owles advocated for anti-discrimination legislation in New York City and the state capital.

“It’s a lot more difficult to march out of the closet than to march for peace. It can cost you your job or your career,” Owles said on the eve of the 1971 Pride March in New York City.

While he was president of the Gay Activists Alliance, Owles lived at 186 Spring Street  in a 19th-century row house with other gay activists, including author Arnie Kantrowitz (1940-2022) and scholar Bruce Voeller (1934-1994).  Around 2010-2012, activists tried unsuccessfully to have the building designated as an historical site, due to its history as the home of prominent gay leaders and focal point for activism.  In spite of broad support for the landmarking proposal, the City of New York allowed its demolition.

During the 1970s, Owles was arrested many times during gay rights demonstrations, known as “zaps” (a term that was adopted by ACT UP a decade later).  In January 1973, Owles announced his candidacy for the New York City Council and ran in the district that included Greenwich Village.  In doing so, he became the first openly gay candidate for office in New York City.

He lost to the incumbent councilmember in the primary election, receiving 3,632 votes to his opponent’s 16,814 votes.  It would take another 20 years before gay men would win seats on the NY City Council (with Thomas Duane and Antonio Pagán in 1992)

After his council campaign, Owles founded the Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats, the first gay political club in the city.

In 2004, the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club was formed as a citywide political activist club with a mission to secure human rights, dignity, and freedom for all people.

“Jim Owles was one of the pioneers of the gay rights movement in the 1960s, and his influence and spirit can still be felt today,” the club’s website states.

Created in 1993 to honor people who were lost to the AIDS epidemic, West Hollywood Palms (later re-named the West Hollywood Memorial Walk) became a visual reminder of how the AIDS epidemic impacted the West Hollywood community.

From an idea from West Hollywood resident Timothy Brusso, the service organization Aid For AIDS worked with the City of West Hollywood to coordinate the installation and maintenance of the first in a series of memorial plaques.  In its original conception, a palm tree accompanied each plaque, thus the project name West Hollywood Palms.

Every plaque donation provided funding for Aid For AIDS, which was Los Angeles County’s largest provider of financial assistance to people living with HIV/AIDS.  AFA, which helped thousands of clients each year pay for rent, utilities, food, and pharmaceutical needs, eventually merged with the Serra Project to become the Alliance for Housing and Healing (which currently oversees the West Hollywood Memorial Walk).

In 2000, the memorial plaques and palm trees would be removed for the duration of the Santa Monica Boulevard Reconstruction Project.  Then, in 2003, the plaques would be re-installed on the boulevard between Crescent Heights and Robertson — this time with trees other than palms — and the project would be re-named the West Hollywood Memorial Walk.

On World AIDS Day, Dec. 1, 2003, the Memorial Walk would be re-dedicated in a City Hall ceremony, followed by a procession along Santa Monica Boulevard, during which the names on the plaques were read and flowers placed in honor of each person memorialized.

Currently, the Memorial Walk includes more than 200 plaques.  The Alliance for Housing and Healing administers the Memorial Walk program and maintains a website that contains an application process and an inventory of existing markers.

Perhaps the most famous person memorialized in the Memorial Walk is actor Rock Hudson, whose plaque was arranged by his friend, Elizabeth Taylor.  The names of Ron Stone, a West Hollywood community leader who orchestrated the Cityhood campaign; Daniel P. Warner, founder of the LA Shanti Foundation; and Loyd L. Tittle, popular local pharmacist, are also included on plaques.

For more information, please visit the Alliance for Housing and Healing website.

Dr. Sable was a leader in Chicago in the fight against AIDS.  In 1983, he co-founded with Dr. Renslow Sherer the Sable/Sherer Clinic at Cook County Hospital for the care and research of HIV disease.

In their first year together, Drs. Sable and Sherer worked with 141 patients.

“Dr. Sable was very well respected within the LGBT community,” Dr. Sherer told the Windy City Times.  “I suppose I was in the right place at the right time, or rather, the wrong place at the wrong time. The death and sickness were enough but having the media, the hype and the phobia gave a sort of drama to the issue, especially when you had Reagan who would not openly talk about HIV/AIDS.”

Dr. Sherer said that because Dr. Sable was openly gay, he was able to attract to the clinic the best health professionals and volunteers.

“Gay nurses and clinicians came out to help and that just gave us such an advantage,” Dr. Sherer said.  “[It] made us an even more credible resource.”

Dr. Sable was known in Chicago’s LGBT community as an influential force, both politically and in the treatment of AIDS. In the late 1960s, Sable was a Vietnam medic who brought home with him a new world view.

After studying medicine at the University of Missouri, he moved to Chicago to intern at Cook County Hospital and he would remain there for his entire medical career.  He would become the hospital’s first openly gay physician.

Dr. Sable ran for Chicago City Council in 1987 as an openly gay candidate in the 44th Ward, against incumbent Alderman Bernie Hansen. He lost by just a small percentage of votes.  Still, Dr. Sable’s campaign helped inspire a new generation of activists, some of whom helped organize Chicago’s participation in the 1987 March on Washington.

In 1988, Dr. Sable was selected to be an alternate delegate at the Democratic National Convention.  He was also a strong believer in national healthcare and was a frequent volunteer physician at the Howard Brown Health Center and area prisons.

When Dr. Sable came out as HIV positive in 1993, a large public event was held at the South Shore Cultural Center to celebrate his lifetime of achievements. He was weak, but was able to attend.  He died later that year, and soon after he was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame.

“I miss him every day,” Dr. Sherer told the Windy City Times. “He was a fabulous person, and if I wanted to go out on a limb, I’d say he was one of the best advocates for LGBT rights that this city has ever seen.  He spent half his time treating AIDS patients and the other half standing up for their rights.”

Randy Shilts joined the newsroom of The San Francisco Chronicle in 1981 to report on gay politics, making him the first full-time openly gay journalist in the U.S. mainstream press. As one of the earliest people in the media to recognize the importance of AIDS as a national issue, Shilts dedicated his writing career to bringing the epidemic to the attention of the American public.

He authored three books, including The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk and And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (1980-1985).

Although Shilts had been tested for HIV earlier, Shilts postponed learning the results out of fear the knowledge would compromise his objectivity. He was informed he had tested positive for the virus the day he wrote the final page of And The Band Played On.

When Shilts pitched the book to publishers, he was rejected until St. Martin’s made a modest offer with an advance of $16,000, recalls friend Michael Denneny, who edited the book.  And The Band Played On would go on to sell more than 100,000 hardcover copies, and some 600,000 paperbacks.

“He worked four years on that book,” Denneny says. “He went into debt. At one point, literally to pay his rent, he had to empty this huge water jug full of pennies, nickels and dimes.”

He died while planning a fourth book examining homosexuality in the Roman Catholic Church.

At his memorial service at Glide Memorial Church, his friend and assistant Linda Alband placed his press card on his casket.

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Photo of quilt panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt

Smith worked for the Human Rights Campaign Fund, the nation’s largest LGBTQ political organization, from 1987 until he retired on disability in 1993.  With his credentials as a lawyer, he worked as a lobbyist, legislative director and legislative counsel for the organization.

His achievements included advocacy of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which still today contains prohibitions on discriminating against people with AIDS, and the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act, which provided federal money for cities hit hard by AIDS cases. He also worked on the Hate Crime Statistics Act and lobbying efforts to increase federal funding for AIDS.

Smith was president of the Gay & Lesbian Activist Alliance of Washington from 1983 to 1985, and he later served as director of its human rights project. He was chairman of the Metropolitan Washington Committee on AIDS issues, and he helped organize the National Organizations Responding to AIDS Coalition.

In a 1985 lawsuit against Georgetown University, Smith represented the Gay Rights Coalition and won the suit in 1987 to compel Georgetown to recognize LGBT organizations on campus.

He was born in Geneseo, NY, and graduated from Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Law School.  In 1980, he came to Washington as a lawyer for the United Auto Workers and later worked for the National Labor Relations Board before joining the staff of the Human Rights Campaign Fund.

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Photo of quilt panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt

Johnson brought his experience as a gay rights activist to his position in City Hall, where he was responsible for mobilizing the city’s efforts to address the growing AIDS crisis, according to the Los Angeles Times. He oversaw housing, prevention programs and financial assistance for those too ill to support themselves.

Upon taking the lead at the LA AIDS Coordinator’s Office, Johnson went to work to develop a comprehensive City AIDS Policy, which served as a blueprint for the City’s multi-pronged effort to combat AIDS.  According to the website for LA’s AIDS Coordinator Office, Johnson’s work reflected his dedication to collecting community input, as well as pulling in legal and healthcare expertise from the City Attorney’s Office and the City’s Medical Director.

On October 16, 1990 the AIDS policy (Council File No. 85-0869-S19) was adopted by the City Council, followed by final approval a week later by then-mayor Tom Bradley.

The AIDS Policy included the following:

• The City Attorney’s Office briefed City department heads on their legal duties regarding the epidemic and the impact of AIDS on the workforce;
• Each City department head designated a departmental AIDS Coordinator responsible for ensuring that employees were trained on anti-discrimination, workplace safety and confidentiality principles, and general HIV prevention education; and
• The Office of the AIDS Coordinator routinely pushed the City to advocate for progressive legislation on the state and federal levels.

By establishing a strong role for the City in AIDS prevention and the system of care, Los Angeles became a civic leader nationwide in addressing the AIDS epidemic.  Johnson’s work was key the program’s success.

He turned full time to the AIDS battle after his longtime companion died in 1986, according to the LA Times.

Before taking the city job, Johnson had been a co-founder and first chairman of the United AIDS Coalition of Los Angeles County, an umbrella group of 30 organizations, and executive director of Being Alive Los Angeles.

On September 18, 1989, he spoke at the the first meeting of the National Commission on AIDS about the problems facing AIDS patients and the lack of response by the federal government.

Brown would become one of the country’s leading HIV/AIDS activists, speaking boldly on the need for Black women to be tested for HIV and seek the best treatment available.

Born in January 1966 in Pittsburgh, California in Contra Costa County, Brown had a happy, middle-class childhood until age 4, when she and her mother moved in with an aunt in New Orleans.  Brown told Outwords in a 2021 interview that it was in her aunt’s home where her cousin began molesting her.  Amidst this trauma, Brown was able to find refuge with her grandmothers.

As Brown entered her teenage years, she became aware that she was attracted to women, but felt a social pressure to sleep with men to prove she wasn’t a lesbian.  In her 20s, she struggled with drug use and decided to enter treatment for her addiction when she was 28.

The drug treatment program ran medical tests on Brown and found that she was pregnant and infected with HIV.  This was in 1994, a few years before modern-day antiretroviral therapy (ART), the most effective treatment for HIV, was available.

A nurse informed Brown that she had AIDS, and coldly told her that she and her baby were going to die. A second nurse, however, told her she would live if she followed doctors’ instructions diligently and learned all she could about HIV. She referred Brown to a research trial used AZT to prevent transmission of HIV from mother to fetus.

During 1994-1999, AZT was used to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV.  This treatment, which was highly toxic to human cells, was discontinued after better medication options became available.  But in 1994, AZT was the best medical option available to Brown, and she embraced it.

And on November 29, 1994, Brown gave birth to a daughter, Jamanii, and she was born HIV negative.

Brown’s triumph was hard-won.  Not only was she subjected to the toxic effects of AZT over long months of treatment, but she was treated in a hostile manner by hospital workers who, throughout her pregnancy, openly looked through her medical charts without permission and made judgmental comments about her.

So after she and her newborn daughter was released from the hospital, she decided to hide her HIV condition from everyone, except for select members of her family.

About 10 years later, after Brown relocated from New Orleans to Dallas, she decided to tell her HIV story to a local newspaper.  Then when she returned to New Orleans a few years later in 2007, a local TV news station asked Brown if she would agree to be featured on its popular “Quiet Hero” segment.

Publicly sharing her HIV status was risky, especially in Louisiana, which had a state law that criminalized the exposure of another person to HIV/AIDS through sexual contact.

Still, she decided to do the TV appearance and openly talk about being a 41-year-old Black woman living with HIV.  Afterward, she received an influx of phone calls from women throughout the city inspired by her to seek HIV testing and treatment.

Encouraged by the experience, Brown enrolled in the social work program at Southern University at New Orleans and earned a Bachelor’s degree in 2011 and then her Master’s degree in 2012.  Her openness about her HIV status made her the go-to mentor for younger students.

She started her professional career as an HIV/AIDS advocate at the age of 46 with a job organizing for AIDS United and then a position with the Southern AIDS Coalition.

In 2012, Brown met HIV activist Penny DeNoble at a political campaign training program, and sparks flew.  At first, Brown and DeNoble decided to keep their relationship a secret.  But then, at a 2018 HIV/AIDS conference during a panel discussion, she inadvertently outed herself when she made an offhand comment about dating women.

Brown then wrote a blog post titled “I Have a Secret” on the Southern AIDS Coalition’s website, and officially came out as bisexual.  She was rewarded for her openness and courage with a large response from women grateful to hear her story and realize that they weren’t alone.

Brown and DeNoble have since ended their romantic relationship, but they remain close friends.  She currently is director of strategic partnerships and community engagement for the Southern AIDS Coalition.  She sits on the boards of the Black AIDS Institute and The Well Project, and also supports the Umi Project, which provides college and career guidance and training for girls and women. Through the project, she plans to take girls on college tours of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

In 2022, the Advocate named Brown a “Champion of Pride” for her work in dismantling the stigma of HIV/AIDS in the southern U.S. states.

Smith was instrumental to the political career of Harvey Milk,  the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California.  Smith organized and managed Milk’s campaigns for public office from 1974 to 1977, and he continued to influence Milk after the latter was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977.

In 1972, Milk and Smith were down to their last $1,000 in collective savings when they decided to open Castro Camera, a photography supplies and service shop that would soon serve as Milk’s campaign headquarters.  At the time, Milk and Smith were in a romantic relationship.

According to Randy Shilts in his book The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (1982), Milk and Smith needed to find a cheap place to live and a way to make money.  They chose the Castro District because they heard that apartments there were cheap and they knew of two gay bars there doing booming business.  Castro Camera opened at 575 Castro Street on March 3, 1973.

