Dear Friends,

The summer certainly flew by! Here is what we at FAM have been up to in the past quarter:

Social Media: We posted six (6) audio stories on our Instagram and Facebook pages with accompanying visuals. Those stories are:

• Richard Gere’s memories of his dear friend, the great fashion photographer and music video director, Herb Ritts (pictured with Richard; photo © Mark McKenna);
• Jake Glaser’s tribute to his late younger sister Ariel and his late mother Elizabeth who founded the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation;
• Cosgrove Norstadt’s appreciation of openly-gay Catholic priest and AIDS activist, Rev. Bernard Lynch (this story originally appeared on The AIDS Memorial).
• Wilson Cruz’s recording on the life and legacy of reality TV star and AIDS activist Pedro Zamora;
• Justin Ross Cohen’s remembrance of Tony Award-winning director, choreographer and writer Michael Bennett; and
• Ed Wolf’s touching story about a mother, her late son and a young AIDS patient at San Francisco General Hospital (this story originally appeared on on The AIDS Memorial);

HEAR Our STORIES: FAM received three (3) additional audio recordings for the HEAR Our STORIES project – they can be found on our website (links below):

• Tribute to Michael Jeter — A tribute from four-time Academy Award nominee Annette Bening about Emmy and Tony Award-winning actor Michael Jeter, who was openly HIV-positive, openly gay and honest about his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction.
• Misha Stafford’s story — The only surviving member of a team of AIDS educators in Atlanta, Misha provided this photo of some of the friends she lost. She “ghosted” the images of her friends, “so that those who are too young to remember the early days of the AIDS epidemic can maybe understand, just a bit, what it’s like to be the last one left.”
• Marna Deitch’s story — Marna talks about close friends in New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles whom she lost to AIDS, and she shares how her life as a world-travelled motorcyclist is the legacy of her late friends. Marna was one of the storytellers at our first STORIES Circle event on World AIDS Day 2021.

Please be sure to follow us on Instagram and FaceBook, where you can see and hear videos related to our HEAR Our STORIES audio recordings project.

We at FAM hope you enjoy the Fall and that we will see you at one of our upcoming events.

Sincerely Yours,

Irwin M. Rappaport
Board Chair