Category: News
Winter 2019 Update from the Executive Director
December 12, 2019
Dear Friends,
December marks the season of giving and Emmy-winner, Jane Lynch, has a special message to share on the importance of supporting STORIES: The AIDS Monument. Click here to watch.
For World AIDS Day, the Alliance for Housing and Healing organized a beautiful candlelight vigil that marched quietly down Santa Monica Boulevard to the future site of STORIES: The AIDS Monument where the City of West Hollywood held the Paul Stark Warrior Awards. I was among the speakers at that event and was able to share some exciting news. The directors of five U.S. based AIDS memorials (STORIES, the New York City AIDS Memorial, Seattle’s AIDS Memorial Pathway, San Francisco’s AIDS Memorial Grove, and LA’s The Wall Las Memorias) convened in San Francisco this past October and officially launched the Collaborative of AIDS Memorial Sites, the first national coalition of AIDS Memorials that will work in collaboration to support each other’s efforts, share ideas, enact programs, and extend our educational reach beyond our local cities. We’ll have much more to share about our emerging collaborative in the future.
I also attended the ONE Archive Foundation’s opening of We Will Be Heard: A Retrospective on AIDS, 1981-2019, a series of timeline panels chronicling AIDS mobilization in LA and nationally. I urge you to attend the retrospective, up only through December 15th, to learn more about our community’s inspirational history.
The final World AIDS Day related event I attended was Still Beginning: The 30th Annual Day With(Out) Art, presented by New York City-based Visual AIDS at MOCA downtown LA. The series of short films commissioned by Visual AIDS and produced by filmmakers responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic, beautifully illustrated the epidemic’s impact on our community’s past and present day. The films were intimate, moving, funny, and illuminating how HIV/AIDS still profoundly affects us in unexpected ways. The films are available for viewing on Visual AIDS Vimeo page.
Continue to read our newsletter for a review of past programs, upcoming events, this month’s profile in leadership featuring Board Treasurer, Craig Dougherty, and ways to support STORIES: The AIDS Monument through your year-end giving.
Happy Holidays!
Tony Valenzuela
Executive Director
Profiles in Leadership: Marc Ware
August 20, 2019
At STORIES: The AIDS Monument we’d like our supporters to become better acquainted with our team of dedicated board members and other volunteers who are making The AIDS Monument possible. This month we feature board member, Marc Ware, former CEO of Hot Cotton, in a brief but moving interview.
Making Connections with Other AIDS Memorials
August 20, 2019
Last month I had the great pleasure of meeting John Cunningham, executive director of the National AIDS Memorial Grove in San Francisco. The beautiful 10-acre site in Golden Gate Park became a federally-designated national memorial in 1996, making it one of the oldest AIDS memorials in the country. John and some of his board and staff were delightful hosts. We talked about our shared missions as AIDS memorials, and began to brainstorm ways we might support and promote each other’s work in the future. While at The Grove, I felt lucky to participate in their Community Volunteer Work Day. I, along with over 100 other volunteers, spent the morning helping lay mulch, pull weeds, scrub stones, clear debris, and plant new trees and shrubs. Being connected to nature while tending to this serene section of the park which serves as a memorial to the thousands that died of HIV/AIDS in the Bay Area was a moving and powerful experience. I’d like to thank John Cunningham and his team for bringing community together to remember lost loved ones and to remind us why this work is still vitally important.
I have, in recent weeks, also connected with leaders of other memorials around the country including Dave Harper, the new executive director of the New York City AIDS Memorial, Jason Plourde, the Project Manager of the forthcoming AIDS Memorial Pathway in Seattle, and my local colleague and friend, Richard Zaldivar, of The Wall Las Memorias. In our positions we are all stewards of a painful history creating spaces for remembrance, celebration and education. I’m happy to know there’s a growing community of support for AIDS memorials. When STORIES: The AIDS Monument opens in 2021, we will be stronger by the ties that bind us to these other sacred sites.