Later that year, Smith orchestrated the Coors Beer boycott that elevated Milk in the Bay Area’s political scene.  One of the first public displays of power by the gay community, the boycott galvanized support behind Teamsters against the Coors Company, which refused to employ union drivers.   With Smith’s strategy, Milk convinced gay bars to boycott Coors beer and it worked — Coors caved in.  In return, Milk convinced the Teamsters to hire openly gay truck drivers, solidifying Milk’s reputation as an astute political operator.

Milk and Smith followed the success of their boycott with campaigns to elect Milk to public office. First, Milk ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1973 and again in 1975, losing both times.  Then in 1976, Milk was appointed by Mayor George Moscone to the city’s Board of Permit Appeals, but he resigned the position just a few months later to run for the California State Assembly. He lost the Assembly race as well.

Finally, Milk was elected to the Board of Supervisors in the November 1977 election, and he was sworn into office on January 9, 1978, becoming the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California.

When Milk was assassinated on November 27, 1978, Smith’s life was thrown into turmoil.

In the days that followed, Milk’s body was laid in state in the City Hall Rotunda.  On November 29, a memorial service was held at City Hall, followed by another service at Temple Emmanue-El.  Milk’s body was cremated and his ashes were wrapped in a Doonsebury comic-strip to acknowledge his love for newspaper comics, and “RIP” was spelled out in rhinestones.  Smith and a few others of Milk’s closest friends scattered the ashes in San Francisco Bay, according to Bob Kelley, curator of the photo presentation Harvey Milk, Second Sight.

The violent death of the man who had guided Smith’s personal and professional life since he was 22 years old had a devastating impact, according to Randy Shilts in his biography of Milk.

“Since most media attention focused on the political heirs of Harvey Milk — who had long considered Scott to be little more than the camera store’s clerk — Smith became increasingly embittered in the month’s after the assassination, complaining that he had never gotten due credit for propping up the business that gave Milk his political base,” Shilts wrote.

Smith was executor of Milk’s last will and testament, a job that came with the tedious process of resolving Milk’s debts and other open affairs, and he also became head of the Harvey Milk Archives, spending long hours organizing Milk’s papers, speeches, photographs and other ephemera.  Now located in the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library, the Harvey Milk Archives/Scott Smith Collection contains hundreds of photographs of Smith taken by Milk, the latter who sometimes spent entire rolls of film on candid images of his favorite model.

Smith converted Castro Camera into an art gallery.  When more than a year had passed since Milk’s death and Smith was still in the throes of a deep depression, the city’s public health director reached out to Scott with counseling resources.  It was almost two years before Smith could begin reconstructing his life.

In the 2008 feature film Milk, the role of Scott Smith was played by James Franco.

Njoko’s story landed on the newspaper’s front page, which resulted in her being expelled from her church and threatened with death by her partner.  She told the Ilanga that she was diagnosed with HIV a year ago, in 1994, the year of South Africa’s independence from white minority rule.  She was 22 years old, and her doctor told her she had three months before AIDS would end her life.

“I waited … three, four months, I waited for death,“ Njoko told NationNews in a 2010 interview.  “I would make sure that I rested properly in my bed, put my arms on my chest just to make sure that at least in my coffin, I would look decent.  It was very lonely and very emotionally draining and quite sad.”

Njoko decided to become an advocate and activist for HIV-positive people, because of the lack of information about the disease.  She was angry and frustrated.

“There was no information at all, except that it was known as a disease for people who had multiple partners, a disease for gay people and for people who were sex workers,” she said.

She believed that people — particularly women — were becoming infected because they believed they didn’t need to be concerned about HIV if they didn’t belong to any of those groups.  And yet, when her doctor tested her for the AIDS virus, she said that Njoko “fitted the profile — Black, young, from a township, with a child.”

She wanted to raise awareness about the ever-increasing risk of being infected, so she took the courageous step of disclosing her HIV status in the local newspaper.

Just a few years later, Njoko would find herself organizing the funeral of another activist who publicly disclosed her HIV status in media.  Gugu Dlamini, a 36-year-old South African woman who volunteered as a field worker for the National Association of People Living With HIV/AIDS, was stoned and stabbed to death by neighbors in 1998 after she announced on a local radio station that she was HIV positive.

Njoko somehow avoided a fate similar to Dlmini’s and would become a long-term HIV survivor, thriving as a gospel singer and motivational speaker.  But for almost 10 years, she would have to manage her disease largely without the treatment options available in other countries.

In South Africa, antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) would not become available to its citizens until 2004.  Former President Thabo Mbeki and Health Minister Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang questioned the research on ARV treatment for HIV and AIDS.  During this time, Njoko would endure a six-month bout of meningitis, followed by bone-marrow tuberculosis.  Then in 2002, she almost lost her right arm in a car accident, resulting in the permanent limited use of her right hand.

But she perservered, and by 2010, she would be known as the voice for countless women who were still afraid to speak about the issues of rape, abuse and HIV.  Njoko would travel extensively, making her voice heard at conferences and ministering to those living with HIV/AIDS.

In 2016, Njoko would write the musical theatre production In My Own Voice about her journey with HIV against the backdrop of 1990s South Africa, deprived of healthcare resources and rife with intolerance for those with HIV/AIDS.  The show would hold its world premier at the Durban Playhouse in South Afirica on July 22, 2016 on the final evening of the 21st International AIDS conference.

Njoko would also become a key role player in South African Voices: Towards a Museum of HIV Memory and Learning, an AIDS educational project at Durban’s KwaMuhle Museum.  The museum exhibition offered people a space to celebrate achievements in addressing the HIV/AIDS crisis in South Africa.

Njoko continues to pioneer for HIV/AIDS, women’s health and human rights.

“Life can still be lived to its fullest, but it might change a bit from what you envisioned,” she said in 2016.  “Eat properly, follow your treatment, and look after your spiritual and emotional well-being.”

National HIV Testing Day is now held annually to encourage people to get tested for HIV, know their status, and get linked to care and treatment.

The National Association of People With AIDS ceased operations in 2013, National HIV Testing Day continues to be observed annually.

On this day, the CDC and many other organizations distribute free HIV self-testing kits.

Crail, who also served as chair of the West Hollywood Transportation Commission, was known as an enthusiastic booster for the city.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Crail’s civic projects included West Hollywood’s annual Mardi Gras and Bastille Day observances.  He also created the West Hollywood Leadership Council, the Santa Monica Boulevard Association, and the Avenues of Design Association.

On the Transportation Commission, he was a proponent of the Sunset Shuttle, a nationally recognized pioneering effort in short-haul urban transport.

A native of Charleston, Illinois, Crail was educated at the University of Washington. Remaining in Seattle after college, he became a nationally recognized dancer with the American Contemporary Dance Company.  He went on to manage some of the nation’s top dance companies, including the San Francisco Ballet and the Joffrey II Dancers, according to the LA Times.

Crail moved to Los Angeles in 1988 to become executive director of the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, and helped establish the chamber as an influential force in the fledgling city.  In 1994, the City of West Hollywood honored him with its extraordinary service award.

Community members would gather for a celebration of Crail’s life in William S. Hart Park in West Hollywood on the following Sunday.

The West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce would create the Thomas Crail Lifetime Achievement award to honor community members recognized for remarkable service to the City.

* * * * * * * *

Photo of quilt panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt

A native of Chicago who was educated at St. Thomas Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Mich., Boland became an LA County deputy in 1984 and was assigned to the West Hollywood station.  He was fired in 1991 for allegedly falsifying a 1989 report for a drug paraphernalia possession charge.  Boland was charged with felony preparation of false evidence, but a judge dismissed the criminal case in 1992.

Boland sued the LA County Sheriff’s Department for $90 million, claiming he was harassed and fired because of his sexual orientation.  Boland was represented by John Duran, a civil rights attorney who also served as a Councilmember for the City of West Hollywood.

In the wake of his firing, Boland’s cause was taken up by the West Hollywood City Council, which has urged his reinstatement, and by activists in the city’s large gay community.

The controversy stems from an April 1989 incident in West Hollywood during which Boland arrested a man for possession of drug paraphernalia.  At the preliminary hearing, Boland said he discovered that he had made an error in the arrest report.  He told the prosecutor that he had mistakenly written that a bag of syringes was found at the feet of the suspect seated in the front of the car, when they were actually on the floor of the back seat next to a second man whom Boland did not arrest.

The bag belonged to the man who was arrested. Nevertheless, the prosecutor concluded that Boland’s error had tainted the arrest to the point that the charges had to be dropped.

The Sheriff’s Department referred the matter to the district attorney’s special investigations division, which filed two misdemeanor charges and two felony charges against Boland.  The Sheriff’s Department then suspended Boland without pay.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge dismissed the charges in June 1990, saying that Boland’s arrest report was “at best very sloppy,” but added, “I consider (this) a training problem internal (to) the law enforcement agency and not something that we send people to prison over.”

The district attorney’s office appealed the dismissal of the charges, and Boland was reinstated and assigned to the sheriff’s station in Marina del Rey, where he was told to wash and wax sheriff’s patrol boats. In April, 1991, he was fired – for incompetence, his superiors told him.

Boland said, “To this day I cannot understand why this has happened … I was not openly gay.  There were rumors circulated, but I did not ‘come out.’  … I had an excellent relationship with my superiors.”

The West Hollywood Gay & Lesbian Sheriff’s Conference Committee, an independent advisory body that includes a sheriff’s representative from the West Hollywood station, examined the case and concluded that Boland was treated “substantially different than most deputies involved in similar infractions, and more harshly than other deputies involved in considerably more egregious infractions.”

The treatment of Boland prompted outcries of discrimination against gays and fueled calls for the City of West Hollywood to replace the County Sheriff’s services with a private police force.  Ultimately, the Sheriff’s Department decided to reinstate Boland and bring him back to the West Hollywood station, and the deputy responded by dropping his civil suit.

At the West Hollywood City Council meeting on April 20, 1992, Boland thanked the Council for its help and support in getting him reinstated and re-assigned to his West Hollywood post.

Visitors to the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station can see a photo of Deputy Boland which is placed in a prominent location in the lobby, accompanied by the following poem:

“God saw that he was getting tired
and a cure was not to be.
So He put His arms around him
and whispered, ‘Come with me.’

With tearful eyes we watched him suffer
and saw him fade away.
Although we loved him dearly,
we could not make him stay.

A golden heart stopped beating,
hard working hands came to rest,
God broke our hearts to prove to us
He only takes the best.”

An advocate for Black gay writers, Corbin lived and worked in LA for nearly two decades, and helped to found Clean Needles Now to help stop the spread of HIV among intravenous drug users.

Published in 1989, Corbin’s first novel, No Easy Place to Be, described the lives of three sisters during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s as they mingled with real-life writers Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, actor Paul Robeson and others.

“I wanted to say something about Black writers,” Corbin told the Los Angeles Times. “The only thing we remember about the Harlem Renaissance is the Cotton Club, where Blacks danced and sang and did buffoonery.  We do not … remember our novelists, our playwrights and our great actors, such as Paul Robeson.”

Corbin subsequently wrote Fragments That Remain in 1993, telling the story of a Black family whose eldest son has an interracial homosexual love affair, and A Hundred Days From Now in 1994, describing two lovers dealing with AIDS.

“Over the course of his three published novels and the wildly divergent critical reception that they received, Corbin charted and specified the concerns that recur in black gay men’s writing while rendering those concerns with a sense of urgency rooted in his awareness of his position in medias res,” writes Terry Rowden in PEN America.  “His novels served as articulations of the social and expressive parameters of black queer identities in relation to both established and emerging figurations of history, family, race, and mortality.”

He is considered by many to be a groundbreaking queer Black writer.

Born in Jersey City, Corbin began writing after he dropped out of the film program at the University of Southern California. He later went on to teach creative writing at UCLA.

“The last time I saw Steven, I visited him in New York and we had a wonderful dinner at an uptown soul food place, talking books and politics into the wee hours,” wrote his friend Mark Sarvas in the Los Angeles Review of Books.  “He called me a few weeks later and I could hear in his voice that something was wrong.  The bravado crumbled, and I listened to him miles away as his voice broke … That voice haunts me to this day.”

While a member of ACT UP Los Angeles, Corbin was active in the organization’s People of Color Caucus and then joined a small group of activists who were interested in creating a needle-exchange program in Los Angeles.  The result was Clean Needles Now, a robust syringe exchange program that brought clean needles and other supplies via truck to various parts of the city.

He was nominated for a 1994 Lambda Literary Award in the category of gay male fiction.  Shortly before his death, he moved back to New York City.

After testing positive to HIV in 1985, Thompson devoted the rest of his life to the battle against AIDS, according to the Bay Area Reporter.  In addition to being a founding member of Being Alive San Diego, he wrote an 80-page consumer guidebook listing the resources for HIV/AIDS services.

Born in San Diego in 1942, Thompson attended the University of California Berkeley and became involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements on campus.  He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history and remained in San Francisco.

In 1984, he returned to San Diego to care for his ailing mother.  When he became HIV+ a year later, Thompson left his job at Bank of America to become staff coordinator of Being Alive’s Peer Advocacy Program.  Thompson was working at Being Alive in August 1995 when he suddenly collapsed and was unable to return to work.

Shortly before he died, Thompson was honored by the San Diego AIDS Coalition for his dedication and achievements in the services of people with HIV/AIDS.

Born in 1943 in Santo Domingo, Payán  immigrated to the U.S. at the age of 13 and became widely recognized for her role in the Spanish-language telenovela Angelica, Mi Vida.  From there, Payán moved on to roles in the film Scarface and the TV drama Hill Street Blues.  As an advocate of New York’s Latino theater community, she was a founder of the Hispanic Organization of Latin Actors (HOLA).

Payán studied law at Peoples College of Law in Los Angeles and became an attorney in 1981, practicing immigration law.  She also wrote a weekly column on immigration issues for El Diario/La Prensa, the largest Spanish-language daily in the U.S.  It was around this time she contracted HIV from a former lover, for which she did not test positive until 1986.

