STORIES

Hello, my name is Stephen Bennett, and I was Chief Executive Officer of AIDS Project Los Angeles in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, which was a very dark period as there was no hope, there was no treatment for people with HIV, and there was so much fear in the world and fear in our community. And hate. And it was a really tough time.

APLA began with an information hotline, and just emergency basic health for people who found out they were sick. It expanded quickly into a food bank, case management, buddy programs, public education and a very sophisticated hotline system.

I want to tell you a story about a morning at work that gives you a slice of what life was like. So, it was early on in the morning, and I was going to work. Our building — the windows were shot out — meaning warnings — and graffiti was put on the wall saying, “We hate faggots,” “You deserve to die.” All kinds of really vulgar and ugly things.  And we really didn’t want our clients coming to their place of safety and refuge to see it.

So, we put a Teflon paint on the building and we put bulletproof windows in, and every morning we had a company come and power wash the building. So I went early, because I wanted to make sure that the building was cleaned and looking good and the contractors were doing what they were supposed to be doing.

So I got there, and as I was about to enter the building — there was a little alcove for the front door was – and lying there was a young man, a 16-year-old, and his clothes were torn and he was asleep.

And I said, “Hey, you got to get up, you got to get moving.”

And he woke up and said, “I don’t know where to go. I don’t know who to talk to.”

But he told me he lived outside of Lincoln, Nebraska, and he had come home from school, told his mother he was gay.

She said, “No, you’re not. You cannot be. Go to your room, and don’t tell your father.”

He heard his father come in. His mother and father argued. His father came up to the room and beat him and beat him and beat him. And threw him out the second-floor window. He fell to the ground, he passed out, and he woke up a number of hours later. He walked to the farm nearby, got $100, hitchhiked into Lincoln, and took the bus from Lincoln to downtown Los Angeles. 

He then arrived at three o’clock in the morning and walked the seven miles from downtown to the AIDS Project building on Romaine, and curled up on the front door, hoping to be found.

He said that he didn’t know anybody that was gay, but he had read in People magazine about the AIDS Project’s Commitment to Life event, and he knew there had to be gay people there, and he was hoping somebody gay would find him and rescue him. That was the world we were living in.

So, I took him over to the Gay and Lesbian Center. There was a lesbian at the desk who was just fantastic, and she hugged him and told him that they had a place for him.

While this was happening, one of our client’s mother was trying to reach him at home, and she hadn’t been able to reach him for two or three days.  And so she went over to see him, and early in the morning, she was quite concerned – he had been very ill, very sick.

And she knocked on the door. Nobody answered. She unlocked it, she came in and found her son.  He had taken a gun and blown his brains out.  And they were splattered all over.  The place was a mess.

Of course, she was very torn up. She didn’t know what to do, so she called his case manager at AIDS Project – Bill, one of our best case managers.

He went immediately and tried to comfort her and figure out what they were going to do. During that time, emergency workers wouldn’t care for us when we were injured, and mortuaries wouldn’t have us in their mortuaries. So they were dealing with that.

At the same time, out in Simi Valley, which is about an hour and a half from here, a young man got up, he was living with his sister, he was quite sick. He lost his home, he had lost his job. He was living there with his sister, and his sister was pretty tired of it.

And she told him, “You get on a bus, you go to APLA to their food bank, and you come back and you bring something home with you.  You bring some food back.”

He took the bus from Simi Valley into — over the hill into Granada Hills, and then another bus to Studio City, and then another bus over the mountain into Hollywood, down to our building on Romaine.  Well, you can imagine what this was like for somebody who was feeling just terrible.

So he gets to our offices. We had a volunteer there, an older woman who was like our mother, and she would take the kids — the men — when they came into the building and hug them and wrap them in a blanket to keep them warm.

He got very sick while he was waiting in the lobby. They had to take him to the bathroom and change his clothes and wrap him up.  There he lay, waiting for his case manager to come in, and his case manager didn’t show up and didn’t show up and didn’t show up.  And he felt so lost.

Well, his case manager was at the apartment with the mother and her son who had killed himself, and he had been trying to find a mortuary that would come and get the body, and he couldn’t find one. And finally, they found some guy in Sylmar that if they paid in cash, he would come get the body, but they had to have everything wrapped up in big double-plastic black bags.

The guy said, “I won’t touch this body. I won’t have anything to do with this body.”

And so they were putting the body in these bags, and so they were waiting for the mortuary to come. Finally, the case manager comes to the office and sees his client laying there on one of our couches in the lobby, sobbing. He picks up the client in his arms.  The client was very sick, had lost lots of weight, was pretty light – and he carried him to his office to sit him down and talk to him. And when he kicked open his office door, the door squeaked. 

After this kind of morning, Bill had had it.  This was the last straw, and he totally flipped out. I’m upstairs in my office, Bill comes into my office. He starts screaming and knocking stuff off my desk, and very upset.

And I said, “What in the hell is going on with you?”

And he said, “My door squeaks.”

I came around the desk, gave him a hug, and we went downstairs to the supply room, and I got some WD40, and we went to his office.  He told me the entire story of his day. The day went forward.

I spent the day in staff meetings, talking about testing, talking about when we’re going to see a treatment.  And then I went to cocktail parties and dinner to raise money.  And that was a day in the life of one of our case managers and for me, the CEO of the AIDS Project, at the height of the AIDS epidemic.