Interested in learning about other AIDS Memorials? Check out this article by AIDS scholar, Theodore Kerr, about how we memorialize AIDS in the midst of an ongoing HIV epidemic.
-Tony Valenzuela, Executive Director
Photo19: A Benefit to Support STORIES: The AIDS Monument
August 20, 2019
On June 6th, 2019, the Leica Gallery Los Angeles hosted Photo19: A Photo Auction to benefit STORIES: The AIDS Monument. It was an extraordinary collection of photographs that included works from Herb Ritts, Firooz Zahedi, Eric Garcetti, and Norman Seeff. Thanks to our generous guests, STORIES: The AIDS Monument raised over $110,000! A special thanks to our sponsors Humphry Slocombe, Atlantis, Four Seasons, Alaska Airlines, Maestro Dobel, TodayTix, and Paddle8.
LA Pride 2019
August 20, 2019
This year for LA Pride, STORIES: The AIDS Monument celebrated Pride in style with new merchandise and a photo booth by S’more Play! Hundreds of people stopped by to tell us their AIDS-related stories which we’re currently featuring on our social media. Thank you to all our community members, donors, and LA Pride for making this year’s festival one that we’ll never forget. If you want to check-out some of the stories we collected at pride follow us on Facebook or Instagram. Do you have a story about how HIV/AIDS has impacted your life? Would you like to be featured on our social media or be involved in future programming? Please message us directly at info@aidsmonument.org.
Watch the Award-Winning The Unit: Lessons on Living & Dying
May 13, 2019
The Unit: Lessons on Living & Dying
We invite you to see the critically acclaimed film The Unit: Lessons on Living and Dying, a short documentary feature directed by STORIES Board Member and filmmaker, Peggy Callahan.
Throughout much of the 80’s and 90’s, there was a strong dedicated team of individuals who devoted themselves to treating and caring for patients who otherwise would have gone untreated. This short film celebrates those who worked on this unit and educates us about the heroes who stepped up when much of the world stepped away.
The Unit has received numerous accolades including from Best Short of 2018, Impact Docs, the Independent Shorts Awards, the Mindfield Film Festival Los Angeles, Accolade Competition, Indie Short Fest, and the Queen Palm International Film Festival.
Spring 2019 Executive Director’s Note
May 12, 2019
Dear Friends,
One of the most frequent questions I’m asked as FAM’s Executive Director is When is the Monument going to be finished? Here’s an update on the progress so far.
STORIES: The AIDS Monument will be the very last section completed in the major renovation currently underway at West Hollywood Park. To be located along San Vicente Boulevard just north of the steps of West Hollywood library, the Monument will stand where the old red brick recreation center now sits. The park construction timeline provided to FAM by the City of West Hollywood has us breaking ground in summer or fall of 2020. A major Dedication event for STORIES: The AIDS Monument is planned for early to mid-2021. It’s important to note that delays are common with large scale construction projects. While we believe groundbreaking and construction of the Monument are on the horizon, unforeseen delays could push our Dedication slightly further out. I’ll continue to share progress about the Monument’s construction in future newsletters.
Last month at a STORIESTelling event we hosted at NeueHouse, a number of prominent industry leaders gathered to talk about the impact of HIV/AIDS on Hollywood from the early days of the epidemic to the present. The conversation about films, documentaries, and TV shows that featured AIDS storylines brought back powerful memories. In 1985, when I was in the 11th grade, I locked myself in my bedroom to watch An Early Frost, the first major film about AIDS to air on network television. Starring Aidan Quinn, the Emmy-winning film is about a closeted gay man who learns he has AIDS and decides to disclose his homosexuality and his illness to his family. It was terrifying and devastating to watch as a 16 year old. And yet, that movie was profoundly important to me as a closeted gay high school student. Although I had never met an openly gay person much less anyone with AIDS in suburban 1980’s San Diego, in that film I could see a version of my future life even if some of it seemed bleak. My family is Mexican and Italian, not anglo like the film’s protagonist, but I still identified with his plight. That’s the power of the arts, of film and TV. That’s the power of stories. It was, therefore, a great honor to have the co-writer of An Early Frost, Daniel Lipman, among the panelists. I was able to tell Mr. Lipman that his film gave me a roadmap to navigate my percolating gay identity in the midst of the AIDS epidemic when before it I had none.