She still occassionally performed, such as her 1991 role in the video Sesame Street Home Video Visits the Firehouse as Delores, a kindly neighbor who offers Marge and Mr. Monster a place to stay while their house is repaired.

Payán did not publicly disclose her status until October 1993.  Payán’s announcement shocked many in the Hispanic community because she was one of the first Latino celebrities to disclose their HIV-positive status.

“I’m not Magic Johnson or Arthur Ashe,” Payán said at her 1993 press conference to announce her HIV status. “As a public person, I won’t devote myself to being an official spokesperson in the struggle for dignity for people with H.I.V. or AIDS.”

However, Payán scrapped this plan and quickly became “the new darling of AIDS conferences and events,” according to The New York Times.  In December 1993, she was a keynote speaker for a United Nations forum on World AIDS Day.

As a spokeswoman for the battle against AIDS, Payán made numerous public appearances and was widely interviewed by Spanish-language news organizations.  She also received numerous awards for her work, among them a Medal of Honor presented to her by President Joaquin Balaguer of the Dominican Republic.

Around March 1994, Payán had her first opportunistic infection, and subsequently underwent rounds of PCP (Pneumocystis pneumonia), MAC (Mycobacterium avium complex) and streptococcal pneumonia.  Within two years, she was hospitalized for three long stays.

”I remind myself that I am still me,“ Payán told POZ magazine in August 1995. ”Besides, think of all the clothes I can fit into now.”

In the 1990s, Payán worked in the legal department for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), a non-profit, community-based HIV/AIDS organization.

“Agencies like GMHC came out of white, gay, middle-class activism, because those are the people who know how to function in the system,” Payán said in her POZ interview.  “And there’s nothing wrong with that.  If this had been a disease which started with women, nothing would have been done.”

Payán died from AIDS-related complications at her Hell’s Kitchen home on April 6, 1996.

* * * * * * * *

Photo of quilt panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt

Until then, Dancers Responding to AIDS (DRA) had been producing its benefit performances in various places along the East Coast, including Saratoga Springs, SUNY Purchase, Martha’s Vineyard, and Washington DC, according to the Fire Island Pines Historical Preservation Society.

Hernando Cortez and Denise Roberts Hurlin, both dancers with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, founded DRA in 1991, because members of the dance community did not have an AIDS service organization like the music and entertainment (LifeBeat) and design (DIFFA) industries did.  Once established, not only did DRA provide direct financial assistance and other services to all dance professionals with HIV/AIDS, but they extended its services to dance companies’ adminstrative personnel, stage crew members and domestic partners with HIV or AIDS.

At the 1991 NYC Pride Parade, Cortez met Rodger McFarlane, executive director of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.  McFarlane presuaded Cortez to move DRA under the umbrella of BC/EFA, and the association has been a mutually productive one over the years.

By 1995, Cortez had been frequenting the Pines for years and saw the location a potentially good one for a DRA benefit.  Jack Schlegel agreed and offered to co-produce an event at The Pines.  The first festival raised almost $8,000, and it continues as an annual event today.

Born in Manila, Philippines, Cortez spent his early years in British Columbia, where he began his dance training at Vancouver’s Pacific Ballet Theatre and then graduated from Purchase College Conservatory of Dance in 1985. He was invited to join the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 1987.

Cortez was featured in two PBS “Dance in America” specials, and his own choreography was showcased in the Taylor Company’s critically acclaimed hit Funny Papers. He performed with Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project in their 1998 national tour. As a choreographer, Cortez has created dances for the American Ballet Theatre, the Williamstown Theater Festival, and the Sands Hotel in Atlantic City.

An estimated 1.2 million people come to view it, among them President Bill Clinton, First Lady Hillary Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and Second Lady Tipper Gore.

In a 2005 interview with Frontline, Bill Clinton talked about walking on the Mall to view the quilt.

“We walked back and forth to see all the squares, and we were looking for people that we knew,” Clinton said.  “It was a personally emotional thing, seeing the love and devotion that those sections of the quilt represented for all those people who died prematurely, and knowing that now, with medicine, they didn’t have to die anymore, if we did the right things. It was a very emotional day.”

The Quilt was first displayed on the National Mall on Oct. 11, 1987, during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.  At that time, it consisted of 1,920 panels and covered a space roughly the size of a football field.

Today, the Quilt has grown too large to be displayed all at once on the National Mall.  It is an epic 54-ton tapestry that includes nearly 50,000 panels dedicated to more than 105,000 individuals.  It is the premiere symbol of the AIDS pandemic, a living memorial to a generation lost to AIDS and an important HIV prevention education tool.

Each year, the National AIDS Memorial works with hundreds of partners across the country to orchestrate more than 1,000 displays in schools, universities, places of worship, corporations and community centers. On World AIDS Day, December 1st, more than half of the Quilt goes on display around the nation.

New panels are still being made.

[photo by Sue Scheibler, West Hollywood activist]

Harrington was awarded the $240,000 grant in recognition of 10 years’ service to the AIDS community, specifically for his work with TAG in overhauling the U.S. government’s AIDS research program.

“It’s a weird year to have gotten this award,” Harrington told POZ magazine.  “I’d had the sense, after Vancouver and all the hype about the protease inhibitors, that the national media think AIDS is over. This award is recognition that it’s not.”

In his POZ interview, Harrington said he tested positive for HIV in 1990 while living in New York and already two years into his work with ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power).  In the activist community, Harrington was known for his uncanny grasp of medical information and for writing a series of white papers on topics ranging from the failings of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration to problems with various HIV treatments.  He also wrote three editions of ACT UP’s National AIDS Treatment Research Agenda, according to TAG.

In January 1992, Harrington and 20 other members of the Treatment and Data Committee of ACT UP left the parent group to create TAG, a stand-alone nonprofit organization focused on accelerating treatment research.  Harrington became the group’s policy director.

That year, Harrington spoke before an audience of 25,000 at the International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam, and described a new path for AIDS research and AIDS activism, characterized by cooperation rather than antagonism.

During his speech, he gave a call to action to people with HIV/AIDS to take part in clinical research.  And then, in a show of putting his words into action, he exhibited a slide show of HIV-infected cells taken from his own lymph nodes. In this way, many in the audience found out Harrington was HIV positive.

Also in 1992, Harrington coauthored with Gregg Gonsalves a groundbreaking report, AIDS Research at the NIH: A Critical Review, which led to critical restructuring of the AIDS research effort at the National Institutes of Health, then led by Anthony S. Fauci, M.D.

Throughout the ’90s, TAG worked with government scientists, drug company researchers, and FDA officials to expedite the development of new HIV treatment.  Following U.S. governmental approval of several effective antiretroviral drugs in 1995, TAG pressured federal agencies and pharmaceutical companies to conduct research to understand the long-term effects of the new drugs.

The academic community’s recognition of Harrington was not celebrated by everyone in the world of HIV/AIDS activism.  Some of Harrington’s former ACT UP colleagues, including Larry Kramer and George Carter, expressed disappointment in Harrington’s work with TAG and considered it colluding with “the enemy.”

However, many other activists agreed that Harrington was a force for the overall good of the community and that he was very effective at expanding HIV treatment options by working in cooperation with government officials.

In 2002, Harrington would expand his activism to include campaigning to raise awareness of the spread of tuberculosis (TB), a neglected disease with far fewer advocates.

In 2007, Harrington would receive a four-year, $4.7 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to train AIDS activists on the issues surrounding TB and to coordinate outreach with African activist groups, according to Nature Medicine magazine.

Harrington’s activism would be featured in the Academy Award–nominated documentary film How to Survive a Plague (2012). He would go on to co-author many articles for scientific journals, including “From HIV to Tuberculosis and Back Again: A Tale of Activism in 2 Pandemics” (Clinical Infectious Diseases, 2010); “Time for Zero Deaths from Tuberculosis” (Lancet, 2011); and “MSM, AIDS Research Activism, and HAART” (Lancet, 2012).

In 2018, his colleague Gregg Gonsalves would be named as a MacArthur Fellow and  become the second HIV/AIDS activist to receive the “Genius Grant.”

Kuti was meant to be a doctor, an upstanding member of Nigeria’s elite like his parents, according to The Guardian.  At age 20, he studied pre-med in England, where his first cousin, playwright Wole Soyinka, was already making a name for himself.

“Instead, Fela Ransome-Kuti became infamous, an outlaw musician who declared himself president of his own ‘Kalakuta Republic,’ a sprawling compound in the suburbs of Lagos that housed his recording studio and offered sanctuary to the dispossessed,” writes Neil Spencer of The Guardian.

Rebelling against oppressive regimes through his music would come with a heavy cost for Kuti. Over his lifetime, he would be arrested 200 times and endure numerous beatings from government officials.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Kuti’s subversive song lyrics established him as political dissident, resulting in Afrobeat to be associated with making political, social and cultural statements about greed and corruption. One of Kuti’s most popular songs, “Zombie,” questions Nigerian soldiers’ blind obedience to carrying out orders.  Another, “V.I.P. (Vagabonds in Power),” seeks to empower the disenfranchised masses to rise up against the government.

At his club, the Shrine, his band played until dawn while dozens of singers and dancers writhed and glittered amid drifts of igbo smoke. Here, Nigeria’s corrupt dictators were denounced and ancient Yoruban deities honoured, all to a relentless backdrop of the “Afrobeat” that Fela had distilled from the musical collision of Africa and black America.

At his death from AIDS-related illiness in Lagos, Nigeria, Fela would leave behind seven children, 50-odd albums and a musical legacy that has been kept alive by his sons and former drummer, Tony Allen

Roughly 1 million people would attend his funeral procession, which began at Tafawa Balewa Square and ended at Kuti’s home, Kalakuta, in Ikeja, Nigeria, where he is laid to rest in the front yard.  Belatedly, Afrobeat would become a cause célèbre among young European and American music fans.

* * * * * * * *

Photo of quilt panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt

Here is the speech that Stokes delivered at the event:

“When we talk about AIDS, we talk a lot about numbers. Numbers that can be overwhelming or intimidating. But we need to look more closely at the numbers … until we begin to see the real lives they represent.

“Today, I’d like to share a few personal numbers with you. The first numbers are 13 and 16. I was infected with HIV at 13 and diagnosed at 16. While my peers were planning their futures, I was being harshly told that I would not live to see 21. That was the year I realized some children die before they have a chance live.

“The next number is 3. That’s how many years it took for me to get the information I needed to combat my disease. I didn’t learn that HIV was a sexually transmitted disease until I was almost 20. No one in my community was willing to talk to someone else’s child about sex – or about AIDS. I suffered greatly with a severe case of unanswered questions. Many youth today are being tragically diagnosed in the prime of their lives because we are too timid to talk candidly about AIDS. We are too afraid to keep our children alive long enough to make healthier choices.

“13. That’s how many pills I take each day to help sustain my health. Pills that are not easy to take and that leave me feeling nauseated and tired. But they are all I have right now – and they keep me alive, I am happy to have them. But they are pills that are not easy to come by. Many of my peers have no access to the latest medicines. Therefore, they have no access to the hope experienced by many – with each new improvement. They sit by and watch people live longer, healthier lives while they still suffer with preventable infections.

“5. That’s how many hours I sat on a hospital curb in my own urine while trying to get treatment for an allergy to an AIDS medicine. 5 hours of suffering when I was only a hundred feet from the source that could alleviate the fierce itching and burning was ravaging my swollen body. But no one had the time to help me. It wasn’t in anyone’s job description to escort a patient to the pharmacy. Especially an undesirable looking patient like I was that day. I experienced the same indifference that many people in my community experience when seeking care. We are not able to walk into hospitals waving insurance cards or cash. We are not able access the good, quality healthcare that all human beings deserve. While we muster the strength and courage to take an active role in our care, we are being stripped of our dignity by the system that’s supposed to help us.

“1.
– Look into the eyes of one person being diagnosed with HIV for the 1st time.
– Tell a homeless young man with HIV that he has to wait one more year to get housing because the resources are not yet available.
– Tell one young woman that you can’t fill her prescription for the medicine that will give her life – because she has no money.
– Tell one child this his mother won’t be coming home anymore because she died today of AIDS related complications.

“Do any one of these things and you will understand what this 156 million dollars means to black and other minority communities. This initiative is important because the moneys allocated and the commitments made here today will positively impact communities in dire need of support services. And just maybe, not one more of these travesties will occur on my home-front.

“The last number I want to share with you today is Zero. I demand that we be liable until there are no new infections. That we do what’s necessary to save lives and not what’s popular. Until there are no more people desperately seeking care only to find the doors closed. Until there are no more people suffering with AIDS, we have to stay committed. Just as committed as the President, The Vice President and The Congressional Black Caucus. Just as committed as Sandra Thurman, Secretary Shalala, Dr. Satcher, The Advisory Council on AIDS and many others who worked tirelessly on this important issue.

“Zero is our goal. Because no more can we sit idly by and watch AIDS consume minority communities. We must maintain the momentum that we have gained today – because HIV is maintaining its momentum.

“No more addicts needlessly infected with one disease simply because they have another one. Addicts should have the services AND the tools they need for effective prevention.

No more lives thrown carelessly aside
No more memorial services
No more screaming mothers
No more broken spirits … or broken hearts.
No more disparity in minority communities.
No – more – AIDS.

Dlamini, a volunteer for a local HIV/AIDS organization, disclosed her HIV-positive to raise awareness about the prevalence of the disease in her community in an attempt to curtail its spread.  She lived in KwaZulu-Natal (now known as Ntuzuma B), a province just outside the city of Durham, South Africa that at the time had the highest incidence of HIV infection (30% of adult residents).

After Dlamini announced her HIV status in the media, neighbors threatened her and told her to stop disparaging their community.  A week before she was murdered, Dlamini was physically attacked by a local man who ordered her to “keep quiet” about her illness.

According to a report in a local newspaper, Dlamini reported the assault to police, but they did not respond.  Shortly afterward, a group of men broke into her house and beat her in front of her 12-year-old daughter.  She died the next day.

News of Dlamini’s death brought worldwide attention to the level of stigma in South Africa and the world in general for people living with HIV/AIDS.

Twelve years later, Dlamini’s daughter, Mandisa Dlamini, founded the Gugu Dlamini Foundation to maintain the fight against HIV/AIDS and gender-based violence.  Mandisa Dlamini also returned to KwaZulu-Natal and turned the house where her mother was murdered into an AIDS museum where “women and girls stigmatized and discriminated can find sense of belonging. “

Pabich campaigned for Milk for State Assembly in 1976 and then for Milk’s successful campaign in 1977 for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

“Dick towered over everyone, especially with his big poof of permed, bleached-blond hair.  He was 20 years old and couldn’t have weighed more than 120 pounds. It was as if a snowy egret had landed among us sparrows,” friend Jim Rivaldo recalled in his tribute to Pabich in POZ magazine.

“Dick’s effete, imperious demeanor might have seemed out of place, but it was soon understood that he had the instincts of a bare-knuckle fighter for the disenfranchised,” Rivaldo wrote.

When Milk won his supervisor’s race, he made Pabich his political aid.  Pabich leveraged his new position to organize the LGBT-fueled campaign to defeat State Senator John Briggs’ Proposition 6, which would have banned gay teachers from California’s public schools.

Following Milk’s assassination on November 27, 1978, Pabich co-founded with Rivaldo the first gay political consulting firm.  Pabich and Rivaldo collaborated on various campaigns, including those for Harry Britt (who succeeded Milk on the Board of Supervisors) and Carole Migden (who in 1996 would go on to become the second openly gay lesbian state legislator).

Pabich served on the University of California AIDS Research Advisory Committee, according to the San Francisco Examiner.  He has been credited with playing a primary role in shaping AIDS policies across the U.S.

After working on Willie Brown’s campaign for mayor of San Francisco, Pabich retired but still remained active on LGBTQ and AIDS issues, according to AP News.

“When AIDS caused Dick’s health to fail, his powerful sense of duty wouldn’t let him step aside completely,” Rivaldo wrote.  “He organized [Mayor] Brown’s Summit on AIDS and established the Mayor’s Office of HIV/AIDS Policy in 1998 as an unpaid volunteer. As his final act of community service, he poured his waning energy into ensuring that Harvey’s long-delayed dream of a gay community center would be realized.”

In the 2008 feature film Milk, the role of Dick Pabich was played by Joseph Cross.

Born in 1943 in a Japanese internment camp in Wyoming known as Heart Mountain, Kuromiya would go on to devote his life to the struggle for social justice.

During the 1960s, Kuromiya became a prominent opponent of the Vietnam War.  In 1967-68, he was an assistant to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and he took care of King’s children following his assassination.  He then moved to New York City, and in July 1969, following the rebellion at the Stonewall Inn, Kuromiya was among the gays and lesbians who founded the Gay Liberation Front.

“GLF tapped into the radical sentiments brewing among young, countercultural, and political gays and lesbians in New York City — and mobilized the energy and eagerness for political action that many felt in the days following Stonewall,” according to OutHistory.  In the ways that the GLF organized (patterned after the the women’s movement) and conducted meetings, the organization can be seen as a direct predecessor to ACT UP.

Kuromiya was diagnosed with AIDS in 1989 and immediately researched everything he could about HIV/AIDS. He became a self-taught AIDS expert who believed that patients fared best when they understood the disease, explored treatment options, and actively participated in medical decisions.

Kuromiya became involved in all aspects of the AIDS movement, including radical direct action with ACT UP Philadelphia and the ACT UP network, People With AIDS empowerment, national and international research advocacy, and the mentorship and care for hundreds of people living with HIV.

Kuromiya was the editor of the “ACT UP Standard of Care,” the first standard of care for people living with HIV produced by PWAs.  He also ran a community medicine chest to help patients get free drugs and ran a 24-hour hotline for patients needing information — even prisoners calling collect.

Kuromiya is perhaps best known as the founder of the Critical Path Project newsletter.  Published by the service organization Philadelphia FIGHT and containing information gathered by Kuromiya, the newsletter was one of the earliest and most comprehensive sources of HIV treatment information.  It was routinely mailed to thousands of people living with HIV all over the world, including hundreds of incarcerated individuals.

Kuromiya understood science and was involved locally, nationally and internationally in AIDS research as both a treatment activist and clinical trials participant.  He fought for research that involved the community in its design – particularly people of color, drug users, and women.

In the last years of his life, Kuromiya turned his attention to the struggle to maintain freedom of speech on the Internet, participating in the successful lawsuit against the Communications Decency Act.  He was also the leading plaintiff in the 1999 Supreme Court case Kuromiya vs. The United States of America, which called for the legalization of marijuana for medical uses.

Mayor Brown presented the proclamation at a University of California at San Francisco AIDS Research Institute event honoring Congresswoman Lee.

“This is truly an honor, and I am very grateful and humbled to receive this proclamation on International Women’s Day,” Congresswoman Lee said.  “The U.S. Congress is finally realizing that the HIV/AIDS pandemic is not a Republican or Democratic issue, but a disease that threatens the entire human family.”

Lee was instrumental in making the Congressional Black Caucus’ Minority AIDS Initiative a growing source of funding for the cities hit hardest by HIV/AIDS, such as her constituent areas of Oakland and San Francisco.”

Congresswoman Lee was also honored as the first recipient of the annual Auxillia Chimusoro Award, given by the UCSF AIDS Research Institute’s Center for Global Research on Women’s Health.  The award is named after Auxillia Chimusoro, the first woman in Zimbabwe to declare openly her positive HIV status.

Upon returning from the 2001 AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, Congresswoman Lee successfully authored an amendment that increased by $42 million the Foreign Operations Budget for international HIV/AIDS programs.

She also co-authored the Global AIDS and Tuberculosis Act of 2000, which was signed into public law on August 19, 2000, by President Clinton. That bill created the World Bank AIDS Trust Fund.

Starke worked in social services throughout his life, helping at-risk youth, individuals with substance abuse problems, and people with HIV/AIDS. He was also involved in the distribution of HIV/AIDS medical updates by Being Alive, AIDS Project Los Angeles, and the Positive Images Consortium.

Starke was a member of the West Hollywood HIV and Substance Use Services Providers Consortium and an employee of Being Alive, an organization by and for people with HIV/AIDS, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The City of West Hollywood would memorialize Starke by creating the Paul Starke Warrior Awards, awarded each year on World AIDS Day to recognize employees and volunteers of local agencies who have done exemplary work in providing prevention, education and direct HIV/AIDS services.

Kight, who served for more than 20 years on the LA Human Rights Commission as its most senior member until his retirement in 2002, dies in his sleep at the Carl Bean Hospice.

He was hospitalized last month in declining health with a variety of ailments, including liver cancer, heart problems and eventually pneumonia. His health was further compromised by a series of strokes suffered late in life.

The co-founder of the Gay and Lesbian Community Service Center of L.A. (now called the Los Angeles LGBT Center), Kight also was a key organizer of the West Coast’s first gay pride parade and celebration in 1970, which effectively galvanized the modern gay rights movement in Los Angeles. The parade has drawn nearly 500,000 people in recent years.

In 1983, Morris helped found Aid for AIDS, a community organization that raised money to give to people with AIDS for emergency payment of rent, mortgages and utilities to enable them to die with dignity at home.

Later a friendship developed between AIDS activist Michael Weinstein, who went on to co-found the Chris Brownlie Hospice in 1987 and subsequently, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, writes the Blade Los Angeles.

His memorial at Metropolitan Community Church in West Hollywood would draw scores of dignitaries and old friends.

Over the course of the day, 77 other same-sex couples in Massachusetts were married, and hundreds more applied for marriage licenses.

On November 18, 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Court found the state’s ban on same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional, citing the state constitution’s ban on the creation of second-class citizens. The court then gave the state 180 days in which to change the law. Efforts by some legislators to amend the state’s constitution with a same-sex marriage ban were defeated, and on May 17, 2004, the state adopted a policy of marriage equality.

Same-sex marriage became legal in all 50 states on June 26, 2015, after the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that states must issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions.

Many scholars in the field of gender and sexuality studies have said that marriage equality is directly linked culturally, socially, and legally to HIV/AIDS activism.

“It is impossible to look at the 22-year-long fight for marriage equality outside of the framework of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and equally impossible to look at today’s attitudes toward HIV/AIDS as unconnected to the cultural impact of the fight for marriage equality,” Harvard professor Michael Bronski wrote one year after the Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage to be a fundamental right under the U.S. Constitution..

Bronski’s view was that granting marriage rights to same-sex couples was fueled by prejudicial ideas around the need to “civilize” gay men — “a deeply conservative argument that preyed on fear and loathing both within and outside of the LGBT community.”

Others saw the link between the AIDS crisis and marriage equality to be a more positive one.  In “Creating & Curating Change: AIDS Activism & the Fight for Same-sex Marriage in Hawai‘i” at the UH-Mānoa Hamilton Library, the exhibit explored the connection between AIDS activism and the campaign for marriage equality.  A theme of the exhibit is how the activism in the 1980s and 1990s around HIV/AIDS healthcare and legal rights fueled the campaign for marriage rights for same-sex couples.

“Unbeknownst to many, the HIV and AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s sparked the fight that led to the victory for marriage equality in America,” wrote Kelsey Louie and Jordan Sang for POZ magazine shortly after the Supreme Court decision.

Louie and Sang pointed out that during the worst years of the AIDS crisis, the immense death and loss was compounded by the harm caused by the lack of legal recognition of same-sex partners.  One example was hospitals’ policy of not allowing gay men to visit their dying partners, because they were not “family members.”

Gay men were also also excluded from important medical decisions concerning their partners and given no legal standing in wills, leases, and other matters.  Much of the activism and advocacy about AIDS and HIV focused on securing legal rights for people living with AIDS and their partners.

On the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, NBC News produced a news feature that explored how the AIDS crisis “accelerated gay rights in America” and helped to make marriage equality the law of the land.

This day would be observed annually on May 19 to raise awareness about the impact of HIV and stigma among Asian and Pacific Islander communities.

In years to come, organizations around the country would observe the day by hosting community events.  The Banyan Tree Project – a national campaign to end silence and shame about HIV/AIDS in Asian and Pacific Islander communities — leads this day with the Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center in collaboration with national partners APAIT Los Angeles, Life Foundation (Honolulu) and MAP for Health (Boston). The campaign includes capacity building assistance, leadership development and HIV awareness promotional events and marketing.

Bono and Shriver founded PRODUCT (RED) in an effort to fight the Africa AIDS epidemic.  With a plan to engage the producers of “world-class consumer goods” and consumers, the two sought to transform commercial profit to fundraising gold.

Each time someone buys a (PRODUCT) RED product, up to 50% of the profit goes to The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which provides AIDS medicine funding to African countries.

Based in New York, (RED)’s focus is on eliminating HIV/AIDS in eight African countries: Swaziland (formerly Swaziland), Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zambia,

(RED) is currently licensed to companies including Apple Inc., Nike, The Coca-Cola Company, Starbucks, Converse, Electronic Arts, Primark, Head, Buckaroo, Gap, Armani, FIAT, Hallmark, Beats Electronics, and Supercell. The Global Fund is the recipient of Product Red’s money, according to the (RED) website.

(RED) is a division of The ONE Campaign, a global movement to end extreme poverty and preventable disease by 2030.  ONE pressures governments to increase their efforts to fight extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa.

While (RED) focuses on raising awareness and contributions for the AIDS fight, ONE advocates the public sector to garner both support and government funding for all three preventable diseases the Global Fund supports: AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. Working in tandem, (RED) and ONE work to achieve their shared goals of economic empowerment and disease prevention.

In late 2021, Apple reported raising nearly $270 million for the (RED) initiative through the sale of products to its customers.

“Apple-supported grants have enabled care and support services for over 11 million people, provided over 192 million HIV tests, and allowed over 13.8 million people access to lifesaving antiretroviral treatments,” Apple’s report states.  “In 2020 alone, Apple’s support for (RED) helped prevent over 145,000 HIV-positive mothers from passing the virus on to their babies.”

Hattoy quit his decades-long job as regional director of the Sierra Club in Los Angeles to join Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign during the 1992 primary.  Shortly thereafter, he learned that he had AIDS-related lymphoma and began chemotherapy treatments.  That didn’t stop him from stumping for Clinton in front of AIDS and gay and lesbian communities all over the nation.

Political activist and author David Mixner remembered well Hattoy’s groundbreaking speech to the delegates of the 1992 Democratic Convention, made shortly after receiving his diagnosis.

“The hall was in the usual hubbub that passes for normal even when speeches are going on. But as Bob Hattoy mounted the podium, stillness fell over the entire place,” Mixner recalled.  “One by one, the delegates stood up, until all 5,000 people were on their feet in respect.”

Hattoy then said the opening words of his speech: “This is difficult.”

“There was not a dry eye in the nation that night,” said Mixner.  “Those of us in the hall had black armbands to honor those we knew who had died of ADIS and held onto each other as he spoke.  It was as if at last we were finally being heard after a decade of horror, death and abandonment.”

Jackie McCort of the Sierra Club said of watching her former colleague at the convention: “We gathered around the TV together that night, so thrilled and touched that ‘one of our own’ was speaking so eloquently to the American people.  Doggone, we were proud!”

Beginning in 1993, Hattoy worked in the Clinton administration as a deputy in the White House Office of Personnel.  In the Old Executive Office Building next door to the White House was Hattoy’s office, which he shared with a colleague.  On his desk was a rainbow pride flag and on the walls were photos of he and his boyfriend.

There, he spent most of his days overseeing the search and screening process for potential hires for midlevel posts in agencies like the Interior Department and Environmental Protection Agency.  But Hattoy also saw his role as largely that of internal agitator, checking up almost every day on the progress of issues with more senior officials and sharing those developments with key members of his network.

“I never think of Bob as someone on the White House staff,” said activist Larry Kramer.  “I think of him as our mole.”