I invite you to learn more about our Hollywood & AIDS panel conversation here which, in addition to Mr. Lipman, also featured Lee Daniels, Nevin Dolcefino, Brain Graden, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Howard Rosenman, and Bruce Vilanch.
Approximately one year out from the Monument’s unveiling, FAM will be introducing a series of community engagement programs to inspire, educate and involve the citizens of West Hollywood and Los Angeles with STORIES. You’ll be hearing much more about FAM’s future programming later this year.
With much gratitude,
STORIES: The AIDS Monument Brunch in Hancock Park
May 12, 2019
On March 31, 2019, Mike Rose & Ruben Rodriguez hosted a brunch fundraiser at their beautiful Hancock Park home for STORIES: The AIDS Monument. Guests included Wilson Cruz and Adam Rippon who each spoke at length about the importance of The AIDS Monument for the community. At the end of their powerful calls-to-action, thanks to our generous guests, the Foundation raised over $120,000, which included a $50,000 match from the Herb Ritts Foundation. Among the guests who generously donated was Jane Lynch who gave $25,000 and later encouraged her social media followers to support as well. See Jane’s Instagram post here.
STORIESTelling: A Conversation on Hollywood & HIV/AIDS
May 12, 2019
On April 10th, 2019 STORIES: The AIDS Monument hosted STORIESTelling: Hollywood & AIDS. The panel discussion featured industry leaders in conversation about Hollywood’s response to HIV/AIDS and how HIV/AIDS impacted Hollywood. We were honored to have Lee Daniels, Nevin Dolcefino, Brian Graden, Daniel Lipman, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Howard Rosenman, and Bruce Vilanch as our panelists with moderator Karl Schmid. Did you miss the event? No worries! We recorded it live on our Facebook page here.
October 2018 Newsletter
October 25, 2018
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Special thanks to Eric McCormack, star of Will & Grace for hosting a cocktail party at the home of Mark Itkin and Bradley Bayou. Eric and his wife Janet have been supporting the Monument since its inception and helped raise an additional $50,000 at this event thanks to the support of Takashi Cheng and Linda Janger, who both made leadership gifts to the Foundation, and many other donors that we proudly welcome to our Monument donor circle. 
Latest News
Dear Friends,
December marks the season of giving and Emmy-winner, Jane Lynch, has a special message to share on the importance of supporting STORIES: The AIDS Monument. Click here to watch.
For World AIDS Day, the Alliance for Housing and Healing organized a beautiful candlelight vigil that marched quietly down Santa Monica Boulevard to the future site of STORIES: The AIDS Monument where the City of West Hollywood held the Paul Stark Warrior Awards. I was among the speakers at that event and was able to share some exciting news. The directors of five U.S. based AIDS memorials (STORIES, the New York City AIDS Memorial, Seattle’s AIDS Memorial Pathway, San Francisco’s AIDS Memorial Grove, and LA’s The Wall Las Memorias) convened in San Francisco this past October and officially launched the Collaborative of AIDS Memorial Sites, the first national coalition of AIDS Memorials that will work in collaboration to support each other’s efforts, share ideas, enact programs, and extend our educational reach beyond our local cities. We’ll have much more to share about our emerging collaborative in the future.
I also attended the ONE Archive Foundation’s opening of We Will Be Heard: A Retrospective on AIDS, 1981-2019, a series of timeline panels chronicling AIDS mobilization in LA and nationally. I urge you to attend the retrospective, up only through December 15th, to learn more about our community’s inspirational history.