In March 1993, when President Clinton said he was considering restrictions on the roles gays and lesbians might be allowed to take in the military, Hattoy compared that to “restricting gays and lesbians to jobs as florists and hairdressers” in civilian life.  This public outburst branded Hattoy as unpredictible and potentially problematic to the Clinton administration.

In a June 1993 wine-fueled interview with The New York Times, Hattoy said, “Basically, I’m an activist first and a White House employee second.  If they fire me, I’ll go to work in a lesbian bakery. But they won’t fire me. We’ve been in too many wars together.”

The next year, to decrease his visibility, the administration appointed him to the position of White House liaison on environmental matters at the Interior Department, where he remained until 1999.  He also served as chairman of the research committee of the Presidential Commission on HIV/AIDS.

“Having been a lobbyist and activist for 20 years, I’d be perfect on the Hill or with community groups or other political coalitions they need to maintain relationships with and keep going — I mean with the progressive community,” Hattoy told POZ magazine in April 1994.  “I originally wanted to do that. That didn’t happen, I think, because — well, I know why.”

“For 25 years, I’ve been an outspoken activist, outspoken about what I’ve believed in and cared about. And for a while that fit perfectly into helping to identify who Bill Clinton was as a human being, to show that he meant it when he talked about how there’s no such thing as Them and Us in America,” he explained.  “When I continued to speak out after the election, it became off-message, I think a lot of people in the White House didn’t know what to do with me.”

A few years after the White House job ended, California Governor Gray Davis appointed him to the California Fish & Game Commisison, which Hattoy promptly joked he would work to rename the “Swish and Fish Commission.”  The post was unpaid and required hundreds of hours of work, with more than a dozen public hearings each year, site inspections, lobbying and other responsibilities.

In the months before his death, he worked on the California Marine Protection Act, creating huge expanses of sea that are like protected state parkland, only underwater.  For environmentalists and preservationists, the legislation was an historic victory, for which Hattoy deserved much of the credit.  Soon after, he was elected Chairman of the commission.

Throughout the years, Hattoy battled recurrent pneumonia and other complications several times and suffered a bone marrow infection a few weeks before his death, but was generally healthy and extremely productive throughout his years with AIDS.

Following Hattoy’s death, former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton released a joint statement:

“We have lost a pioneer, a leader, and a friend. Bob Hattoy devoted his life to the fight for civil rights and social justice for the gay community and people living with AIDS.  We will always be grateful for his courageous and moving speech at the 1992 Democratic National Convention and afterward, for his years of dedicated service in the administration. He gave hope to a community that feared their voice would never be heard at the highest levels of government.”

Dr. Hitt was chairman of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) in President Bill Clinton’s administration in the 1990s.

In 1996, when President Clinton called for a cure for HIV, a vaccine and a guarantee of quality care for AIDS patients, Dr. Hitt turned his focus to the rapid spread of the disease among intravenous drug users and pressured federal agencies to develop more ways to address the issue, such as programs funding free clean needles, according to The New York Times.

In April 1998, President Clinton’s administration followed PACHA’s recommendation to lift the ban on federal funding of needle exchange programs.  However, the president simultaneously announced that these programs would not receive federal funding.

“At best this is hypocrisy, at worst, it’s a lie,” Dr. Hitt said at the time.  “And no matter what, it’s immoral.”

After leaving office, Clinton acknowledged that he had pulled his punches on needle exchange, and he wished he had had the political courage to release federal funds for the programs.

John Duran, the then-mayor of the City of West Hollywood and a longtime friend of Dr. Hitt, told POZ magazine, “I think Scott’s legacy was drawing AIDS to the attention of the president. He was uncompromising.  He was not afraid of challenging the president about what would make good public policy.”

Dr. Hitt “took the fight against AIDS to a whole new level,” HIV/AIDS activist and political strategist David Mixner told the Los Angeles Times.

With Dr. Hitt, Mixner co-founded Access Now for Gay and Lesbian Equality (ANGLE), a Los Angeles-based political organization that raised considerable funds to advance LGBT and AIDS issues.

“As the epidemic changed,” Mixner said, “he was one of the leaders who insisted on changing the face of the fight against AIDS to include people of color. That was one of his greatest contributions.”

Dr. Hitt began practicing medicine in 1983, just as the full force of  the AIDS crisis was devastating the lives of many Los Angeles County residents.  According to the Bay Area Reporter, he was a member of the Pacific Oaks Medical Group in Beverly Hills, one of the largest private HIV practices in the country.  He practiced as an HIV/AIDS doctor until 2000, about a year after he was diagnosed with colon cancer.

Dr. Hitt was survived by his longtime partner, Alex Koleszar, a Los Angeles artist who has had exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and in Florence, Italy at the Biennale, according to Matt & Andrej Koymasky’s website.  Hitt was in medical school when he met and fell in love with Koleszar.

“I was so happy,” Koleszar said about the day Hitt proposed to him. “It couldn’t have been more romantic. I was waiting for the lightning bolt to strike.”

Delaney was among the most influential HIV treatment activists in the United States, according to Elaine Woo’s obituary of Delaney in The Los Angeles Times.  Although not HIV-positive himself, Delaney was passionate about speeding up the development of HIV therapies, and forged productive relationships with federal agencies as well as with pharmaceutical companies and researchers.

“Millions of people are now receiving life-saving antiretroviral medications from a treatment pipeline that Marty Delaney played a key role in opening and expanding,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who led early AIDS research at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “Without his tireless work and vision, many more people would have perished from HIV/AIDS…. He was a formidable activist and a dear friend.”

Delaney’s death was announced by Project Inform, the San Francisco-based education and advocacy group he founded in 1985 with psychotherapist Joe Brewer.  Delaney also helped to establish the National HIV Treatment Hotline, which fielded thousands of calls a year from people in need of information about HIV and AIDS.

Project Inform was launched in response to Delaney’s frustration with the bureaucratic delays around the testing of new treatments.  The organization created controversary in 1989, when it conducted its own clinical trial of an experimental drug called Compound Z.  Although several patients died during the trial, the medication proved effective enough to eventually be approved.

A year later, largely through Delaney’s actions and advocacy, the U.S. Public Health Service adopted a policy allowing patients with HIV and AIDS to receive experimental drugs while they were still in research studies.

Although the policy initially addressed the need for people living with AIDS to access experimental treatment, thousands of people facing other life-threatening diseases have benefited.

Dr. Fauci was among the top scientists who initially opposed the policy change, but it was Delaney who eventually changed his mind, he told the LA Times.  In the mid-1980s, Delaney arranged for the doctor to meet gay men with HIV and AIDS who desperately wanted access to experimental treatments.

“A lot of activists were promoting it.  But it was Marty who convinced me by bringing me face to face with people who actually needed it,” said Dr. Fauci, who said he considers Delaney a public health hero.

Delaney was also close to Robert Gallo, MD, who helped discover the AIDS virus. Hearing of Delaney’s passing, Dr. Gallo issued a letter praising the activist as the rare lay person who possessed “an uncanny understanding of the science of HIV/AIDS,” and was the singular person who could succeed in “bridging the gap” between the research community and patients.

Delaney was born in 1945 in Chicago. He trained to become a Roman Catholic priest but dropped out of seminary to teach elementary school. He later became a management consultant with clients including IBM and Bank of America.

In 1978, after learning that he had Hepatitis B and had been given only months to live, he moved to California to participate in a Stanford University clinical trial of the drug interferon.  When the treatment put him into remission, he began to ask why more patients couldn’t have access to the experimental treatment.

“He said it was better than dying,” his sister, Lois Delaney-Ogorek, told the LA Times.

Delaney, who was gay, was living in Sausalito in the early 1980s when many of his friends began dying of a mysterious disease. He began to help smuggle drugs from Mexico and China — including ribavirin and isoprinosine — that were thought to have immune-boosting properties crucial to fighting AIDS.  So deep were his convictions, that he was willing to risk arrest and jail time to provide people living with AIDS with access to the drugs.

Through Project Inform, he began holding town hall meetings across the country to share information about the effectiveness of various treatments. He also launched what he described as “medically supervised guerrilla trials” of promising drugs that AIDS patients were using despite the lack of FDA approval.

Explaining his rationale on a 2004 episode of the PBS show Frontline, he said: “It struck us as very clear and very simple that people with a life-threatening illness should have a different rule book than people in general when it comes to accessing new drugs.”

In the Frontline interview, he said that AIDS took the lives of 80% of his friends and many more were living with HIV.

“There were times in the early 1990s where I swear that not a single day would go by in which someone I knew somewhere in the country didn’t die,” Delaney said.  “It’s meant, for a lot of us, devoting our lives to this work, because how could you not do so?”

“Gay and bisexual men make up roughly 2% of the U.S. population, but we account for 53% of new HIV infections,” Bond wrote on the website for the White House’s Office of National AIDS Policy.  “We are the only group where HIV infection rates are rising.”

In his blog post, Bond announced he had been living with HIV since 2001, and discussed how he was invested in the success of the White House’s new HIV/AIDS Strategy, released under President Barack Obama.

“I want to share a personal perspective on the importance of the recently released National HIV/AIDS Strategy for the United States that was issued by the Obama Administration in July,” Bond wrote.  “While I work closely with the Office of National AIDS Policy, I was not directly involved in writing the plan, but I clearly have a personal stake in the mission.”

When Bond was appointed in January 2009 as the Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, he became the first openly gay person to hold this position.

“From day one of President Obama’s administration, he encouraged people to push collectively to do better,” Bond told Philadelphia Gay News reporter Mark Segal in 2016.  “It is activists’ job to bring issues to the forefront and push. I think that’s an important component of this. We have to have people both working on the inside and the outside to bring about real change, which is what this community has done very effectively.”

Prior to working in the White House, Bond served as the National Constituency Director for the Obama for America Campaign in Chicago and the Executive Director of the Democratic National Committee’s Gay and Lesbian Leadership Council, according to The Advocate.

He also served several years as the Executive Director of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, an organization committed to training and electing Out LGBT candidates for public office.  Bond got his start in politics as the executive director of the Missouri Democratic Party, according to CBS News‘ “11 HIV-Positive Icons You Should Know.”

He was born in Jaspar County in rural Missouri, where his mother was a notable leader in the Missouri Democratic Party. He came out to his parents in high school and, inspired by his mother’s involvement in local politics, he left home to study Public Administration at Missouri State University in Springfield.

At almost 40 years old, Bond discovered he was HIV positive.  About this time in his life, he said, “For some of us, we don’t come out once, but twice.”

In 2019, Bond would become Executive Director of PFLAG, an LGBTQ advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.

In the mid-1980s, Taylor became the most prominent celebrity to back what was then a very unfashionable cause: AIDS research, prevention and care.  It started with a 1984 dinner benefit for the nonprofit AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA), for which she began calling her A-list friends to solicit their support.

“She took this energy that she used to have a career, and she put it into AIDS, for no other reason than her friend [Rock Hudson] had gotten ill,” AIDS activist and comic writer-performer Bruce Vilanch said at a 2021 event hosted by the Foundation for The AIDS Monument.  “The reason Elizabeth was so successful was everybody in the world would take her call — even the Pope — if only to discuss jewelry.”

Over the years, Taylor reportedly was responsible for raising more than $270 million and influencing countless elected officials to support the cause.

In 1985, she, along with Dr. Michael Gottlieb and Dr. Mathilde Krim, founded the non-profit American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR).  Immediately, Taylor began lobbying then-President Ronald Reagan and members of Congress to address the epidemic by allocating funds to research the treatment and prevention of the virus.  In 1986, she appeared in amfAR’s first public service TV ads to heighten AIDS awareness and encourage compassion for people with AIDS.  Taylor was instrumental in expanding amfAR’s operations to other countries.

In 1991, she founded the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation (ETAF), a non-profit organization that took a more personal approach to the AIDS epidemic.  With ETAF, Taylor sought to advocate for and provide direct care to those who faced the highest levels of stigma, marginalization, and discrimination.  Today, ETAF continues to carry forward Taylor’s mission, with heart and hope, until the end of HIV/AIDS.

Taylor testified before the Senate and House for the Ryan White Care Act in 1986, 1990, and 1992.  She persuaded President Reagan to acknowledge the disease for the first time in a speech in 1987, and publicly criticized presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton for not doing enough to combat the disease.

Taylor also founded the Elizabeth Taylor Medical Center to offer free HIV/AIDS testing and care at the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington, DC, and the Elizabeth Taylor Endowment Fund for the UCLA Clinical AIDS Research and Education Center in Los Angeles.

For her advocacy work, Taylor was honored with several awards; she was made a Knight of the French Legion of Honour in 1987, and received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1993, the Screen Actors’ Guild Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanitarian service in 1997, the GLAAD Vanguard Award in 2000, and the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2001.

After her death, GLAAD President Jarrett Barrios issued a statement saying that “Dame Taylor was an icon not only in Hollywood, but in the LGBT community, where she worked to ensure that everyone was treated with the respect and dignity we all deserve.”

According to Paul Flynn of The Guardian, she was “a new type of gay icon, one whose position is based not on tragedy, but on her work for the LGBTQ community.”^[140] Speaking of her charity work, former President Bill Clinton said at her death, “Elizabeth’s legacy will live on in many people around the world whose lives will be longer and better because of her work and the ongoing efforts of those she inspired.”

Since Taylor’s death, her estate has continued to fund ETAF’s work, donating 25% of royalties from the use of her image and likeness to the foundation.

In the opening of the video, which can be seen on YouTube, Robbins says, “If the news is that I am positive, then I’m going to get a plane ticket, jump on a plane, and go and tell my family.”

Next, we see him walking to Roosevelt Hospital in Nashville and taking an elevator to the third floor, where the clinic is located.  The camera is turned off, but we could hear Robbins’ conversation with the doctor, who tells him, “Your viral load right now is at 5,517,000.”

We then see Robbins coming out of the clinic, looking stunned as he mutters, “Alright … positive.”

Once outside the hospital, he makes an attempt to collect himself, announcing his HIV-positive status and his plans to return home to Jacksonville, Tennessee, so he can “tell my mom face-to-face.”

Robbins posted the video on his Facebook page and then on YouTube.  He was motivated to do this, because he was struck by the fact that he didn’t know anyone else in Nashville who was HIV-positive and he felt he needed to warn the men in his city “that we are not invincible.”

Less than a month after being told he tested positive for HIV, he started a blog called “I’m Still Josh” to help start a dialogue about living with HIV in the South.  He would help spread the word to his peers that an epidemic of new infections was occurring, and he would offer advice about prevention.  He also sought to create a simple message to break down the stigma attached with HIV in Nashville:  “I’m still Josh. You still be YOU!”

He would go on to be a frequent contributor to POZ magazine and win awards for his advocacy work about sexual health and HIV.  Robbins’ work also has been featured on The Advocate, Human Rights Campaign, Healthline, and a myriad of additional publications.  Robbins was named to the POZ 100 List in 2013.

In 2014, Robbins created an iPhone application called Ask HIV, described by Product Hunt as “an HIV/AIDS hotline on your iPhone.”  During the Obama administration, Robbins helped lead the White House’s social media plan for the update of the President’s National HIV Strategy.

From 2013 to 2000, Healthline.com elected Robbins’ blog to its list of Best Blogs List for HIV for eight consecutive years).  He supports local HIV/AIDS organizations, including Nashville CARES and the HIV Vaccine Trials Network.

Grant, who is openly gay, was diagnosed as HIV+ in 2011, after being contacted by a former lover who tested positive for HIV.

In an interview for The Sydney Morning Herald, Grant spoke candidly of his diagnosis:

“I was messing around with my life and indulging in destructive behaviors and ended up getting a disease that could have totally been avoided.  When I look at the fact that there are millions of children in Africa with HIV, who never got to choose, it makes me need to figure out why I let that happen to myself.”

Born in a small Colorado town, the singer-songwriter decided to break with his band the Czars in 2010 and embarked on a solo career.  His debut solo album Queen of Denmark was named the best album of 2010 by Mojo, and his third studio album, Grey Tickles, Black Pressure (2015), received widespread critical acclaim

In addition to music, Grant has a strong interest in languages and can speak fluent German, Spanish and Russian, as well as conversational French and Swedish.  He currently lives in Reykjavik, Iceland and is in a long-term relationship with an Icelandic graphic designer.

As an activist during the height of the AIDS Crisis in New York, Cox helped facilitate the production of protease inhibitors, which revolutionized AIDS care in the 1990s.

In 1992, Cox joined with other ACT UP members to form the Treatment Action Group, which worked to further treatment advances in HIV.  Along with other TAG colleagues, Cox schooled himself in the science of AIDS, the workings of drug trials and the government approval process.

While still in his 20s, he represented people with AIDS in high-level meetings with the Federal Drug Administration to hasten the approval time for new HIV medications, including the new drug class of protease inhibitors.

In addition, Cox designed a clinical trial to examine the effectiveness of ritonavir, which was initially controversial because no one wanted to receive a placebo.  Cox’s design, however, allowed for both speedy data gathering and a relatively accelerated approval process so that those receiving a placebo could quickly be upgraded to the medication.  The quick study and approval of ritonavir, along with the rival drug indinavir, had a dramatic effect on HIV treatment.

Cox continued to be an HIV/AIDS advocate into the 2000s.  Concerned with issues faced by gay men, including loneliness, depression and substance abuse, he founded the Medius Institute for Gay Men’s Health in 2006.  However, Cox was forced to abandon the project when funding was not made available, and he returned to his home town of Atlanta.

In 2012, Cox returned to New York and, shortly thereafter, was featured in the documentary film How to Survive a Plague.

“One of the visceral things the film brought back for me is the rage that is still almost as fresh as the days when I first discovered it,” he wrote in a blog post for POZ magazine.

“Footage of virulently homophobic North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms reminds me even today of how much I hate (present tense) this man,” he wrote.  “His colleagues, including New York’s John Cardinal O’Connor, Mayor Ed Koch, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Patrick Buchanan, even the low-level Reagan press staffer who, in a transcript of an early White House daily briefing, is asked about AIDS, and reduces it to a smutty joke worthy of a quick chuckle.  Karma be damned — I hate these men, and probably will until the day I die.”

A few months after his blog post, Cox was found severly ill in his apartment by his roommate, Mark Leydorf, upon his return home after a couple days away.  Leydorf called an ambulance, which took them to the Allen Hospital, a branch of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, on 220th Street and Broadway. There, doctors found that Cox’s T-cells were virtually gone and that his viral load was through the roof.

Less than a week later, Cox died at the hospital.  Afterward, on The Huffington Post and other Web sites, a furious debate ensued about just what Cox’s death represented.

“Was it ‘pill fatigue,’ a term applied to patients who grow exhausted taking a variety of medications daily and then become noncompliant?  Why would Mr. Cox devote his life to obtaining lifesaving medications for people all over the world, only to stop taking them himself?” wrote Jacob Bernstein in The New York Times.  “Was Mr. Cox trying to kill himself after several years in which the side effects had been nearly as bad as the disease?  Or could crystal meth have been to blame?”

Mark Harrington, the executive director of TAG, said Cox had been struggling with an addiction to methamphetamines and had stopped taking his HIV medication some months ago.

“He saved the lives of millions, but he couldn’t save his own,” Harrington said.

However, David France, director of How to Survive a Plague, said, “There was some temptation to conclude Spencer was doing drugs at the end of his life, but there’s no evidence of that that we know of.”

According to Walt Odets, a clinical psychologist in Berkeley who knew Cox and has written extensively about the aftereffects of HIV on long-term survivors, the epidemic did not end for the veterans of Act Up when therapeutic drugs came along.

“It was an extraordinary trauma comparable to a wartime experience,” Dr. Odets said. “For many gay men, after the epidemic was over, there was a loss of energy and vitality.  It’s like going from a car that runs on rocket fuel to one that runs on gasoline.  And it had to be bewildering for Spencer.”

The year after Cox’s death, St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center (now Mount Sinai Morningside) memorialized the activist by renaming their long-time HIV clinic the Spencer Cox Center for Health.

Moore starred in the HBO special Drop Dead Gorgeous about living with HIV.  Part of his act included imitating his mother, Wilma, whose malapropisms included saying that when she was cold, she wrapped herself in a couple of “Africans.”

“I’ve been there, Mother,” he quipped.

Although gay, Moore was in a lavender marriage to Canadian comedian Lois Bromfield from 1980 to 1995.  In the 1990s, Moore frequently performed as the warm-up comedian for tapings of the TV sit-com Roseanne, on which Bromfield was a writer.

“That mouth got him hired and fired five times by Roseanne Barr from the set of Roseanne,” wrote Rich Griset in his Style Weekly tribute to Moore.

But it also endeared him to Ellen DeGeneres, according to local comedian and theater critic John Porter.

“Steve was losing his health benefits, because he didn’t have enough work under his SAG card, so Ellen DeGeneres would hire him when she had her sitcom,” Porter said.  “It kept him employed long enough so that his benefits couldn’t be denied.”

In a Los Angeles Times review of Moore’s HBO show, Daryl H. Miller characterized Moore as “a little Joel Grey, a lot Bette Davis.”

“What makes his story so compelling is the generosity of spirit that he finds in himself and in those around him,” Miller wrote of Moore.

In the show, which was shot before an audience at the Comedy Store in West Hollywood, Moore covers his whole life, from growing up in Danville, Virginia to living the fast life in Los Angeles, and then moving back to Danville.  The show concludes with a story about returning to Los Angeles to receive free HIV medication from a Beverly Hills doctor who reallocates drugs from patients who died, and then throwing himself a life-affirming 40th birthday party.

After the release of the HBO show, Moore continued to support himself with smaller-scale comedy touring, including performing at HIV/AIDS and LGBT conferences and events, and as a speaker on AIDS and HIV issues.

Moore died at his home in Danville, Virginia.  The Byrd Theatre in nearby Richmond would host a public memorial service for Moore on what would have been Moore’s 60th birthday.

Gunnell said she founded Glendale Leaders for AIDS Awareness to fulfill a pledge she made to longtime friend and early AIDS educator Judy Ritchie.

Ritchie lost her then-11-year-old son, Alan, to AIDS in 1992, after he contracted the disease through a blood transfusion when he was 2 days old, according to the Glendale News-Press (a subsidiary of the Los Angeles Times).

Gunnell said she told Ritchie, “Judy, I will give you my promise that something good will come out of this.  Alan’s life will not be in vain.”

Gunnell’s first efforts to bring AIDS education into the Glendale community were met with opposition, according to the Glendale News-Press.  At the time, Gunnell was a prominent member of the Glendale Sunrise Rotary Club and the advisor to the group’s Interact student club at Herbert Hoover High School.  She and a group of Hoover students organized a campus AIDS awareness week in 1993, in spite of resistance from school administrators.

Following the awareness-raising event, Gunnell and the Interact club angered the school board further by hosting an HIV/AIDS information booth at an annual fundraising tour of homes.  When a high school student returned home from the event with a pamphlet she picked up at Interact’s  booth, the student’s mother complained to school administrators about the pamphlet, which included information about how HIV is transmitted sexually.

Soon, Gunnell was wrongly portrayed by critics as a zealot who sought to fill “the children’s minds with rubbish,” she told the News-Press.

To continue the work she started with the Glendale Rotary, Gunnell founded Glendale Leaders for AIDS Awareness in 1993.  Soon, the organization had about 100 members, all working to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS in the Glendale community.

Through the organization’s tenacious efforts, the City of Glendale became receptive to the need for raising awareness about HIV/AIDS.  The city created a mandatory AIDS education program for its employees, a milestone that Gunnell was particularly proud of.  Glendale Leaders for AIDS Awareness also established a book collection at the Glendale Central Library.

“Glendale had come from being frozen in the ice age to being on the cutting edge,” she said.

But by late 1999, membership in Glendale Leaders for AIDS Awareness had fallen to about 10 active members.

“Many people do not find the issue to be as fashionable at it was three or four years ago,” Gunnell told the News-Press in December 1999.  “A lot of people are saying, ‘It’s not a problem anymore. I don’t have to worry about this.’  They think if you can take a pill, it’s not a problem … but it’s not true.”

Gunnell was a 43-year resident of Glendale who had a career as nurse and then private investigator, according to the Glendale News-Press.

Born in Boston, Gunnell had been a member of the Glendale Sunrise Rotary since 1989, and was also a member of the Los Angeles County Medical Association Alliance, District 4, serving as president for three years.

Among the many community efforts she spearheaded were “Not Even For A Minute,” part of national campaign to prevent child deaths from being left unattended in a car; “Bully Me Not,” an antibullying education effort with expert training for local educatorsy; “Shaking Shocker,” an education campaign to prevent shaken-baby syndrome; and “Glendale Safe Place,” which designated safe havens for runaway or homeless youth.

In addition, she was involved with the Glendale Youth Coalition, Glendale Human Relations, Safe Place National Advisory Board, Committee for a Clean And Beautiful Glendale, Glendale Healthy Kids, Glendale Chamber of Commerce, Glendale Latino Association, and Glendale Healthier Community Coalition.

Among the awards she received were the Glendale Adventist Cancer Care Guild 2015 Courage Award, the Service Above Self Award from Glendale Sunrise Rotary in 2011, the Glendale YWCA Heart and Excellence Award in 2008, the Glendale YMCA Harold Prugh Award in 2002, and Glendale News-Press Woman of Achievement in 2001.

In early 2015, Goode was staying on a friend’s couch while looking for a place to live in New York City, according to The New York Times’ coverage of Goode’s lawsuit.

Goode spotted a Craiglist rental ad that looked perfect: a one-bedroom apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn that was newly renovated and on the first floor.  Most importantly, it was affordable enough that his subsidy from the HIV/AIDS Services Administration would cover it.  Goode tested positive for HIV in 2006.

Goode submitted an application for the apartment unit and the rental process proceeded until an agent from the brokerage firm, Nooklyn, asked about Goode’s source of income. When he informed the agent that he was disabled and would be paying his rent with a city voucher, the realtor rejected his application, texting him the message, “That landlord doesn’t accept HASA.”

So Goode filed a lawsuit in the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn against the landlord, Goldfarb Properties, accusing it of violating a city law prohibiting discrimination based on the source of a tenant’s income.  Then Goode reported Nooklyn to the city’s Commission on Human Rights, which agreed to investigate the matter.

In January 2016, more than 26,000 people in the city qualified for rental assistance from the HIV/AIDS Services Administration.  Source-of-income discrimination is illegal in New York, but many landlords and rental agencies routinely rejected applications from people who pay their rent with Section 8 or other rental assistance subsidies, according to the Times.

While waiting for the matter to be resolved, Goode moved to Miami.  Then the New York City Commission on Human Rights notified Goode that he had won his complaint, and that Nooklyn would be ordered to pay him $5,000 in damages.

In addition to compensating Goode, Nooklyn agreed to adopt companywide reforms, according to the Times.

Goode recommended that anyone on disability who is seeking housing should text or record their conversations with landlords and realtors.

“People on HASA are so used to being told ‘no’ that we often just accept it,” said Goode. “That’s what realtors and landlords are banking on.”

Redman began his HIV/AIDS advocacy work in 1982, when he helped to create the first hotline in Los Angeles to share verified medical information about the disease.  In early 1983, he would found AIDS Project Los Angeles with Nancy Cole Sawaya, Max Drew, and Ervin Munro.

In the beginning, APLA had five clients, which would grow to 100 by the end of the year, and by the middle of 1984, APLA would serve 200 clients — and the numbers kept growing.  Redman served on APLA’s Board of Directors and volunteered throughout the years.

Redman also served on the Board of Directors for the Federation of AIDS-Related Organizations (later renamed AIDS United).  He was honored in June 2015 by the LA City Council during LGBT Heritage Month for his work to advance equality.

Redman apparently started feeling ill in mid-December and cancelled a party planned for Dec. 18, according to journalist Karen Ocamb in The Pride.  After a friend begged him to see a doctor, Redman went to the emergency room at Southern California Hospital at Culver City and was immediately rushed to Urgent Care.