The final World AIDS Day related event I attended was Still Beginning: The 30th Annual Day With(Out) Art, presented by New York City-based Visual AIDS at MOCA downtown LA. The series of short films commissioned by Visual AIDS and produced by filmmakers responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic, beautifully illustrated the epidemic’s impact on our community’s past and present day. The films were intimate, moving, funny, and illuminating how HIV/AIDS still profoundly affects us in unexpected ways. The films are available for viewing on Visual AIDS Vimeo page.
Continue to read our newsletter for a review of past programs, upcoming events, this month’s profile in leadership featuring Board Treasurer, Craig Dougherty, and ways to support STORIES: The AIDS Monument through your year-end giving.
Happy Holidays!
Tony Valenzuela
Executive Director
At STORIES: The AIDS Monument we’d like our supporters to become better acquainted with our team of dedicated board members and other volunteers who are making The AIDS Monument possible. This month we feature board member, Marc Ware, former CEO of Hot Cotton, in a brief but moving interview.
Last month I had the great pleasure of meeting John Cunningham, executive director of the National AIDS Memorial Grove in San Francisco. The beautiful 10-acre site in Golden Gate Park became a federally-designated national memorial in 1996, making it one of the oldest AIDS memorials in the country. John and some of his board and staff were delightful hosts. We talked about our shared missions as AIDS memorials, and began to brainstorm ways we might support and promote each other’s work in the future. While at The Grove, I felt lucky to participate in their Community Volunteer Work Day. I, along with over 100 other volunteers, spent the morning helping lay mulch, pull weeds, scrub stones, clear debris, and plant new trees and shrubs. Being connected to nature while tending to this serene section of the park which serves as a memorial to the thousands that died of HIV/AIDS in the Bay Area was a moving and powerful experience. I’d like to thank John Cunningham and his team for bringing community together to remember lost loved ones and to remind us why this work is still vitally important.
I have, in recent weeks, also connected with leaders of other memorials around the country including Dave Harper, the new executive director of the New York City AIDS Memorial, Jason Plourde, the Project Manager of the forthcoming AIDS Memorial Pathway in Seattle, and my local colleague and friend, Richard Zaldivar, of The Wall Las Memorias. In our positions we are all stewards of a painful history creating spaces for remembrance, celebration and education. I’m happy to know there’s a growing community of support for AIDS memorials. When STORIES: The AIDS Monument opens in 2021, we will be stronger by the ties that bind us to these other sacred sites.
Interested in learning about other AIDS Memorials? Check out this article by AIDS scholar, Theodore Kerr, about how we memorialize AIDS in the midst of an ongoing HIV epidemic.
-Tony Valenzuela, Executive Director
On June 6th, 2019, the Leica Gallery Los Angeles hosted Photo19: A Photo Auction to benefit STORIES: The AIDS Monument. It was an extraordinary collection of photographs that included works from Herb Ritts, Firooz Zahedi, Eric Garcetti, and Norman Seeff. Thanks to our generous guests, STORIES: The AIDS Monument raised over $110,000! A special thanks to our sponsors Humphry Slocombe, Atlantis, Four Seasons, Alaska Airlines, Maestro Dobel, TodayTix, and Paddle8.
This year for LA Pride, STORIES: The AIDS Monument celebrated Pride in style with new merchandise and a photo booth by S’more Play! Hundreds of people stopped by to tell us their AIDS-related stories which we’re currently featuring on our social media. Thank you to all our community members, donors, and LA Pride for making this year’s festival one that we’ll never forget. If you want to check-out some of the stories we collected at pride follow us on Facebook or Instagram. Do you have a story about how HIV/AIDS has impacted your life? Would you like to be featured on our social media or be involved in future programming? Please message us directly at info@aidsmonument.org.
The Unit: Lessons on Living & Dying
We invite you to see the critically acclaimed film The Unit: Lessons on Living and Dying, a short documentary feature directed by STORIES Board Member and filmmaker, Peggy Callahan.
Throughout much of the 80’s and 90’s, there was a strong dedicated team of individuals who devoted themselves to treating and caring for patients who otherwise would have gone untreated. This short film celebrates those who worked on this unit and educates us about the heroes who stepped up when much of the world stepped away.