An upper respiratory infection had traveled to his heart and lungs, and medical personnel determined he didn’t have enough T-cells to fight the infection.  He “coded” and was placed on life support while his family and former partner were notified and flew in to be with him in his last moments.

The goal is to rally U.S. faith communities (including Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Sikh, Hindu and Baha’i) to take a public stand against stigma in their congregations and raise awareness of HIV and AIDS.

A longtime resident of West Hollywood, Chud had served on the city’s Disabilities Advisory Board and on the Los Angeles County Commission on HIV.  He was also a prolific writer, having been published by publications like Huffington Post, among others.  In 2015, he was included in the “POZ 100” for his advocacy for appropriately designed housing for disabled people.

In late 1977, while a sophomore at Yale, Chud was hospitalized with symptoms that would become familiar to medical personnel in just a few years: night sweats, a rash, swollen lymph nodes, and thrush.  At the time, however, Chud’s medical team was unable to come to a diagnosis.  When his symptoms subsided in about two weeks, the doctor discharged him, saying, “You probably had some sort of virus.”

The official beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic is often cited as June 5, 1981, the day the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued its first warning about a rare pneumonia called pneumocystis circulating among a small group of young gay men.  However, according to Science Magazine, a 2016 study indicated that in 1981, when Dr. Michael Gottlieb presented the first five cases  to the CDC, there were already 250,000 people living with the virus.  Chud was one of them.

By 1985, Chud was living in Washington and had already watched many of his friends get sick and die.  In 1989, his own illness had advanced to full-blown AIDS.

“I thought I was going to die,” Chud told CNN in 2010. “I didn’t think I would see 30.”

He started volunteering for drug trials. One, a National Institutes of Health study, studied the combination of drugs AZT and DDC, a new drug by Roche Pharmaceuticals.

“DDC, while effective in the test-tube against HIV, was very toxic, and put all 80 of us study participants through a whole host of side effects,” recalled Chud in 2017 article he wrote for Plus. “The mouth sores were legendary. Eating required first gargling with Lidobenelox, a thick pink emulsion of lidocaine, benadryl, and Maalox. It resembled the hand soap in public restrooms, but it provided 20 minutes of pain relief.”

Chud was pulled from the drug trial when he began experiencing partial paralysis and lockjaw.  While these symptoms dissipated after a few days, Chud had unknowingly sustained long-term damage to his body’s cartilage.  By 2003, he was in so much pain, he sought treatment from an orthopedic surgeon, who uncovered extensive damage to Chud’s spine.

Between 2003 and 2015, Chud underwent over 80 operations on his spine, neck, and major joints.  Through all this, he lost 7 inches in height because of destroyed disks, leaving less room for his lungs, bowel and stomach.

In 2009, he began using a four-wheeled walker to be able to walk.  Prior to that, he had given little thought to what it was like to live with a disability, but this new experience motivated him to become an advocate for himself and other long-term HIV survivors who live with disabilities.

“My drive to do something for other disabled people shifted into hyper-drive from that moment on,” Chud wrote.

Chud was aware of his place in AIDS history and felt a responsibility to share his experience with younger generations.

“While the trajectory of AIDS has changed immensely, I think that knowing my tendency for feeling invincible until something happens to me, there is great peril that the current generation will never know how terrible the AIDS epidemic has been in gay America, let alone the world,” he wrote in the Huffington Post.

Bowie dedicated his life to compassionate advocacy for those living with HIV/AIDS and for the local homeless community. In 2004, he served as a founding board member and executive director of the Long Beach AIDS Foundation, and was named 2008 “Man of the Year” by the Long Beach Lambda Democratic Club.

In 2014, Bowie was named executive director of Being Alive Los Angeles, a non-profit dedicated to fighting HIV by ending stigma and restoring dignity while increasing access to care. He served at Being Alive Los Angeles until his death.

Bowie was born on Jan. 24, 1961, in Portland, Maine. His father was a civil engineer for the military and moved the family many times, eventually settling in Huntington Beach and Fountain Valley. He graduated from Fountain Valley High School and moved to Long Beach, where he started work in video editing and music videos.

Bowie contracted HIV at the age of 22 in 1983, in the early days of the epidemic, before there was effective treatment.  He and his mother drove to Mexico to buy AZT, an early antiretroviral medication reported to treat HIV, and brought doses back for others who also needed it, according to his obituary on EverLoved.

He was inspired to become an activist in 1991 after watching Magic Johnson disclose his HIV status, telling his fans that he still had a long life to live.

“What Magic Johnson did is bring it into the public dialogue and bring a sense of normalcy to living with HIV,” Bowie said in a newspaper interview. “It just gave a new face to what HIV looks like in our communities.”

On March 19, 2020, Bowie started showing flu-like symptoms, and he was transported to Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Downey when his condition worsened, said Jeff Wacha, Bowie’s husband of 20 years, to the Long Beach Press-Telegram.

Wacha said that when Bowie, who had HIV, arrived at the hospital, tests showed his immune system to be normal.

To the end, Bowie was thinking of and fighting for the welfare of others.  On March 25, he posted the following on Facebook:

“The CDC needs to fix the way we count COVID-19 cases.  For instance, my staff and I all have COVID-19, a presumptive case because our doctors know us and ask the right questions.  However, our status is not counted.

“If it weren’t for Facebook, nobody would know each of us added one more to our neighborhood count.  All because we haven’t had testing.  Here’s my problem: CA currently has 2,853 confirmed cases, but because of testing shortages, and by order of our illustrious LA Public Health Dept., hospitals were told until the patient is seriously ill and ready to be admitted, no testing.”

On the day Bowie died, Wacha posted on Facebook:

“We had one last set of ‘I love you’ before they sedated him so they could intubate and put him on a ventilator. This was about 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 28. I had no idea it would be the last time I spoke to my husband; my reason for living; the man who has supported me emotionally the previous 20 years and kept me alive; the man who made me laugh every day that we were together; the man who made each day together even more beautiful than the day before; the man who always knew what to do to help me see the light at the end of the tunnel when I started spiraling into the abyss; the man who surprised me with deliveries of flowers just because he ‘knew you needed it right now and to remind you how much I love you.’”

In the days following Bowie’s death, Wacha received hundreds of messages of condolences.

“He was an incredibly kind and compassionate person who fought for wellness and health in the gay community,” Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia said. “He was a leader in the fight against HIV/AIDS and impacted many, many people in Long Beach. Our hearts go out to his family and friends.”

Britt worked with Milk, California’s first openly gay elected official, on his campaigns, according to the Los Angeles Times. Britt, who was also openly gay, had a storied career as a political operative who fought for progressive and gay rights.

“Harry was progressive before the word became vogue,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein told the LA Times.  When Sen. Feinstein was mayor of San Francisco, she appointed Britt as Supervisor to succeed Milk. “He was a powerful advocate for the gay community who never took no for an answer.”

Britt served on the Board of Supervisors until 1993 and was the board’s president from 1989 to 1990, according to The Advocate.  He brought to the city his strong brand of progressive politics, advocating for rent control, neighborhood preservation, and domestic partnership during the AIDS epidemic.

He was instrumental in the effort to defeat California Proposition 64, a 1986 ballot measure to quarantine people living with HIV/AIDS, according to Los Angeles activist Torie Osborn.

In a statement on Facebook, the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club issued a remembrance of Britt:

“Harry Britt would not have wanted to be memorialized as a ‘legend’ or a ‘hero.’ But for all of us, he will always stand as a queer legend …  Harry believed that tepid liberalism kept the powerful satisfied with the status quo, and that none of us should rest until there is a fundamental transfer of that power to queer and trans folks, women, people of color, and those most damaged by the ills of our society. His fight lives on in all of us.”

While Dr. Sonnabend never claimed to be the first AIDS doctor, he is looked to by many as the first doctor who from the start recognized that a new disease was causing the deaths of young, previously healthy gay men in the largest city in the U.S.

“Fate placed him in New York City immediately before the start of the epidemic, where his training as a researcher gave him tools that others lacked, and his compassion created a loyal patient following,” wrote Bob Roehr for the British Medical Journal.  “He was a bit of a curmudgeon, familiar with but not dependent on the hidebound strictures of the medical establishment, comfortable in the role of an outsider.”

Dr. Sonnabend was also openly gay, which earned him the trust and openness of young men seeking treatment for ailments associated with an active sexual lifestyle.   Trained in infectious diseases, the doctor was practicing medicine at a time and place and for a specific clientele that allowed him to be among the very first to see and treat the unusual illnesses associated with HIV and AIDS that were plaguing many of his clients.  Because he was also a researcher, Dr. Sonnabend was among the first doctors to collect data and report his case studies to federal health officials.

“The other doctors who were treating AIDS didn’t have the research experience or the instincts,” Dr. Sonnabend told Sean Strub of POZ magazine in 1998. “And the academic researchers — the top immunologists, virologists and so on — who had the expertise, didn’t have the patients. I had both the background and the patients.”

During the 1980s and 1990s, he treated hundreds of HIV-positive people and conducted some of the earliest research into AIDS, often at his own expense, according to The New York Times.  He pioneered the methods of community-based research, designed to address a quickly-spreading disease that could not wait for the medical establishment’s planning processes that typically ran six months to years.

In the 1980s, Dr. Sonnabend pioneered and promoted the use of an inexpensive sulfa drug to prevent a type of lethal pneumonia that people with HIV commonly developed, according to the NY Times. Despite his persistent advocacy, the federal government took more than two years to recommend this treatment as a standard of care.

During the height of the AIDS crisis and long before effective treatments were widely available, Dr. Sonnabend helped create several AIDS organizations, including the AIDS Medical Foundation (now amfAR) and the PWA Health Group, the first buyers’ club for medications for people living with AIDS.  He was also a key founder and organizer of the Community Research Initiative (now ACRIA), the first organization to fast-track treatment studies for HIV and AIDS with a network of doctors, most of whom were in private practice.

When Dr. Sonnabend publicly urged gay men to change their sexual behaviors to avoid sexually-transmitted infections, he became a figure of controversy in the gay community, which was in its heyday of a sexual revolution that championed freedom, experimentation and acceptance.  He was a consultant on the 1983 booklet, How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, which was distributed widely in New York City and recommended that men use condoms and avoid exchanging bodily fluids.

“Many people in the gay community took his message of safe sex as anti-sex,” said David Kirschenbaum, a friend of Dr. Sonnabend and co-executor of his estate.  “They thought he was putting limits on sexual freedom.”

He also faced the derision and scorn from academic scientists who considered private doctors unaffiliated with universities to be technically ineffectual and lacking the resources and training to gather scientifically valid data, according to the NY Times.  But when his research and treatment methods proved to be effective in meeting the urgent need of an infected population that was growing exponentially, academic researchers and federal health officials began to seek out his input.

Dr. Sonnabend was born on Jan. 6, 1933, in Johannesburg and grew up in Bulawayo, in what was then Rhodesia, according to the NY Times.  He received his medical training at the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh and the National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill, a suburb of London, specializing in the research of interferons (naturally occurring proteins that interfere with viruses).

In the late 1960s, he moved to New York City to continue his research at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.  When he opened his private practice and began treating people with HIV and AIDS, he was served with an eviction notice from the co-op board in his building, which claimed his patients entering through the lobby were lowering the property values.  Dr. Sonnabend and five of his patients sued and won what became one of the first AIDS-related civil rights cases.

After 35 years in New York, Dr. Sonnabend retired and moved to London.  Throughout his life, he played piano and composed music as a hobby.  In 2018, at the age of 85, Dr. Sonnabend made his public debut as a composer when selections of his music were performed at London’s Fitzrovia Chapel at two concerts, both of which were filled to capacity.

Sources:
British Medical Journal
The New York Public Library, the Joseph A Sonnabend Papers
POZ Magazine
The New York Times

Already active in the fight for LGBTQ equality in the early 1980s when AIDS first struck, Lang became deputy director of AIDS Connecticut and used her position to improve the state’s public policy and programs regarding HIV/AIDS.

“I guess the phrase that comes to mind is passionate warrior, just a real warrior for justice and for the underdog,” John Merz, CEO of AIDS Connecticut told NPR’s Weekend Edition.  “She was maybe five-foot-two.  But whenever she walked into the room, she commanded an audience, especially when she was passionate about the issue on the table.”

Lang’s warrior spirit was evident early on in her work with AIDS Connecticut, when she successfully shut down a measure that would have violated the confidentiality of an already vulnerable population by requiring the collection of names of state residents living with HIV/AIDS, Merz said.  At around the same time, Lang helped to secure $1.1 million from the state legislature for housing programs for those living with HIV/AIDS.

Lang, a lesbian who lived in Hartford, originally worked as a nurse’s aide, and then attended the University of Lowell, where she became involved with the campus gay rights group, according to The Advocate.

“I found my people,” she told Hartford Magazine in 2016. “I found a niche around organizing and agitating.”

Lang served on the boards of the National AIDS Housing Coalition and the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS at Yale University, was a member of the Connecticut Alcohol and Drug Policy Council, and founded the Statewide Opiate Overdose Prevention Workgroup.

In 2017, Lang was honored for her work at the White House as a “Champion of Change for Advancing Prevention, Treatment and Recovery.”  She was also an activist with the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights, which successfully fought for inclusion of sexual orientation in Connecticut hate-crimes and antidiscrimination laws.

A few months after Lang’s death, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy held an event on World AIDS Day to commemorate Lang and her achievements.  Murphy told Forbes magazine that, back when he was a young state senator in 2003, it was Lang who informed him about the ongoing needs of those living with HIV and AIDS.

“Shawn Lang was a great, great friend of mine, somebody who taught me a lot about the importance of doing prevention, work and treatment work around the AIDS population in Connecticut. And she was a hero to me,” Murphy told Forbes. “I thought it was important to recognize her legacy, but also have a conversation about what more we need to do here in Connecticut and what more we need to do around the world.”

During his tenure as President of the DGLA, he partnered with the Foundation for Human Understanding to create Resource Center, which remains an important resource for HIV/AIDS treatment and care.

The gay community in Dallas was hit early and hard by the AIDS crisis, and Monroe responded by organizing local resources and demanding funding for HIV/AIDS programs, according to KERA, the National Public Radio station in Dallas.

“Bruce and others in the community insisted on speaking up for our rights and making sure that people got the care that they needed, and finding a way for funding and keeping people in their homes and getting them food and getting education out to individuals,” recalled Cece Cox, CEO of Resource Center.  “He was also an incredibly clever and kind person who uplifted many of us, and I will miss him a lot.”

Friend and fellow activist William Waybourn told KERA how Monroe was also an accomplished artist who used his creativity in his activism.

“When we would have demonstrations he would help do the graphics and make it appealing. That will not only entice volunteers but get the media’s attention as well as get across the message that we were trying to deliver,” said Waybourn.

At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Monroe brought national attention to Texas by taking part in chalking outlines in front of Dallas City Hall and displaying crosses on a potter’s field in a vacant lot in Oak Lawn to symbolize the number of AIDS cases in Dallas.

Monroe said in his oral history that he and others from the Dallas Gay and Lesbian Alliance formed an activist branch called the Gay Urban Truth Squad (GUTS) to organize these demonstrations and others.

He was particularly proud of the potters field demonstration, because it did such a great job of illustrating how low a priority HIV/AIDS funding was for the Dallas City Council.  The city had recently spent $500,000 to fill a hole in the vacant lot, he said, while in the same year, the council members approved only $55,000 in funding for HIV education.

“So once the hole was filled and started growing grass again, we constructed and erected, in that newly created field, over 500 white crosses to represent the number of HIV cases in Dallas at the time,” Monroe said. “It was very effective symbolism and drew a great deal of attention from all sectors.”

In 2020, Monroe was honored with the Dallas Black Tie Dinner Kuchling Award for his service to the Dallas community. While he was unable to attend or speak, some of his close friends delivered an acceptance speech that he had typed out one letter at a time with his thumb on his cell phone, according to The Dallas Way.

As executive director of the Washington-based National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (which later was renamed the National LGBTQ Task Force), Vaid arrived at President George H.W. Bush’s 1990 address on AIDS with a large sign that read “Talk is Cheap — AIDS Funding is Not.”

Vaid’s well-publicized action caused her to be left out of future White House events, but that single moment in the media was credited with causing an immediate boost in federal funding for AIDS research.

A year later, Vaid was a lead organizer in a large series of demonstrations in Sacramento, California in October 1991, following  Governor Pete Wilson’s veto of legislation that would have extended human rights protections to gay men and lesbians in the state’s Fair Employment and Housing Act.

Assembly Bill 101, which was sponsored by Assemblyman Terry B. Friedman of Los Angeles, would have amended state regulations to prohibit job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, according to The New York Times.  Initially, Wilson indicated that he would sign the bill into law if the state assembly and senate passed it.  But when the bill landed on his desk, he decided to veto it, stating that the amendment was unnecessary because existing laws, policies and court opinions provided many of the same protections.

According to Vaid, the gay and lesbian community was so angry with Wilson, that it was reminiscent of the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York’s Greenwich Village and the response to the 1978 assassination of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk.

“People are calling it Stonewall II,” she told the NY Times.

Vaid joined other LGBTQ leaders in Sacramento to speak before about 4,000 demonstrators furious about the governor’s veto, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“This is our response to the bigots of the world … people like [Rep. William] Dannemeyer who call us ‘revolting,’” Vaid told the crowd. “Revolting? You bet we are!”

Dannemeyer was an Orange County Congressman infamous in progressive political circles for vilifying environmentalists, blurring the line between Church and State, and, most notably, pushing for a quarantine of AIDS patients and a reinstatement of state anti-sodomy laws.

According to the LA Times, Dannemeyer was fond of saying, ad nauseam, “God’s plan for man is Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Dannemeyer found a formidable opponent in Vaid, whom journalist Karen Ocamb called “a short, thin, proud lesbian of South Indian heritage who exuded the perfume of power.”

Born in 1958 in New Delhi, India, Vaid immigrated with her parents to the United States when she was eight years old.  A self-described odd child, Vaid was a voracious reader whose bedroom wall included a poster of Martin Luther King, Jr.  At the age of 11, she participated in a Vietnam War protest, the first of many political demonstrations.

By the age of 25, Vaid had her law degree from Northeastern University in Boston, where she cofounded the Boston Lesbian/Gay Political Alliance.  She began working as a staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Prisons Project in Washington, D.C., according to the American Immigration Law Foundation.

A year into her position with the ACLU and newly aware of the spread of HIV among incarcerated individuals, Vaid initiated a project to help prisoners living with HIV.

Around this time, Vaid withdrew from her Indian culture and family events as she began to come out as a lesbian.  In an interview with Progressive, she recalled the difficulty of navigating the meaning of her sexual identity combined with her heritage without having any South Asian role models. Then, while she was attending a women’s music festival, another attendee approached her to ask if she was Indian.

“And we were hugging and practically crying because it was so remarkable to meet another one,” Vaid told Anne-Marie Cusak of the Progressive. “We thought we were the only ones.”

In 1985, Vaid became a member of the Board of Directors for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and then in 1986 became the organization’s director of public information.  In this role, she established the NGLTF as a trusted source of information on issues concerning gay and lesbian rights.

Vaid became executive director of NGLTF’s Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. in 1989.  She initiated major fund-raising and public outreach programs that resulted in the threefold increase of the organization’s operating budget.

She also co-founded the NGLTF’s Creating Change conference, which drew attention to gay and lesbian issues during the 1988 and 1992 presidential campaigns.  At the foundation of Vaid’s work was her belief that the more gays and lesbians were seen by the media as ordinary citizens participating in society, the fewer barriers there would be to achieving equal rights.

Vaid resigned from the NGLTF in late 1992 in order to work on her book, Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation, which was published in 1995. She returned to the NGLTF’s Policy Institute in 1997.

Seventeen years later, she would write another book, Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics (2012), and dedicate it to her partner, Kate Clinton.

About Vaid’s book, playwright Tony Kushner said, “It’s more than a fantastically-useful roadmap through the convulsive politics of these perilous times, more than the fearless analytical acumen and the clear-eyed, mature, impassioned perspectives available on every page.  People in the LGBT community, people everywhere who are struggling to assimilate this era’s unnerving contiguity of hope and despair will find what’s written here indispensable.”

After George H.W. Bush’s death in 2018, Vaid reflected on the former president’s achievements, and lack thereof, during AIDS crisis in an interview with NPR’s All Things Considered.  She credited activists for pressuring Bush to take actions like signing the Ryan White CARE Act, suggesting that little would have been done otherwise.

“The fact is that we were doing our best and hardest work in our community to build social services, to fight discrimination,” Vaid told NPR’s Ailsa Chang. “People were being rejected at hospitals. People were being turned away from mortuaries. We were dealing with that while dealing with loss. So I think what could have been done was done because of the activism. And more could have been done had the White House not been, frankly, bad on issues affecting LGBT people because they had bias.”

In a June 2019 article for The Nation to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Vaid urged the LGBT community to again come together for “an escalated response … one grounded in protest.”

“Stonewall’s 50th anniversary presents the LGBTQ movement with a choice: merely to celebrate this sanitized, marketed reenactment of a revolutionary moment or to remember and rebuild our movement on Stonewall’s militant foundation — on fierce protest against the state, and as outsiders to a system with little to lose and everything to gain,” she wrote.

Vaid credited every achievement in the fight for LGBTQ rights to “messy, massive, persistent protest,” and fiercely believed that there remained much to fight for.

“Senseless laws criminalize people with HIV, immigrants, women, transgender people, and protesters against the Trump regime,” she wrote.  “They prevent people of color from voting; and new court decisions rig the system to maintain control for an oligarchy. This moment requires an escalated response from us, one grounded in protest.”

In a tribute to Vaid in the Washington Blade, journalist Karen Ocamb recalled seeing the activist icon on the LGBT news program Gay USA, where she appeared as a guest just months before her death.

“She talked about the National LGBTQ+ Women’s Survey, an American LGBTQ+ Museum — and about fighting breast cancer,” Ocamb wrote.  “Urv seemed upbeat but a burdened aura of mortality cloaked her Zoom appearance.  She seemed determined to approach death as she had lived — educating people about our ongoing fight for liberation and, with a deep, broad smile and thoughtful eyes, telling the truth about her own humanity.”

In the mid-1990s, retired gynecologist Dr. Gao Yaojie was providing medical care in a small village in rural China when one of her patients, a woman who was exhibiting advanced AIDS symptoms, tested positive for HIV.

Chinese officials had long held that HIV and AIDS was not a problem, because the country banned the importation of blood products.  So Dr. Gao reached out to someone who might give her the hard truth about AIDS in China, Dr. Wang Shuping, a researcher who was testing blood donations for hepatitis C and HIV.  Dr. Wang had found HIV in the blood supply, but her warnings to local officials were dismissed.

Drs. Gao and Wang decided to team up and launch a campaign to educate rural residents about HIV and AIDS, and the dangers inherent in the for-profit blood centers that paid for their plasma donations.

While Dr. Wang worked behind the scenes gathering facts and information, Dr. Gao became the public face of AIDS awareness in China, daring to publicly challenge China’s health system and government.  This proved to be a very dangerous endeavor.

Dr. Gao travelled to remote villages from her home in Zhengzhou, providing rudimentary medicine for fever, diarrhea and other symptoms of AIDS.  According to The New York Times, her stops included a village school where 20 children were left without parents due to AIDS.  She said she once came across a toddler who was clinging to the feet of his mother, who had hanged herself after her husband died of AIDS.  Dr. Gao also spent considerable time leafleting bus stations, health clinics and sex parlors with educational material about HIV/AIDS.

While Dr. Gao’s work on AIDS education in rural China later earned her international acclaim from world leaders including Hillary Clinton, her rising profile meant she also came under close state surveillance.  Chinese officials forbid her to grant interviews, but she would still find ways to share her experiences dispensing healthcare and information in rural China.

Her cohort Dr. Wang also found ways to continue their work.  After party officials shut down her research clinic, Dr. Wang took on a new job in Beijing as assistant to the chair of China’s National Committee on HIV/AIDS.  Her position allowed her to continue her medical research on the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in China and keep Dr. Gao up-to-date on the latest information to share with rural residents.

In April 1996, all the donation clinics in China were abruptly shut down, without any notice to donors that they had been exposed to HIV through the clinics’ unhygienic practices.  Later that year, clinics reopened with HIV testing for previous donors.  And still, Chinese leaders would not acknowledge the prevalence of HIV in the country’s blood supply or the existence of an AIDS crisis among its rural citizens.

In spite of this, word got out to the rest of the world that China was experiencing an AIDS crisis.  The epidemic in China was unique in that it was associated with the “bloodheads,” the commercial blood donation sites that proliferated in China after its 1986 ban on the importation of blood products.

On August 8, 2001, Chinese officials finally acknowledged that the country had been unsuccessful in quarantining itself against HIV, and announced a publicity campaign to educate its citizens about HIV and AIDS. However, Chinese officials claimed that the major causes of HIV transmission in China were drug use and sexual contact.  Drs. Gao and Wang disputed this, making the research-supported claim that the country’s blood products industry was to blame.

“I visited so many provinces, cities, and counties, and met with thousands of AIDS patients. But I never saw a drug user and found that sexually transmitted cases accounted for less than 10%,” Dr. Gao told Radio Free Asia. “There is a 100% certainty that transmission is occurring through blood transfusions.”

Disputing the government’s official position on the health crisis was dangerous.  Under Communist Party rule, Dr. Gao was able to continue providing care to people living with HIV and AIDS in rural China, and she was able to write books about it.  But government officials heavily edited her work and kept a close eye on her public presence.

Officials refused to issue Dr. Gao a passport in 2001 to travel to the U.S. to be honored by the Global Health Council with the “Jonathan Mann Award for Health and Human Rights.”  In 2003, government officials would again refuse to allow Dr. Gao to travel abroad to accept the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, which was presented at an event in Manila, Philippines.

In 2007, the Vital Voices Global Partnership invited Dr. Gao to Washington, DC to receive the Global Women’s Leadership Award for Human Rights at a March event.  On February 1, as Dr. Gao was leaving for Beijing to pick up her travel visa, she was intercepted by officers and placed under house arrest, according to The New York Times.  Officials turned off her phone service and prevented family members and friends from visiting her. Under duress from a party official who came to her apartment three times a day, Dr. Gao agreed to decline the invitation.

Dr. Gao didn’t realize that her house arrest was receiving worldwide attention in the media and many were outraged at China’s treatment of the 80-year-old activist.  Hillary Clinton, who was then the Senator from New York and a co-founder of the nonprofit women’s advocacy group Vital Voices, wrote a letter to then-President Hu Jintao, urging him to allow Dr. Gao to come to the U.S. to accept the honor that her organization wanted to bestow.  A few days later, he relented under the pressure.

In early March 2007, Dr. Gao made her first trip to the U.S. and was honored in Washington, DC.  At the Vital Voices Awards event, she expressed concern that when she returned to China, she would be targeted by government officials for criticizing their handling of the AIDS epidemic.

Later the same year, she received another honor, the Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award from the New York Academy of Sciences.

In August 2009, at the age of 82, Dr. Gao fled China with the help of the Chinese rights watchdog China Aid Association, and received political asylum in the U.S.  She settled in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, where she restored her writings to their pre-censored state and arranged to have them published.

For many years, she was visited by Chinese students and others who were aware of her human rights achievements.  In March 2019, Hillary Clinton — who called Dr. Gao “simply one of the bravest people I know” — came to the doctor’s Harlem apartment for a visit.

“We’ve met many times over the years, including my first trip to China as secretary of state,” Clinton posted on Facebook after visiting Dr. Gao in New York City.

Dr. Gao’s “end-of-life” statement included her wish to be cremated and her ashes to be scattered in China’s Yellow River with no ceremony.  Originating in the Bayan Har Mountains in western China, the river flows through nine provinces of China and empties into the Bohai Sea in the east.  The Yellow River basin is known as the birthplace of ancient Chinese civilization, earning the name as “the Mother River.”

“I want to float eastwards down the Yellow River, and basically disappear from this world,” she said.