The Unit has received numerous accolades including from Best Short of 2018, Impact Docs, the Independent Shorts Awards, the Mindfield Film Festival Los Angeles, Accolade Competition, Indie Short Fest, and the Queen Palm International Film Festival.
Dear Friends,
One of the most frequent questions I’m asked as FAM’s Executive Director is When is the Monument going to be finished? Here’s an update on the progress so far.
STORIES: The AIDS Monument will be the very last section completed in the major renovation currently underway at West Hollywood Park. To be located along San Vicente Boulevard just north of the steps of West Hollywood library, the Monument will stand where the old red brick recreation center now sits. The park construction timeline provided to FAM by the City of West Hollywood has us breaking ground in summer or fall of 2020. A major Dedication event for STORIES: The AIDS Monument is planned for early to mid-2021. It’s important to note that delays are common with large scale construction projects. While we believe groundbreaking and construction of the Monument are on the horizon, unforeseen delays could push our Dedication slightly further out. I’ll continue to share progress about the Monument’s construction in future newsletters.
Last month at a STORIESTelling event we hosted at NeueHouse, a number of prominent industry leaders gathered to talk about the impact of HIV/AIDS on Hollywood from the early days of the epidemic to the present. The conversation about films, documentaries, and TV shows that featured AIDS storylines brought back powerful memories. In 1985, when I was in the 11th grade, I locked myself in my bedroom to watch An Early Frost, the first major film about AIDS to air on network television. Starring Aidan Quinn, the Emmy-winning film is about a closeted gay man who learns he has AIDS and decides to disclose his homosexuality and his illness to his family. It was terrifying and devastating to watch as a 16 year old. And yet, that movie was profoundly important to me as a closeted gay high school student. Although I had never met an openly gay person much less anyone with AIDS in suburban 1980’s San Diego, in that film I could see a version of my future life even if some of it seemed bleak. My family is Mexican and Italian, not anglo like the film’s protagonist, but I still identified with his plight. That’s the power of the arts, of film and TV. That’s the power of stories. It was, therefore, a great honor to have the co-writer of An Early Frost, Daniel Lipman, among the panelists. I was able to tell Mr. Lipman that his film gave me a roadmap to navigate my percolating gay identity in the midst of the AIDS epidemic when before it I had none.
I invite you to learn more about our Hollywood & AIDS panel conversation here which, in addition to Mr. Lipman, also featured Lee Daniels, Nevin Dolcefino, Brain Graden, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Howard Rosenman, and Bruce Vilanch.
Approximately one year out from the Monument’s unveiling, FAM will be introducing a series of community engagement programs to inspire, educate and involve the citizens of West Hollywood and Los Angeles with STORIES. You’ll be hearing much more about FAM’s future programming later this year.
With much gratitude,
On March 31, 2019, Mike Rose & Ruben Rodriguez hosted a brunch fundraiser at their beautiful Hancock Park home for STORIES: The AIDS Monument. Guests included Wilson Cruz and Adam Rippon who each spoke at length about the importance of The AIDS Monument for the community. At the end of their powerful calls-to-action, thanks to our generous guests, the Foundation raised over $120,000, which included a $50,000 match from the Herb Ritts Foundation. Among the guests who generously donated was Jane Lynch who gave $25,000 and later encouraged her social media followers to support as well. See Jane’s Instagram post here.
On April 10th, 2019 STORIES: The AIDS Monument hosted STORIESTelling: Hollywood & AIDS. The panel discussion featured industry leaders in conversation about Hollywood’s response to HIV/AIDS and how HIV/AIDS impacted Hollywood. We were honored to have Lee Daniels, Nevin Dolcefino, Brian Graden, Daniel Lipman, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Howard Rosenman, and Bruce Vilanch as our panelists with moderator Karl Schmid. Did you miss the event? No worries! We recorded it live on our Facebook page here.
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